Shafer-Elliott et al./Hunt for Ancient Israel, 4. The Joseph Story

It is well known that I perceive the Bible as polemic literature. This declaration opens my book “Hidden Polemics in Biblical Narrative,” which discusses the ideologies and types of polemics. My use of the term “polemic” assumes a topic on which opinions differ and in biblical times would have been a subject of intellectual and public debate, of which we have evidence. In my book I describe four types of such polemics: the explicit or open; the indirect; the implicit or hidden, and the seemingly hidden polemic too. They can be distinguished from one another by the way they relate to the topic of the polemic and to the attitude towards. All of them appear in the story of Joseph, therefore this contribution deals with the four types of polemics in this story. Moreover, these polemics prove that the story of Joseph reflects the Persian period.