The Trap of Success

In his talk, John Lennox asks rhetorically, “Why shouldn’t we take Scripture seriously?” He then says, “I see no reason why not to. I see increasing reason to do that.”

Lennox is a Northern Irish mathematician, philosopher of science and Christian apologist with a long association with Oxford.

Scott of BLK SHP Bible Talk asks a similar question, this time directed at Egyptologists. citambibliju.com exists to encourage people to read the Bible and reflect on its relevance to our lives. In this issue, we present Scott’s video Genesis Is True. We Found the Receipts and its transcript.

In his “detective” style, Scott presents a range of intriguing details and connections. What struck me most was the “trap of success”, which I recognised as the central message of this issue. That is also why I chose it as the title of this article. As I read the Bible that day, this was what I recognised as God’s guidance for my own life. Perhaps it will shed a similar light for some of you, too.

Further reading

The video offers a concise presentation of Scott’s research and his interpretation of biblical and historical sources. For a fuller exploration of the subject, Scott points to his book Dynasty of Slaves, which he announces in the video, as well as a sample chapter and a visual timeline available through his newsletter. Readers interested in the sources, chronology and individual connections are encouraged to explore this additional material and follow news of the book’s release.

Scott’s transcript — English original

What follows is the English transcript of the video from BLK SHP Bible Talk. The narrative voice, historical reconstructions and interpretations below are Scott’s; the preceding introduction is editorial content from citambibliju.com.

Genesis Is True. We Found the Receipts

If you dig deep enough into the mud of the Nile Delta, you eventually hit a layer of history that makes Egyptologists very uncomfortable. For 200 years, the timeline of the Bible and the timeline of secular history have been at war. We're told that the patriarchs are myths. Critics insist there's no evidence for a population of Semitic shepherds living in Egypt during the Middle Kingdom and that the Exodus is a fairy tale because no record exists of a Hebrew slave becoming a prince of Egypt.

But they're looking in the wrong place and they're looking for the wrong man. Scholars often search for a character from a Sunday school flannel board. A boy in a technicolor dream coat who acts nice and forgives his brothers. But the Joseph of history, the Joseph who actually walked on this earth, he wasn't just a nice guy. He was a master strategist. Scripture tells us in Psalm 105 that Pharaoh made him lord of his house and the ruler of all of his substance, to bind his princes at his pleasure and teach his senators wisdom. He was the most brilliant, ruthless, and effective political operator of the ancient world. He didn't just survive Egypt, he broke it. He took a decentralized, feudal mess of warlords and forged it into the first true superpower of the Bronze Age. He's there in the record. His face is on the statues. His name is in the king's list. You just have to know what you're looking for. Today, we're going to walk into the ruins of Avaris. We're going to brush away the sand from a Syrian palace that probably shouldn't exist. And we're going to look at the face of the man who sold the world to Pharaoh.

But before we dig up the governor, I want to make sure that you've got the tools to follow this investigation. The timeline we're talking about is a little complex. And if you're just listening now, it can be hard to visualize where the Middle Kingdom ends and where the Hyksos period begins and where all of these pieces fit together. So, I've put together a full visual timeline graphic and a free preview of a chapter of my upcoming book, Dynasty of Slaves. It maps all of this out for you. It breaks down the dynasties and the dates and the archaeological layers we're discussing today. The only way to get it is to join my email newsletter. It's completely free. It's where I share the raw research, the book updates, and some of the deep dive content that doesn't make it onto YouTube. So, click the link in the description, sign up, and I'll send you the timeline and the book preview directly to your inbox.

Okay, now that's out of the way. Let's get back to 1670 BC. It always starts with the river. In Egypt, the Nile isn't just water. It's a god named Hapi. For thousands of years, Hapi makes a promise to swell the banks of the Nile River in the season of inundation. He promises to deposit the black silt from the Ethiopian highlands onto the fields, ensuring that if the pharaoh maintains Ma'at, which is the cosmic order, the people will eat.

