I. Introduction
It was to fruitful Goshen upon the request of Jacob’s son Joseph that Jacob and his sons immigrated (c 1830 BC based on an Exodus date of c. 1400 BC; cf. Archer 229). They immigrated during a widespread, severe famine, that was gnawing to naught all before it (Gen. 45:9-11). Yes, upon the request of Joseph they immigrated, even Joseph, who had become great in the land of Egypt (Gen 45:8, 13). Yes Joseph, who was sold into slavery to the Egyptians by his very brothers sad to say (Gen 37:3-36).
In our day and going back to the not-too-distant past,”Goshen” has often been used as the name for this and that, for example churches, colleges, cities, and so forth. Usually, the idea behind such naming is to associate that something with what the Christian Bible relates about the Goshen of Scripture. It is the purpose of this study to prayerfully discover the salient features of biblical Goshen and, in the process, to come to understand why “Goshen” became such a favorite among Christians when it came to naming things dear to them (e.g., this “Goshen” short list). Discussion of “Goshen” as a naming favorite is the focus of our concluding comments section, the other sections of the study set things up for that analysis.
II. Where is Goshen
Scripture uses the name “Goshen” fifteen times in fourteen verses (Gen 45:10, 46:28, 29, 34, 47:1, 4, 6, 27, 50:8, Exodus 8:22, 9:26, Jos 10:41, 11:16, 15:51, KJV). What is clear from these verses is that there were three different places with that name located either in ancient Egypt or southern Palestine (by Palestine we mean largely the region which is modern-day Israel, “Palestine”). The location in ancient Egypt is the one we will consider in this study; the other two in Palestine have to do with (1) the conquest of the Promised Land by Joshua, where a “Goshen” is mentioned in Joshua 10:41, 11:16, and (2) with the allotment of territory to the twelve tribes after the Conquest, where too a “Goshen” is mentioned in Joshua 15:51 in the territory of the tribe of Judah. From this point forward by “Goshen” is meant the Egyptian Goshen.
Old Testament Goshen was located in northeastern Egypt, specifically, in the northeastern Nile Delta near the ancient Hyksos capital of Avaris[1]. Looking at a Bible map of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, Goshen can be seen to lie between the ancient Egyptian (storage | supply) cities of Raamses to its north and Pithom to its south (Fig. 1). These are the cities that the Egyptians (more aptly, the Hyksos) ultimately, i.e., after the days of Joseph, forced the Israelites to build under slave-like conditions (Exodus 1:8-11-here is probably referenced a Hyksos ruler, see discussion Archer 229f). The Bible refers to Goshen also as the “Land of Rameses” (Gen 47:11) and probably the “Plain of Zoan” (Psa 78:12, 43). Another geographical reference point is nearby Lake Menzaleh, which some hold plays a role in the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt—this in the greater context of the Exodus is discussed later in the study.
III. Salient Features of Goshen
The Bible tells us that Goshen, or the land of Goshen as it is sometimes referred to (Gen 46:28; 47:1; 50:8, Exodus 9:26), was particularly fertile—the best land in Egypt, agriculturally speaking (Gen 45:18; 47:6, 11)—and thus well suited for farming and animal husbandry, just the kind of trade that Jacob and his sons pursued at home in Canaan. Of course, Joseph knew how good this land of Goshen was, and he made it a point to tell his brethren that they should explain to Pharaoh that they were shepherds by trade so that he would be sure to give them this land for their very own (Gen 46:31-34; 47:4, 6). It is noteworthy that shepherds were despised and “looked down upon” in Egypt in that day (Gen 46:34), so Goshen with its rich pastureland was probably not the kind of land that Egyptians in general would have wanted. One may even suppose that the land was avoided by the Egyptian upper crust and probably not a few others. Moreover, Pharaoh likely had ulterior motives in giving this land to Israel (Jacob and his descendants). Specifically, he would gain experienced shepherds living there to tend his own flocks (Gen 47:5-6); it is probably a fair guess that the stigma associated with shepherding (therefore associated with Goshen) made finding quality herdsmen difficult for Pharaoh. There, then, in the land of Goshen, Israel multiplied and prospered and became exceedingly numerous among the Egyptians (Gen 47:27). We will circle back to the red font descriptors with a discussion later in the concluding comments section, please keep them in mind (Goshen: fertile, avoided, stigma).
