192 BARTON— THE HISTORICAL VALUE [April 17, 



clearly occupied a position of power with the king similar to that 

 ascribed to Joseph in Genesis. 



3. The action of Joseph in storing up corn and then distributing 

 it during a time of famine is paralleled by the course of Baba of 

 El-Kab, who flourished under the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt about 

 1500 B.C., and who says in an inscription carved in his tomb, at 

 the close of a description of the activities of his life: 



"I collected corn as a friend of the harvest-god. I was watchful in time 

 of sowing. And when a famine arose, lasting many years, I distributed corn 

 to the city each year of the famine.'"* 



The principal features of Joseph's life are thus paralleled in 

 ancient history. The careers of Baba and Dudu are thoroughly his- 

 torical ; our knowledge of them rests upon contemporary documents. 

 While the latter part of the tale of the two brothers contains much 

 that is mythical, the portion which deals with the brother's wife is 

 so natural, and presents such a vivid picture of Eg3^ptian rural life, 

 that there can be little doubt that it is based on a real incident. 



When once a name has become prominent in a nation it tends, by 

 a law of human nature, to gather to itself all the appropriate stories 

 known. One heard at Harvard a generation ago stories told of 

 the late Professor Andrew P. Peabody, which a generation before 

 had been told in Germany of the absent-minded Professor Neander. 

 Before our eyes to-day stories are attaching themselves to Colonel 

 Roosevelt which originally were told of others. It is not too much 

 to suppose that the stories known to us from the sources quoted 

 attached themselves to the name of Joseph, and thus filled out to the 

 later Israelites the figure of their shadowy patriarch. This suppo- 

 sition, confirmed by historical and legendary analogies, enables us 

 to find in the Joseph stories real history. It is not, it must be con- 

 fessed, the history of a real Hebrew patriarch, but it is real history 

 of Egypt and Palestine and of real men in them. The history is 

 recovered, too, by following historical methods and following his- 

 torical analogies, and relieves us from the necessity of supposing 

 with Winckler that Joseph is but a series of Tammuz myths, or with 

 Jensen, that he is a group of Gilgamesh myths. 



" Cf. Brugsch, " Egypt under the Pharaohs," London, 1881. I., 303 fif. 



