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The king and the Pharaoh

Joseph served a king and Moses faced a Pharaoh: how the Qur’an’s two titles for the ruler of Egypt match the Egyptian record.

3 minute read
Columns of the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, raised under the New Kingdom

The Bible and the Qur’an both tell how Joseph rose to power in Egypt and how Moses confronted its ruler generations later. The two scriptures differ in a detail that looks small and turns out to be telling: what they call the king.

A statue of Ramesses II, a New Kingdom pharaoh, the era in which the Egyptian title came to name the king himself

Two titles in the Qur’an

In the story of Joseph, the Qur’an calls the ruler of Egypt al-malik (الملك, the king). It is the king who dreams of seven fat cows devoured by seven lean ones, the king who summons Joseph from prison, and the king’s cup that is found in his brother’s saddlebag.1 In the story of Moses, the ruler is Firʿawn (فرعون, Pharaoh), the name the Qur’an uses for him throughout.2 Across the whole Qur’an the two titles never cross: Joseph’s king is never called Pharaoh.3

The Hebrew Bible uses a single title for both. The ruler who takes Sarah into his house in the time of Abraham, the ruler whose dreams Joseph interprets, and the ruler who resists Moses are all Pharaoh.4

What the Egyptian record shows

The word Pharaoh comes through Greek from the Egyptian per-aa, “the great house”. In the Old and Middle Kingdoms it named the royal palace. Only in the New Kingdom, which began around 1550 BCE, did it come to name the king himself.5 The earliest examples come from the Eighteenth Dynasty: an ostracon from the joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III refers to the king simply as Pharaoh, and Alan Gardiner cited a clear instance under Amenhotep IV.6 The Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson draws the consequence plainly: to call a ruler before the New Kingdom Pharaoh is strictly anachronistic.7

Dating Joseph and Moses

Scholars who look for Joseph in Egyptian history place him before the New Kingdom, either in the Middle Kingdom or in the Hyksos period, when rulers of Asiatic origin held northern Egypt.8 Most place Moses within the New Kingdom, often in the thirteenth century BCE.9 On those datings the Qur’an’s usage fits the history exactly. Joseph served a king at a time when no Egyptian called his ruler Pharaoh; Moses faced a Pharaoh at a time when the title had come into use.

How to read the difference

Some writers have argued that Pharaoh was a permanent designation of the Egyptian king, so that the biblical usage is correct for every period. The Egyptian evidence does not support that view.10 Biblical scholars have read the usage as a sign of when the Genesis narratives were written down: the writers described the Egypt of the patriarchs in the vocabulary of their own later age.11

The Qur’an was proclaimed in seventh-century Arabia, many centuries after the events it narrates, when no one could any longer read the Egyptian inscriptions. It nonetheless keeps the older title for Joseph’s ruler and the later one for Moses’s. For Muslim readers the distinction is one more sign that the Qur’an does not depend on the earlier scriptures for its knowledge of the past. See Joseph and Moses among the figures.

Further reading: Understanding the Bible and the Qur’an in historical context, What archaeology tells us about the ancient Near East and Who was Abraham?, Haman in the Qur’an.

The carved base of a Middle Kingdom Egyptian scarab amulet

Notes

  1. Qur’an 12:43, 12:50, 12:54, 12:72, 12:76. ↩
  2. Qur’an 7:104; 10:75; 20:24. ↩
  3. “Qur’anic Accuracy Vs. Biblical Error: The Kings & Pharaohs Of Egypt”, Islamic Awareness, first composed 11 January 1999, last updated 3 March 2006, section 3. ↩
  4. Genesis 12:15; 41:1; Exodus 5:1. ↩
  5. I. Shaw and P. Nicholson, British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 1995), p. 222; cf. T. Wilkinson, The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Ancient Egypt (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), p. 186. ↩
  6. Hayes’s ostracon and A. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, 3rd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 75, both as cited in “Qur’anic Accuracy Vs. Biblical Error: The Kings & Pharaohs Of Egypt”, Islamic Awareness, first composed 11 January 1999, last updated 3 March 2006, section 5. ↩
  7. Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 186. ↩
  8. “Joseph, Moses & The Rulers Of Egypt”, Islamic Awareness, last updated 11 April 1999, section 4. ↩
  9. “Qur’anic Accuracy Vs. Biblical Error: The Kings & Pharaohs Of Egypt”, Islamic Awareness, first composed 11 January 1999, last updated 3 March 2006, section 4. ↩
  10. Ibid., section 5, on A. S. Yahuda and J. Vergote. ↩
  11. Ibid., section 6. ↩
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