IV. The Exodus
The Israelites’ exodus from Egypt (from Goshen in Egypt where they resided [c. 1400 BC]—this is in Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty [1549-1292 BC]), is set forth in chapters eight through fourteen of the Book of Exodus (Exodus 8-14). The actual location of the miraculous-crossing-climax of the exodus is uncertain, but it was probably not through waters resident in Egypt (Exodus 13:17-18), nor through the Red Sea proper (Fig. 1). Quite aside, note that the “red” here may have entered common usage (1) on the merit of a physical basis: colonies of bacteria and single-celled organisms that thrive in the water and which, upon dying, are discernible as a sort of illusory sawdust or straw, and/or (2) on the merit of a practical basis: colors were utilized in antiquity to denote cardinal directions. Whatever the provenance, the biblical text, the consonantal Hebrew, has it so: [YOD<>MEM=“YaM” with QAMETS vowel]+[SAMEK<>PE=“SuF” with SHUREQ vowel], literally, “sea+reed,” or, “Reed Sea” (H3220 + H5488, character map). So, we have a challenge before us: is it “Red” or is it “Reed” Sea? If it is “Reed,” how should we understand that, seeing that “Reed” suggests shallow water, in direct contradiction to the biblical text (Exodus 15:4, 8, Isa 51:10, et al.)? Shallow water hardly lends itself to the miraculous in the context of the Exodus. We defer here to the following article, which digs deeper for us: “Red Sea or Reed Sea?” (author Debbie Hurn; the following hopes to capture her thinking).
Hurn’s research and thinking explores an alternative intended meaning for “SuF” based on [SAMEK<>PE as before, but with the WAW vowel letter as “O,” (instead of a SHUREQ “U”). Here strikes the difficulty of a consonantal Hebrew that was augmented by way of vowel letters and that could consequently be nuanced differently, as here—but not (augmented) until around the time of David (tenth-century BC; in general, Pratico 12). This would be some four centuries after the time of Moses, the inspired author of our Exodus passage. So, following Hurn, we get now “SoF” (H5490), where “SoF” translates to “end[2].” The verses of note two have a common thread—“SuF” is not compounded with “YaM” (“sea”); these alternative “end-like” uses are in an altogether different context. Consider Solomon and “Red Sea,” as in 1Kings 9:26, where we have the same “YaM” + “SuF” as in our Exodus passages, here lapping the shores (brink, brim, termination, etc., H8193) of Edom. Thus, instead of “Reed Sea,” or even “Red Sea, ”we likely have “End Sea,” or, “final frontier,” as known in its day. The known world was small in ancient times and large bodies of water marked final frontiers is the idea: who knew exactly what, if anything, lay just beyond the familiar? Quoting Hurn,
These ancients thought of the Red Sea as a continuous body of water that extended from the Arabian Gulf to the Persian Gulf and included all connecting oceans to the south” […] The truth may be this, that the Red Sea was known to the Hebrews as the yam soph because they regarded it as the ‘sea at the end of the world’. Like other nations, the ancient Israelites did not distinguish the Red Sea gulf from the great Southern Ocean that formed the impassable boundary of the known world. Its waters may have seemed ‘strange and inexplicable’ to the inhabitants of the ancient world, whose only knowledge of the sea was the vast tideless lake [the Mediterranean] which washed the coasts of Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and Italy. It [the Red Sea] must have always brought to the mind of those who stood on its shores, that they were on the waters of a new, and almost unknown world.
It is rather like our confusion as to the final frontier, or, “edge”, of the known universe in modern times—the scenario is maybe the same, the familiar “sea-and-its-confluences” if you will is just bigger these days owing to telescopes, space probes, orbiters, rovers, and modern computing capabilities that make intelligible the former’s data. But ignorance always lies just beyond the familiar, like its shadow, thus it lies, and so we always seem to bump up against a “SoF”, an “end” of sorts, whether in ancient times or in modern times.
