Fact-Checking the Torah -- TYMW to TTB analysis

Wanna do an Olrik analysis? What better target than that urban legend of urban legends which probably helped support another urban legend but at the same time has consequences for DH? It doesn’t get much better than that.

Probably everybody reading this post has heard that the Tale of Yosef and His Master’s Wife and the Egyptian Tale of Two Brothers have some kind of relationship. I’ll call them TYMW and TTB from now on. (And didn’t you wonder why I didn’t discuss them before, hmmmm?)

TYMW says that Yosef was running the house for his master who bought him in Egypt. The wife lusted after Yosef but he kept refusing her so she falsely claimed rape and got him thrown in jail. It was the setup for the second set of dreams and thus part way to the goal of the narrative. Traditionally, being at least 200 years before the Exodus, this is sometime in the 12^th dynasty.

TTB is called a folk tale in one collection of texts related to Tannakh; the papyrus containing it dates to 1225 BCE (in the 19^th dynasty) First we have to assume that folk tale and oral narrative are roughly the same thing.

Pritchard’s book (listed in the Bibliography) doesn’t have the whole TTB; a full form is posted online. Second, we have to assume that it’s correctly translated for purposes of this comparison. After reading part 3 of this blog, do you have a feel for how difficult it is to prove these relationships?

TTB records that the two men involved were brothers, not master and slave. The wife was caught by her husband washing off makeup used to simulate bruises, a detail that is not in the Torah story. He kills her; we don’t know what happened to the wife in Torah. The younger brother castrates himself to prove he’s not lying when he denies the rape. That, too, is not in Torah. Couldn’t be. Yosef had not yet sired the tribes of Efraim (ancestor of Joshua) and Menasheh (ancestor of Gideon).

After that TTB goes on to say that Anubis, the older brother, helped Bata get away to a valley where he could live. The Egyptian love goddess (or goddesses, it says “the seven Hathors” which points at the Law of Three) creates a wife for Bata and he warns her not to leave the house when he is out hunting. That’s a classic motif in fairy tales, and of course she disobeys.

The Sea sees her and manages to get a curl of her hair and send it the whole way to Pharaoh who falls in love with her because of its fragrance. He sends soldiers and they kill Bata and take the wife (does this sound familiar?). Anubis, through magic, realizes Bata is dead, and Bata has told him of a reviving magic to use; it works but Bata is transformed into part of a pine tree. He makes three attempts to get his wife back; she realizes that it’s him each time and tells Pharaoh, who takes action. But eventually she becomes pregnant with Bata’s son, and he becomes crown prince with Anubis as his vizier This entire episode is missing from TYMW.

And now the big reveal...