The entire civilization is built on this single fragile wager. The pyramids, the temples, the golden masks, they all depend on it. But in the late 12th dynasty, the water stops rising. The records of this time are terrifying, describing a Nile that is lazy and low. The canals turn into cracked mud. The green belt of the delta begins to recede, turning a sickly yellow-brown as the desert starts to creep in. For the first time in centuries, the people of Egypt look at their gods and realize they're silent. Hapi, for all intents and purposes, is dead. And when the river dies, the politics explode.

The reality is Egypt at this moment isn't one big happy family. It isn't the unified empire of Ramesses that we see in the movies. It's a fractured feudal mess. The real power isn't in the royal palace. It's held by the nomarchs. These are the regional governors, local warlords who rule over their provinces like little kings. They command private armies and enforce their own tax systems, paying only lip service really to the pharaoh while answering to no one. But most importantly, the nomarchs control their own private granaries. For generations, these warlords have been hoarding the wealth of the Nile. They're proud, independent, feudal holdouts who refuse to let the central government rule.

But hunger has a way of humbling even the proudest warlord. As the famine grinds on year after year, the private stockpiles of the nomarchs begin to run dry. The local peasants start rioting. The private armies are starving. The warlords look at their empty silos and realize they have a choice: keep their pride and die, or swallow their pride and beg.

So, a procession begins. I can imagine them traveling north, the boats of the great southern lords drifting down the shrinking Nile, heading toward the Delta and the fortress city of Avaris. They arrive at the royal storehouses, hats in hand, desperate for grain and ready to make a deal with the pharaoh.

But when the doors of the administration center open, they aren't met by a pharaoh at all. They aren't even met by a traditional Egyptian priest with a shaven head and a leopard skin robe. They're met by a foreigner. He's a young man about 30 years old. Although clean shaven in the Egyptian style, his features are unmistakably Semitic. He's carrying a throw stick, the symbol of a shepherd, and it rests casually against his shoulder. He'd be wearing royal linen, a gift from the pharaoh, but he speaks with the accent of a Canaanite. He looks at these starving warlords, the men who have ignored the throne for centuries, and he tells them, "I have the grain. The silos are full. The king has prepared for this." The warlords ask for the price, and they expect a tax or a fee, of course. But the foreigner shakes his head. He doesn't want their money or their gold. He wants their land.

The Bible records the desperation of the moment in Genesis 47. The people cry out, "Why should we die before your eyes? Buy us and our land for food, and we with our land will be servants to Pharaoh." So the deal is struck. Verse 20 confirms the hostile takeover. It says, "And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh. So the land became Pharaoh's."

This is the moment the Middle Kingdom of Egypt is dismantled. The warlords sign the papers. The grain is released, and the dynasty of the "rulers of foreign lands," called the Hyksos, begins. Historians like Manetho call them invaders claiming they conquered without a battle. But looking at the broader scope of history, we know the truth - they didn't invade. They just bought the place.

And in the rest of this story, we're going to look at the so-called invasion that didn't actually happen. The linguistic connection between Joseph's political title and the name of the mysterious Hyksos king. The discovery of a curious statue of a Semitic man, wearing a multicolored coat. How the Hyksos consolidated their power in exactly the same way Joseph did in Genesis. And finally, I'll end this investigation with the nail-in-the-coffin connection that is too mind-blowing not to mention.

But, first, the invasion that wasn't an invasion at all. If you open a standard history textbook to the year 1650 BC, you're going to find a very strange story. Historians call this the Second Intermediate Period. It's considered a dark age, a time of chaos and collapse. And if you ask a traditional Egyptologist what happened, they'll tell you that suddenly out of nowhere, a mysterious race of invaders called the Hyksos swarmed across the border.

They quote an ancient Egyptian historian named Manetho. Writing over a thousand years later in the 3rd century BC, Manetho claims that these invaders of an obscure race had the audacity to invade the country. He writes: "In the reign of King Tutimaios, for what cause I know not, a blast of God smote us and men of obscure race invaded the land."