Well, where is the most likely place that this miraculous event occurred? Dr. John Bright thinks that the tip of the Gulf of Suez is too far south of Goshen for it to have occurred there because the Egyptian cavalry would likely have caught up with the Israelites long before (Bright 122). Nor he thinks is it plausible “that the Red Sea then extended north of its present shoreline to connect with the Bitter Lakes (now part of the Suez canal), for there is now evidence that it did not” (Bright 122). Since, however, the Israelites lived in and around Goshen near Lake Menzaleh, Bright thinks that the miraculous crossing of the Exodus may have occurred through an arm of that lake, possibly not far from present-day El-Qantara (located at the northern tip of the Gulf of Suez) on the Suez Canal (Bright 123, Fig. 1). We prefer however a proposal based on fascinating research done by Dr. Lennart Moller[3] and colleagues, who posits that the crossing took place across the Gulf of Aqaba—specifically, from the Nuweiba peninsula, on the eastern coast of the Sinai Peninsula, and thence across the Gulf of Aqaba to Midian. Nuweiba is situated directly west of ancient Midian across the Gulf of Aqaba. Midian was probably Moses and the Israelites’ planned destination by way of, by following, the old Egypt-to-Midian trade route (Fig. 1—black curve with Xs on it and then around the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba into Midian), the same route Moses no doubt followed when he first fled Egypt (Exodus 2:11-15). But, in their flight, the massive Israelite assembly wandered off this route and found itself, by-and-by, hemmed in at Pi hahiroth (= ”mouth of the gorges,” see figure 1 and Nuweiba; red curve with Os on it crudely guesses at the wander). Hemmed in with the sea blocking them forwards (east), the formidable terrain of the wilderness blocking them to their north and south, and the Egyptian cavalry closing in behind them (west)—(Exodus 14:1-7, 8-14,15-21, 22-28, 29-31). Based on the astounding evidence he provides, Moller and his colleagues may well be right, evidence not least of which includes the documentation of a wide, walkable, silt, underwater land bridge, extending across the precipitous Jordan Rift Valley from Nuweiba (eastern coast of the Sinai peninsula) to Midian (western coast of the Arabian peninsula), which would have been exposed when the waters parted[4], (“The Exodus Revealed”). An important aside here concerns the location of Mount Sinai (Horeb). In that regard, please note that Paul places Mount Sinai in Midian | Arabia (Horeb: Exodus 3:1, 17:6, Deu 1:19, 4:10, 15; cf. Mount Sinai: Exodus 19:18, 23, 24:16, 31:18, 34:4, Act 7:37-38, particularly Gal 4:24-25).
V. Concluding Comments
Let’s tie all this together now and with God’s help try to determine some reasons why the name “Goshen” is a favorite among Christians for the naming of their homesteads and the like. The following are some major points mentioned above to consider in that regard.
Goshen was fertile land, the very best land in Egypt. One can see the Eternal Mind at work having purposed to place Israel on such a bountiful land, compatible with their agrarian and pastoral character. Compatible, compatibility predetermined. They, thus in His will, “holding up their end,” commissioned to the task, were secure, and exceedingly blessed, and bounty followed, not only with respect to the fruits of this fertile land, but in their very homes as, not least, God’s people too greatly multiplied on this fertile land. No doubt this “compatible-calling,” and follow through on their part, and attendant blessing and care—evidence of the Divine Presence in their midst—goes a long way in the minds of Christian communities when it comes to naming their places, thus associating themselves with the same, ever cognizant of it, and reminded of it every time (even their) “Goshen” is mentioned. This sort of association-by-name surely serves a faith-quickening purpose, rather like declarative praise in prayer, wherein one calls to mind via praising-prayer God’s mighty deeds in creation and personally in one’s life, in this way coming to greater appreciation of the One on the other end of one’s fertile Life-tether, finding peace in the same. (“Goshen.” “Christian.” ”Christian” has its own distinctive ring does it not? Now there’s an Association, surpassing.)
Goshen was the land of Israelite shepherds, and shepherds play a prominent role both figuratively and literally in the Christian Bible, especially as Jesus is the Good Shepherd (John 10:14-16), the Head Shepherd (1Peter 5:4), the Shepherd and Guardian of souls (1Peter 2:25). Again, Christian communities likely treasure a special kinship with biblical Goshen, in this instance with the Goshen shepherds, who undertook to care for an interest of Pharaoh that the indigenous loathed and stigmatized. Indeed, no less the “modern day “Goshens,” where we find those great shepherds of the interests of God, in their generation, in their communities, at great pains and no less stigmatized, do that work for the Head Shepherd which most (even some in their own ranks) avoid. The very name “Goshen,” then, serving as a reminder of that honorable, weighty calling, so loaded with responsibility. The very name “Goshen,” then, flying aloft as a banner signaling that here is found a community that has undertaken to care for the interests of the “God of Goshen” irrespective of the stigma and any personal costs (“Feed My Sheep”, “The Mindset of a Shepherd | A Pastor’s Prayer”).
Goshen was protected by God and spared the plagues that came upon the rest of Egypt (Exodus 8:22, 9:4, 10:23, et al.). God’s people lived there, and He protected them there, extending to them the divine favor in myriad ways over the years we can be sure. Certainly, this aspect of the land of Goshen has special appeal for all Christians in both its physical and spiritual sense.
