How Egypt Got Its First Pharaoh

The name Pharaoh is older than any single king of Egypt. Every ruler who sat upon that throne, including the one who drove Abraham and Sarah from the land, bore the title because of one man: a penniless wanderer from the land of Shinar named Rakyon, which means Have-naught. His story is told in the Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's monumental early-twentieth-century synthesis of rabbinic tradition, and it reads less like royal history than like a parable about what power really is and who tends to seize it.

Rakyon was wise. He was also handsome, and completely broke. He left Shinar with nothing but his wits, heading for Egypt, where he had heard the king was accessible to men of learning. He arrived only to discover the custom of the land: the king showed himself in public exactly once a year. On every other day of the year, he was sealed inside his palace, remote and unreachable. Rakyon had traveled far for a meeting that would not happen for months. He had no money, no food, and no friends in a foreign city.

He slept two nights in a ruin. On the third day, he had a plan.

He recruited thirty strong men and led them to the graveyard. In the name of the king, he announced a new tax: two hundred pieces of silver for every body buried. No payment, no burial. Within eight months, Rakyon had amassed extraordinary wealth, a private army of mounted men, and an iron grip on the one thing no Egyptian family could refuse to pay for. When the people finally brought their complaint to the king on his one public day, Rakyon arrived ahead of them. He came with a thousand youths and maidens dressed in finery, preceded by mountains of gold, silver, and gems, and a magnificent horse. The king, dazzled, listened to his explanation. The court praised him. The people, who had come to accuse, found themselves charmed instead.

The king renamed him. Rakyon, Have-naught, became Pharaoh, Paymaster, because he had collected tribute even from the dead. Under the king's nominal authority, this Pharaoh administered law and justice throughout the land. Then, through accumulated cunning, he converted that administration into something very close to kingship. The people loved him. It was decreed that every ruler of Egypt would bear his name forever.

This is the Pharaoh who later met Abraham. The encounter, preserved in the Book of Jubilees, composed sometime in the second century BCE in the land of Israel, is brief but charged. Sarai was taken into the palace, and Pharaoh was struck with affliction until Abraham prayed and he was healed. He sent them out loaded with cattle and silver and gold, and Abraham returned to the altar between Bethel and Ai and blessed the Lord his God who had brought him back in peace. The Jubilees passage is terse on the details of the court, but it establishes what Ginzberg elaborates: this first Pharaoh understood something about power that most kings do not. He understood that the man who controls access, whether to burial ground or to the throne room, controls everything.

The rabbis who preserved this story saw in Rakyon a mirror. Here was a man who grasped a universal human weakness, the terror of leaving one's dead unburied, and turned it into a revenue stream. He is not exactly wicked. He never lies outright. He simply identifies the leverage and applies it. His intelligence is genuine, his charisma real. The midrashic tradition does not condemn him as a villain. It presents him as a type, the cunning outsider who out-maneuvers his way into the machinery of empire, and whose name then sticks to every ruler who follows, whether just or cruel.

There is a further detail that the tradition preserves. Egypt's king before Rakyon was Ashwerosh son of Anam, and the custom of the land was royal invisibility: one appearance per year, all other days sealed away. Rakyon did not overthrow this system. He inserted himself into it. He worked within the existing architecture of power while quietly replacing its substance. By the time anyone noticed, the name Pharaoh was already the name of the office, not the man.

When Abraham left Egypt and turned his face back toward Canaan, toward the altar and the blessing he had first built between Bethel and Ai, he carried with him herds and silver and gold given by the first Pharaoh. He also carried the knowledge that Egypt, that great and ancient nation, owed the name of its kingship to a hungry man with a good plan and no shame about whom he taxed. The Torah never quite lets you forget who the rulers of the earth actually are, or where they came from. Often they came from nowhere. Often they still are.