Manetho admits something crucial here. He says that they conquered easily and without a battle, but then pivots to violence. He claims they burned the cities and demolished the temples and treated the natives with cruel hostility, enslaving women and children. It sounds terrifying and violent. It sounds like an ancient blitzkrieg.

But here's the problem. When archaeologists dig into the ground at the city of Avaris, the capital of these Hyksos kings, they don't find a war. The principal excavator of the site is Dr. Manfred Bietak. He spent decades peeling back the layers of the delta here. And when he reached the layers corresponding to the rise of the Hyksos, he found essentially nothing. There's no destruction layer from this time. There are no burnt walls. There are no mass graves of soldiers defending the border. There is no evidence of a siege of any kind. The invasion is a ghost. It never really happened.

So, we have a mystery. How do you conquer the greatest empire on earth without a battle? How do foreigners take over the throne of the pharaohs without firing a single arrow? You do it the way all peaceful takeovers happen - the politics of economics. There's no war to find in the dirt of Avaris because we're actually looking for an administrative takeover based on economics. We're looking for a New Deal that would make Wilson and Roosevelt blush.

What archaeology confirms is a slow, peaceful infiltration. We see Semitic pottery styles appearing gradually, then Semitic housing, and then Semitic burial customs. The population of Avaris starts as a small group of guests, then grows into a multitude, and finally they're the ones running the administration.

Manetho was right about one thing. They took the country without a fight. But he was wrong about the fire and the sword. His account is most likely Egyptian propaganda mixed with a measure of historical fact. Historians call them the Hyksos. The Bible calls them the family of Jacob. And I'm going to show you that they are the exact same people.

So, if they weren't invaders, who were they? And more importantly, who was their leader? In criminal investigations, names are like fossils. They get buried under centuries of dirt. They get compressed by translation, and they get distorted by time. But if you know how to brush off the dust, the original shape is still there.

Manetho gives us the name of the very first Hyksos king. He calls him Salatis. Now, Salatis is not an Egyptian name. It doesn't mean anything in the Egyptian language. For centuries, this name has baffled Egyptologists. They just assume it's some foreign word that got garbled in translation.

But if you know your Hebrew and you know your Bible, that name should set off an alarm in your brain. Salatis is the Greek transliteration of a very specific Semitic word - שַׁלִּיט (shalit). And what does shalit mean? It doesn't mean king. The Hebrew word for king is מֶלֶךְ (melekh). That's the root of the name Melkizedek. Shalit is something else. It means the ruler or the governor. It's a title for a man who holds absolute authority, but authority that has been delegated from somebody else.

Now, I want you to turn your Bibles to Genesis 42:6 with me. Look at how the text describes Joseph at the height of his power. It doesn't just call him a prince. It uses a very specific technical title. It says, "Now Joseph was the governor over the land." The Hebrew word there – הַשַּׁלִּיט (ha-shallít). Do you see what just happened? The Bible calls Joseph the Shalit. The Egyptian history books record the very first Semitic ruler as Salatis. It's the same title. It's the same man.

Manetho writes that this king, Salatis, was famous for one specific administrative action. He didn't build pyramids. He didn't fight wars. Manetho says he measured corn. Think about that. If you know the story of Joseph, it's definitely starting to ring some bells. Of all the things a historian could remember about a king, his battles, his wives, his monuments. Manetho remembers that he was obsessed with the grain supply. He controlled the economy with an iron fist by controlling the corn. Now, does that look familiar to you? We're looking at Joseph here, the grand vizier, the man who saved the known world by controlling the corn in Egypt. To the starving Egyptians, he wasn't just a bureaucrat. He was the man with the keys to life. He was the Shalit. And this changes the entire narrative of who the Hyksos actually were.

The word Hyksos comes from the Egyptian phrase - ḥqꜣw ḫꜣswt (heqa khasut). For a long time, historians translated this as shepherd kings, but modern egyptology has corrected that. It literally translates to rulers of foreign lands. It was the title given to the chieftains of the Semitic tribes living in the delta. It was the title given to Joseph and his family as they consolidated power. They weren't invaders. They were the administration. They were the ones keeping the lights on when the Nile went dark.

