Hello, and welcome to the Scriptures a Real podcast, the podcast where we talk about elements of the scripture that make them become real to us.

And we do that because we believe that the more real they are, the more power we can draw from them,

the more that we identify with the people in them and thus can apply them to our lives.

I'm your host, Kerry Mulestein, and this is going to be a shortcast where I just talk about a couple of things very briefly.

And it may even be, we'll see if we want to do a new genre of shortcast.

Maybe we're coming up with too many ideas, but a new genre that we might call this the G-Wiz

shortcast. Because what I want to talk about is really just a number of things, not any huge thing

or something that will take long, but a number of things that are just interesting

historical or cultural elements that for me just make the story just kind of have a little bit

more life to it, but it's a, you just say, gee whiz. And I mean, that doesn't prove the scriptures

true or anything like that. It's just kind of makes it more interesting. So as we're doing the

Joseph story, I thought there might be a few

things that would be interesting to us if we're going to talk about the Joseph's story. So we're

not going to go through all of the details of that story. We know that he's sold and goes down into

Egypt. We know that kind of thing was happening.

There were regular trade routes and there was human trafficking in there as well.

I've actually looked into that Egyptologically and we have some decent evidence for that and lots of evidence for

Semitic people being brought down into Egypt as servants and slaves.

One of the questions we have to ask ourselves is,

when might this have been happening? And we don't know for sure, but we can get some pretty

decent ideas. So if we think that Abraham is somewhere around 2000 to 1800 BC, he has an

almost 200 year lifespan. So he's somewhere in that window that would put

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