The Con Man From Shinar and the Slave Who Both Ran Egypt

Rikayon Arrived Broke and Left With a Title

He came from Shinar with intelligence and no money. He wanted to impress the king of Egypt, Oswiris, but discovered the king held court only one day a year. Rikayon slept in a ruined bakehouse. He tried to sell vegetables in the street and was robbed before he made a single transaction. He needed a scheme.

He hired thirty armed men and stationed them at the Egyptian burial ground. He sent them to intercept every funeral party. The message they delivered was that by royal decree, no burial could proceed without a payment of two hundred pieces of silver. The decree was entirely fictional. The king had issued nothing. The men were not officials. But the bereaved families, arriving with their dead and confronted by armed men quoting royal authority, paid.

Within a year Rikayon had accumulated significant wealth from the burial tax. He brought the money to Oswiris, who was furious that this outsider had been collecting fees from his population without authorization. But Rikayon divided the money and gave half to the king as tribute, and gave the other half to the palace officials as gifts. The king, looking at the gift and the tribute and the man who had managed to generate both out of nothing, made him the administrator of Egypt. He gave him the title Pharaoh, meaning king's servant, and that title passed to every Egyptian king after him. Rikayon of Shinar, the broke wanderer who ran a fake cemetery toll, invented the name that every Egyptian monarch would carry for the rest of history.

Joseph Led the Army Against Tarshish

Centuries later, the Ishmaelites who had bought Joseph from his brothers came back to Egypt with a problem. The king of Tarshish had failed to pay his annual tribute. The Ishmaelites wanted the tribute collected. Pharaoh agreed to lend them military support. He appointed Joseph, his second ruler, to lead the Egyptian army on the campaign.

The Book of Jasher treats this appointment as a natural extension of Joseph's authority. He had already reorganized the Egyptian economy, supervised the granaries through seven years of famine, and managed the redistribution of the land to Pharaoh's ownership. Leading a military expedition was within his portfolio. Joseph marched the Egyptian army to Tarshish, subdued the city, and collected the tribute. The Ishmaelites received what they were owed.

The connection the book is drawing is between Rikayon's administrative genius and Joseph's administrative genius. Both men arrived in Egypt from outside. Both men acquired authority through demonstration of capability. Rikayon acquired it through a scheme. Joseph acquired it through the interpretation of dreams. Both men ran Egypt more effectively than its native administrators.

Egyptian Power Has Always Been Outsourced

Jasher's arrangement of these two stories as consecutive chapters is an editorial claim. The title Pharaoh was invented by a man from Shinar who had no connection to Egypt before he arrived penniless in a ruined bakehouse. The man who would later be second in command under that title was a Hebrew slave who arrived in Egypt shackled on a trading caravan. In both cases, the most consequential power in the country was held by someone who had no native claim to it.

The book does not present this as a criticism of Egypt. It presents it as a structural fact about the country. Egypt is a place where intelligence and situation can catapult an outsider into the center of power. That is true for Rikayon, who used a fake bureaucracy and a timely gift. It is equally true for Joseph, who used a God-given ability to decode the content of dreams. The mechanism is different. The result is the same: the person running Egypt is not Egyptian.

What the Two Stories Together Mean

Read sequentially, Rikayon and Joseph produce a pattern that runs deeper than coincidence. The country that will enslave Israel was managed from its inception by people who were not part of its dynasty. The title that identified its kings was coined by a man from the very region that would later produce Abraham. The slave who reorganized its economy was the great-grandson of the man God had covenanted with.

Jasher is suggesting that Egypt was never as closed or as purely indigenous as the standard telling implies. Its power was porous from the start. What looks like foreign subjugation from the inside of Israel's story looks, from Jasher's wider angle, like a recurring pattern in which the covenant family keeps passing through Egyptian power and reshaping it without intending to.