But we don't just have a name. Surprisingly, we actually have a face.

This is where the investigation moves from linguistics to material evidence, specifically to the archaeological site of Tell el-Dab'a, the ancient city of Avaris, capital of the Hyksos. For years, this site was just a mound of dirt in the delta. But beginning in the 1960s, the Austrian Archaeological Institute, led by Manfred Bietak, began to dig. It's important to note that Bietak is a secular archaeologist, who was not trying to prove the Bible. He's simply recording what he finds in the ground, which is - the best type of archaeologist, in my opinion.

What he found in Stratum D/2, the layer dating to the late 12th and early 13th dynasty, shouldn't exist in Egypt, at least not according to the official story. He uncovered the foundations of a massive residential complex, but it wasn't an Egyptian house. It was a palace built in the Assyrian Mittelsaal style, the central-hall style. This is the kind of mansion you would find in Canaan, Syria, or northern Mesopotamia - a Semitic architectural design planted right in the middle of the Egyptian delta.

And who would live in a house like that? Well, it belonged to a high-ranking official who was incredibly wealthy and powerful yet refused to fully assimilate. He didn't want to live like an Egyptian noble. He wanted to live like a Hebrew patriarch. He was a man who walked into the halls of Pharaoh, but when he went home at night, he wanted to feel like he was back in his hill country of Canaan.

But the house isn't the only thing that matches the Bible. It's the grounds behind it, too. In the garden behind this massive villa, archaeologists found a private family cemetery containing exactly twelve main tombs arranged around the central courtyard. Now, stop and think about that for a moment. Who is the famous Hebrew patriarch with twelve sons? It's Jacob. The archaeology shows us a massive Semitic clan living in the best land of Egypt governed by a single family of twelve leaders.

Among these twelve tombs, however, one was different. Eleven of them were standard monumental graves. But the twelfth was a small pyramid tomb. In the Middle Kingdom, you don't give a pyramid tomb to a foreigner or a shepherd. You give that to a pharaoh or a queen. This is a royal honor reserved for someone with the highest status in the land.

Inside that tomb chapel they found the fragments of a colossal limestone statue. Although it had been smashed in antiquity by someone wanting to erase this man's memory, enough of the fragments remained for archaeologists to reconstruct the figure.

The statue depicts a man sitting on a throne with three distinctive features. First, his skin is pale yellow - the specific Egyptian art code for Asiatics or Semites as opposed to the reddish-brown Egyptians. Second, his hair is styled in a massive red mushroom-shaped coiffure, a distinctively non-Egyptian style typical of the northern Semitic tribes. And third, resting against his shoulder in his right hand is a throw stick, not a scepter or a weapon of war, but the tool of a shepherd used to guide sheep. We're looking at a Semitic ruler living in a Syrian palace in the Delta, surrounded by 12 family tombs, buried with royal honors, and holding a shepherd's staff.

But the detail that seals the identification is the paint. Faint traces of paint cling to the statue's shoulder revealed that he wasn't wearing white linen, which would have been typical for royals. He was wearing a striped multicolored coat of black, red, white, and blue. We're looking at the face of Joseph here. We are looking at the shalit.

But the mystery doesn't end with the statue. It ends with the body. When the archaeologists opened the burial chamber beneath the pyramid, they expected to find a mummy, gold, and maybe some jewelry. Instead, the tomb was empty.

You might think it was grave robbers, which is a fair guess in Egypt. But grave robbers are predictable. They take the gold and leave the bones because bones are worthless. In fact, they usually trashed the mummy looking for amulets. In this tomb, it was the opposite. There was no gold left. Sure, but there were no bones either. The sarcophagus was clean.

Why would a thief steal a skeleton? The truth is, they would not. But a family would. Turn to Exodus 13:19. It says this, "And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for he had straightly sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones away hence with you."

