Abraham didn't just go to Egypt to escape famine. According to Josephus, he went to debate the priests.
When drought struck Canaan, Abraham heard that Egypt was prosperous and decided to travel south. But he had a double purpose: he wanted to partake of Egypt's abundance, and he wanted to meet their scholars. If the Egyptian priests had better ideas about God, he would follow them. If they didn't, he would convert them. That was the kind of man Josephus presents—not just a patriarch but an intellectual heavyweight who walked into foreign courts looking for an argument.
The problem was Sarah. She was beautiful—dangerously so—and Abraham knew that Pharaoh would have him killed to take her. So he told Sarah to pose as his sister (Genesis 12:13). The disguise failed almost immediately. Word of Sarah's beauty spread through the Egyptian court, and Pharaoh sent for her, intending to make her his own.
God intervened with plagues and political chaos. Pharaoh's body broke down with disease. His government erupted in sedition. When the Egyptian priests finally told him the truth—that this catastrophe was divine punishment for pursuing another man's wife—Pharaoh summoned Abraham, returned Sarah untouched, and gave him enormous wealth as an apology.
Then something remarkable happened. Pharaoh didn't exile Abraham. He invited him to stay and learn from Egypt's greatest scholars. And Abraham didn't just learn—he taught. Josephus claims Abraham introduced the Egyptians to arithmetic and astronomy, sciences they had never known before. These disciplines had originated among the Chaldeans, and Abraham carried them into Egypt, from where they eventually passed to the Greeks. A famine refugee had become the most admired mind in the most advanced civilization on earth.