There was a famine in Canaan where Abraham’s

[Mary Naeem]

There was a famine in Canaan where Abraham’s descendants, the Hebrew people, had settled (Genesis 43:1), so Joseph brought all of them out of Canaan and into Egypt (Genesis 46:26–27). Joseph was able to provide food for them all because he had become governor of Egypt and was in charge of buying and selling food (Genesis 42:6). Why was Joseph in Egypt? Joseph’s brothers had sold him into slavery some twenty years earlier and were now dependent upon him for their sustenance (Genesis 37:28). This irony is only a small part of what happened in Joseph’s life; God’s paradoxical movement is obvious through all of Joseph’s history. If Joseph had not been governor over Egypt and moved his kinsmen there, there would be no story of Moses, no exodus from Egypt four hundred years later (Exodus 6:1–8).