How a Shinar Wanderer and a Hebrew Slave Both Ran Egypt

Egypt is supposed to be a closed dynasty in the standard biblical telling. Pharaoh inherits the throne. Foreigners do not run the country. The Book of Jasher, a medieval Hebrew expansion of biblical narrative, refuses that picture. The book records two non-Egyptians taking effective control of Egypt at completely different moments. A penniless man from Shinar invents the title Pharaoh by running a cemetery extortion racket. Generations later, a Hebrew former slave leads the Egyptian army to subdue Tarshish on behalf of the Ishmaelites.

The book is making a quiet claim. Egyptian power, as the Book of Jasher reports it, has been outsourced to outsiders almost from its origin. The reader is invited to read both stories together.

How a man named Rikayon invented the title Pharaoh

Jasher chapter 14 opens with a man named Rikayon arriving in Egypt from the land of Shinar. He is wise but penniless. He plans to impress the king of Egypt, Oswiris, but learns the king only holds court one day a year. Rikayon sleeps in a ruined bakehouse. He tries selling vegetables and is robbed by passersby.

Then he designs a scheme. He hires thirty armed men and stations them at the Egyptian sepulchre. He instructs them to inform every funeral party that, by royal decree, no burial may proceed without a payment of two hundred pieces of silver. The decree is fictional. The men are not officials. The decree is enforced anyway. For eight months, Rikayon and his thirty soldiers extract silver, gold, and horses from grieving families. He becomes wealthy.

The complaints reach Oswiris on his next public day. The king is furious. He summons Rikayon. Rikayon, anticipating the summons, prepares a grand entrance. A thousand beautifully dressed children on horseback ride ahead. Silver, gold, precious stones, and a magnificent horse follow as a personal gift. The king is intrigued by the wealth and the audacity. Rikayon delivers what the book calls excellent speeches. The court is charmed.

The king's response is the most surprising sentence in the chapter. "Thy name shall no more be called Rikayon," Oswiris declares, "but Pharaoh shall be thy name, since thou didst exact a tax from the dead." The Book of Jasher then says the people of Egypt accepted Rikayon as a prefect under the king. He rose to power. The Egyptians decreed that every king after him should also be called Pharaoh. The title, in Jasher's reading, originated as a nickname for a Shinar wanderer who built his fortune by taxing funerals.

How Joseph rebuilt the army of the people who had imprisoned him

Generations later, the same Egyptian court is in different hands. Joseph has risen from prison to second-in-command. The Book of Jasher devotes chapter 50 to a story the Torah does not tell. The children of Tarshish are oppressing the children of Ishmael in the land of Havilah. The Ishmaelites send a desperate appeal to Pharaoh.

Pharaoh dispatches Joseph at the head of a mighty Egyptian army. The book treats this as a normal operational decision. The second-in-command, a Hebrew, leads the Egyptian military into Havilah on behalf of the descendants of Abraham's other son. Joseph crushes the Tarshishites. He subdues the entire land. The Ishmaelites are settled in the captured territory. The defeated Tarshishites scatter toward Javan, the region the rabbis associate with Greece. Joseph returns to Egypt with his army intact.

The same chapter then describes the seven years of plenty and the onset of the famine. The Book of Jasher adds a detail the Torah does not record. Joseph commands the corn to be stored in the ears, with soil added to prevent spoilage. The Egyptians who also store food do not follow Joseph's preservation method. Their stores rot. Joseph's do not. When the famine begins, the Egyptians beg Pharaoh for help. Pharaoh tells them, "Go to Joseph. Do whatever he says."

What does it mean that Egypt always needed an outsider?

The two chapters of Jasher, read together, make a startling claim about Egyptian power. The title Pharaoh is invented by an extortionist from Shinar. The granary that saves Egypt from famine is built by a Hebrew from Hebron's hill country. The military victory over Tarshish is delivered by the same Hebrew. The Book of Jasher is willing to say what no other Jewish text says quite as plainly. Egyptian sovereignty, as the book imagines it, has been propped up by outsiders almost continuously.

The book does not condemn this dependency. It records it. Rikayon's audacity charms King Oswiris. Joseph's wisdom rescues a later Pharaoh. The apocryphal tradition takes a measure of pleasure in this inversion, suggesting that the most powerful empire in the ancient world ran on borrowed talent.

Why Joseph kept a registry of fathers and grandfathers

The Book of Jasher adds one more detail to Joseph's grain distribution that the Torah does not include. Joseph decrees that only sons, not servants, may purchase corn, and that the names of all buyers, their fathers, and their grandfathers must be recorded. The reason, the book says plainly, is that Joseph wanted to know the moment his brothers arrived.

This is a bureaucratic detail with theological weight. Joseph is not just running a granary. He is running a registry. Every name that passes through Egyptian customs is being checked against the family tree of Jacob. The administrative apparatus of Egypt is being used to find ten missing brothers. The Book of Jasher is comfortable with this. The outsider running Egypt is also using Egypt's records to repair his own family.

How a wanderer and a Hebrew shared one throne across the centuries

The two stories are separated by generations in the biblical timeline. They share a structural shape that the Book of Jasher is careful to draw. Both men begin with nothing. Rikayon arrives in Egypt poor and sleeps in a ruined bakehouse. Joseph arrives in Egypt as a slave and ends up in a dungeon. Both rise by demonstrating a kind of cleverness Egypt does not have on hand. Rikayon invents the cemetery tax. Joseph invents the corn-in-the-ears storage method. Both are renamed by the Pharaoh of their day. Rikayon becomes Pharaoh. Joseph becomes Zaphnath Paaneah.

The Book of Jasher is using the pattern to argue that competent rule of Egypt requires either audacity or wisdom, and that the country is willing to import both from outside. The book does not flatter Egypt. The country, in this telling, is a stage on which outsiders perform.

What the Book of Jasher quietly took away from Pharaoh

By the end of the second chapter, the title Pharaoh has been reduced to a label. It was invented as a nickname for a wanderer. It is now being held by a king who tells his people to obey a Hebrew. The throne is real. The title is real. The independent authority of Egypt to feed its own people, defend its own friends, or run its own dynasty has been quietly drained out by the time Joseph stands in the granary.

The book leaves the reader with one strange thought. Egypt, in the Jasher tradition, has always been the country that outsiders organize. Rikayon shows up with thirty men and a story. Joseph shows up with a dream interpretation and a storage method. By the time Moses arrives generations later with a staff and a brother, the pattern has been set. Egypt is not surprised by foreign authority. It has been organizing itself around foreign authority since the title Pharaoh was first written down.