When the Israelites left Egypt in the middle of the chaos of the plagues, they didn't just grab their dough and their gold. They went to the garden of the old Syrian palace, opened the pyramid tomb of their ancestor, and honored their oath. They carried the bones of the dreamer out of Egypt and took them home to the promised land.

So, we have the man, his name, and his statue. But now we have to ask a hard question about how he used that power.

The story of Joseph is often taught as a nice moral lesson about forgiveness, which it is; that is true. But politically, it's a thriller. It's closer to The Godfather than it is to It's a Wonderful Life. And if you read Genesis 47 carefully, it's actually pretty terrifying.

When the famine hit, Joseph didn't just give the food away. After all, he was not running a charity; he was running a state. And he used the crisis to execute one of the most aggressive political takeovers in human history. The Bible is very honest about the steps of his consolidation.

Step one: the liquidation of capital. First, the people spent all their money. Joseph collected every silver ring, every gold deben, and every piece of currency in Egypt and in Canaan. He brought it all into Pharaoh's house.

Step two: the liquidation of assets. When the money was gone, the people cried out for bread, and Joseph said, "Give me your livestock." So they brought him horses and flocks and herds, their donkeys. He stripped the people of their independent wealth and transferred it to the crown.

And then step three: the liquidation of freedom. Finally, when they had nothing left, they came to him and said, "Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants to Pharaoh." And Joseph did it. Genesis 47:20 records the sale. It says, "And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh. For the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them, so the land became Pharaoh's."

Think about what that means politically. For centuries, the Middle Kingdom has been paralyzed by those feudal holdouts, the local warlords we talked about in the beginning. They owned their own land and they were completely independent. In one stroke, Joseph wiped them out. He dismantled the feudal system. He stripped the warlords of their power bases. He centralized all the wealth, all the land, and all of the authority into the hands of the king. He destroyed the old order and created the absolute monarchy of the New Kingdom.

This was a process that had begun generations earlier. Actually, the archaeological record shows the diminishing power of the nomarchs for a while. But Joseph's economic policy combined with the brutal famine was the final straw.

Now, his intentions were good. He wanted to save people from starvation. He was acting as a wise steward for his master. But in doing so, he built a machine of absolute power.

Later in the Bible, in Deuteronomy 4:20, God calls Egypt "the iron furnace," כּוּר הַבַּרְזֶל (kur ha-barzel). It's an industrial term. It means a smelting furnace used to refine metal. And Joseph is the one who built it.

This is the dark irony of the story. Joseph saved his family from starvation, but by centralizing absolute power, he created the very weapon that would eventually be turned against them. He was the savior who ended up building the cage.

And the tragedy of history is that as long as a pharaoh who knew Joseph was on the throne, that machine protected the Israelites. The Hebrews lived in the best of the land in Goshen. They prospered. They multiplied. They were the protected class of the administration.

Joseph therefore constructed the perfect weapon for a tyrant. He centralized the economy and enslaved the population to the state. He did not realize that a few generations later, a new king would arise, a king who didn't care about Joseph, and he would find his weapon waiting for him. He would turn it against the very people who built it.

But the story of the dynasty doesn't end with Joseph. Okay, Scott, if Joseph was the first Hyksos king, who was the second? Did the dynasty continue, or did it fall apart when he died? Manetho gives us the answer. And once again, the linguistic connections are remarkable.

In Manetho's list of Hyksos kings, the successor of Salatis - that is, Joseph - is a king named Benon. Now, just like Salatis, Benon is meaningless in Egyptian. It has no root, no meaning, and no history in the hieroglyphic language. But in Hebrew, it's crystal clear. Benon is a perfect Greek transliteration of the Hebrew word Benoni.

Does that name ring a bell? Well, turn back in Genesis 35:18. We're on the road to Bethlehem, Jacob's beloved wife, Rachel. She is Joseph's mother, and she is in labor again. The text says, "And it came to pass as her soul was in departing, for she died, that she called his name Benoni, but his father called him Benjamin." It means "son of my sorrow." But his father, Jacob, refuses to let that be his destiny. He renames him Benjamin, which means "son of my right hand."

