The Torah states, almost in passing, that Joseph "removed the people to cities from one end of the border of Egypt to the other" (Genesis 47:21). Why? The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan gives a reason the plain text does not: "for the sake of the brethren of Joseph, that they might not be called wanderers: therefore he made them migrate from one end of Mizraim to the other."

Joseph, the Targum reveals, reorganized the entire Egyptian population so that his own family would not stand out.

Hiding One Family Inside a Nation of Migrants

Picture the social situation. Jacob's household had just arrived in Goshen. They were foreigners, refugees from a famine-struck Canaan. In any other country they would have been conspicuous — the only people speaking Hebrew in a landscape of settled Egyptians. They would have been called garim, strangers, with all the mockery that carries.

So Joseph moved everyone. The country-dweller was relocated to the city, the city-dweller to the country. Egyptians who had lived in their ancestral homes for centuries suddenly found themselves in new regions. Now the whole nation was displaced. And in that sea of displaced people, one extra family from Canaan — living in Goshen instead of their birthplace — was just one more example of a general condition.

A Ruler's Strategy of Love

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, preserving a tradition also found in <a href='/categories/midrash-rabbah.html'>Midrash Rabbah</a> on Bereishit Rabbah 95:3, makes Joseph's motive explicit. He was not building an empire. He was building cover for his family. Every Egyptian uprooted from their ancestral village was a layer of protection for the Hebrews in Goshen. No one could sneer at Jacob's sons for being newcomers, because every Egyptian was now a newcomer in their own land.

Some modern readers flinch at this. Was it ethical to displace an entire nation to normalize one family's foreignness? The Targum does not answer that question. It simply tells us what Joseph did and why. He used the lever of power he had been given — the famine had reduced Egypt to his mercy — to buy his brothers a form of peace.

What Power Costs and Buys

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan was composed in its final form between the 4th and 8th centuries CE, when Jews under foreign rule knew exactly what it meant to be the only newcomers in an old land. Joseph's policy here is the rabbinic fantasy of a powerful Jew in a foreign court. If he had the ear of the throne, he would use it — not for conquest, but so that his people could breathe.

The takeaway is this. Power bends toward whatever the powerful love. Joseph loved his brothers. So the map of Egypt itself rearranged to protect them.