A Christian is, by definition, a follower of Jesus Christ, and as such a member of the Body of Christ, which is simply the Christian Church. There is through that connection with the Body of Christ—God’s people—a remarkable resemblance between the Land of Goshen and the Christian Church. The Church is, in a sense, like the biblical Land of Goshen. That is to say, the Church is necessarily a “place” where God’s people live as God’s people and depend on Him for everything. In this sense, the “modern-day Goshens” are aligning themselves with the Christian Church as communities of God’s people, dependent upon Him, serving Him. This may be the major impetus behind a community’s claim to be “Goshen.” One might say it is a public expression proclaiming to be Jehovah God’s people, even His, the God of Goshen, showing themselves to have consciously tethered themselves to Jehovah their God and a priori counted the cost, be that as it may, quite resolute to acquiesce thereto for the glory of the God of Goshen, not so subtly proclaiming confidence in His abiding care and presence in the face of that Cost. This openly praises, and positively brings attention to, His Name, even the” God of Goshen”—here surely is yet another Name befitting our great Savior God Jesus Christ (John 10:14-16, 17:11, 19-23, Romans 7:4, 12:4-5, 1Corinthians 8:6, 10:15-17, 12:12-13, Ephesians 1:22-23, 2:11-16, 3:5-6, 4:11-16, 5:23, 29-30, Colossians 1:13-18, Zechariah 6:12, “O, That Name!”).
The three features just listed for Old Testament Goshen, namely that it was:
· a fertile land,
· a land of shepherds,
· God’s people lived there under His care,
might be understood to hold solely a centripetal appeal (center-seeking), but nay, there is a centrifugal aspect to them as well (outward-seeking). In that respect they are surely a clarion call for “modern-day-Goshens,” because:
· the Christian Church seeks to be no less fertile (bearing fruit),
· the Christian Church seeks to be no less pastoral and, perhaps most of all,
it seeks to live, and move, and have its being as God’s people; a people seen by those watching to be under His care in the “Land of Egypt.” That is, reflecting Jesus to an unbelieving world that in no small way in this the beginning of the third millennium since Jesus’ first advent despises and “looks down upon,” and avoids Goshen and its people, in this way despising and looking down upon and avoiding the very God of Goshen, even Jehovah God.
The transition into the third millennium since Jesus’ first advent… O my. But let us remember the movement of redemptive history (the movement of the Holy Spirit) across these millennia, all the while focusing on God’s promises and their unfolding (esp. those in the context of this study: Gen 15:13-14, 16, Deu 18:18, Luke 12:51). God brought His ancient chosen people to Goshen; there they multiplied and prospered under His care for quite a while, and then came suffering, even great suffering. God ultimately delivered His people from their suffering—when they cried out to Him (Exodus 3:7), raising up a savior (Moses) to lead them out of the Land of Egypt to the Promised Land, thus setting the stage for God’s appearance to deliver all peoples (Romans 3:29), for it was promised that the great Savior God, the Deliverer, would be one of them, born in Bethlehem, in the Promised Land (Gen 3:15 must start the thread, then we have such as Deu 18:18, Micah 5:2, Galatians 3:8, 13-16, et al., “Isaiah Chapter Fifty Commentary”). Indeed, setting the stage for the appearance of the promised Deliverer, Jesus Christ, who would consummate redemption | Salvation (here is Deliverance in the extreme), as promised, on a cross in the Promised Land (“Holy Week”, “Jesus Our Jubilee”). And if we consider this movement of God in redemptive history and fold in now the sufferings of the Christian Church presently, we nevertheless find our blessed Jehovah God’s promises still flowering, yea still today, as follows. He first brings His Chosen to precious and expensive Goshen, even the Christian Church, where again we see that they have multiplied and become exceedingly numerous there, notwithstanding, with an apparent transition to persecution and suffering, following the same pattern as before. She is now, with heightened, more sensitive anticipation (appreciation…) awaiting the second advent of Her great Savior God Jesus to deliver Her and lead Her out of the Land of Egypt (no confused wandering this time). Awaiting to be delivered once-and-for-all, again with great power, Exodus Power, to the Promised Land yonder transcendent, an assembly exceedingly numerous. (Thus God’s promises are still flowering: “Children of the Resurrection”, “The Fourth Cup”, “Saints”, “In the Beginning”, ” A Letter of Invitation-2”.) But please notice! She, in Her day, must cry out, following the biblical pattern laid down in Goshen. She, in Her day, must really want Deliverance! She, in Her day, must treasure it! Must treasure it as Goshen before, to hasten the day and hour we think (Matthew 24:36). Come Lord Jesus, come soon. We cry out for you to come; yes you great Savior God, whom we love and adore above all else. Please make a way and send Him soon Papa Jehovah God. Amen.
Praised be Thy strong Name in all the earth great Savior God, even the “God of Goshen.” Amen.