Benjamin was Joseph's full brother. They were the only two sons of Rachel, Jacob's beloved wife. They were the dreamer and the right hand. When Joseph rose to power, the Bible tells us he had a special affection for Benjamin. At the feast in Genesis 43, he gives Benjamin five times as much food as the others. He tests his brothers to see if they will betray Benjamin like they betrayed him.

So when Joseph - the Shalit, King Salatis - finally died at the age of 110, who took the keys to the kingdom? Well, it did not go right away to Ephraim or Manasseh, his Egyptian-born sons. It seems that the leadership of his Semitic dynasty stayed with the Rachel line. The second shepherd king of Egypt was Ben-Oni, King Benon.

This gives us a picture of the Hyksos period that is radically different from the barbarian invasion story that the Egyptologists try to tell.

We aren't looking at a chaotic rotation of warlords. We're looking at a family business. They held the throne. They held the military. They held the economy. And for nearly a hundred years, the shepherd kings ruled the Delta.

They built the city of Avaris into a massive, thriving metropolis. They controlled the trade routes to Canaan. They imported olive oil, wine, and textiles. And they lived like princes. They were the head and not the tail, above only and not beneath, like Deuteronomy 28:13 says.

But that is exactly where the danger was hiding.

So, let's zoom out and look at the big picture of this investigation. We started with a mystery, the question of who the Hyksos were. History told us they were invaders who conquered without a battle. Archaeology told us there was no war, only a massive Semitic settlement. Linguistics told us their first king was named "governor" - shalit, and their second king was named "son of my sorrow" - Benoni. And the ground itself gave us a statue of a Semitic official wearing a coat of many colors, buried in a pyramid with no bones inside.

To me, the verdict is clear. The dynasty of slaves began as a dynasty of kings. They weren't invaded by the Hyksos. They were the Hyksos.

We love to quote Genesis 50:20. It's the verse we put on coffee mugs and the verse we sometimes use to comfort ourselves when things go wrong. It says, "But as for you, you thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive." It is an encouraging verse. It is true, beautiful, and wonderful. God used the betrayal and the pit and the prison and the famine to position Joseph to save Israel and many more.

But there's a dark side to that verse that we rarely talk about. What happens when the good turns sour? What happens when the provision becomes a prison?

God meant it for good to save people alive. That was the mission: survival. But once the famine was over, why did they stay for so long? Why did they get comfortable in Avaris? Why did they build palaces and adopt Egyptian titles?

They stayed because the good felt too good to leave. They traded the tent of Abraham for the palace of Avaris. They traded the promise of a rugged land in Canaan for the luxury of the Nile Delta. They preferred the power of Goshen over the purpose of God.

And that is the trap of success. You see, Goshen was never meant to be a permanent address. It was a shelter from the storm. It was a place to weather the famine. But the family of Jacob treated it like a destination. They fell in love with the system Joseph built and the influence and comfort that he brought them.

And because they wouldn't leave on their own, God had to let the wheel of history turn. He had to allow a new pharaoh to rise up. A series of nationalists, starting with Seqenenre Tao, followed by Kamose and finally Ahmose I, did not care about Joseph, who didn't care about Benoni and who didn't care about the economy.

Sometimes the only way God can get his people to move is to make the place where they are unbearable.

This is my encouragement to you today. We all have our Goshens, don't we? We have those seasons where God blesses us with influence or comfort or a job that pays well or perhaps a community that feels safe, and we thank God for it. We should recognize that these things are blessings. But we can never let our comfort zone become our cage.

There comes a moment in every believer's life where the season of "saving much people alive" shifts to a season of "get up and go". And when that shift happens, do we have the courage to leave the comfort of what was once a blessing? Do we have the courage to walk away from the status and the security? Or will we stay until the blessings turn into a curse?