Down to Egypt, When the Rains Failed

The Bible itself explains the difference in one striking passage. God tells Israel that the Promised Land is nothing like Egypt:

There it is. Egypt was watered "with thy foot," a picture of the irrigation channels that farmers opened and closed with their feet, drawing water from the Nile onto their fields like "a garden of herbs." Canaan, by contrast, "drinketh water of the rain of heaven." One land ran on a river; the other ran on the sky. And that made all the difference in a drought. When the rains failed across the eastern Mediterranean, Canaan withered, but Egypt's river kept flowing. The Nile's flood did not come from local weather at all; it came from heavy rains far to the south, deep in Africa, that swelled the river every summer regardless of whether a single drop fell over Canaan. So Egypt could be green and full while its neighbors starved.

Egypt did not simply throw open its borders. Its northeastern frontier, the way in from Canaan across Sinai, was guarded by a line of fortresses, and travelers had to be granted passage. During famines, Egypt generally did allow foreign herders and their flocks to enter the well-watered eastern Delta to survive, but it recorded them, taxed them, and kept an eye on them. And there was a social distance built in: shepherds, the very trade of the patriarchs, were looked down upon. Joseph told his brothers plainly, "every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians" (Genesis 46:34), which is exactly why Pharaoh settled Jacob's family off to themselves in the grazing land of Goshen (Genesis 47:6). They were welcomed to survive, but they were foreigners, and Egypt never let them forget it.

And this is not just the Bible's claim, it is written in Egypt's own records. In the tomb of Khnumhotep II at Beni Hasan, painted around 1890 BC, in the days of the patriarchs, there is a vivid scene of a caravan of Semitic people, men, women, and children, entering Egypt, led by a chief the caption calls "the ruler of a foreign land." Centuries later, an Egyptian border official recorded in a document known as Papyrus Anastasi VI that he had let "the Shasu tribes of Edom" pass the frontier fortress "in order to keep them alive and to keep their cattle alive." That is the biblical picture exactly: hungry Semitic herders from Canaan and Edom, admitted through Egypt's border to keep themselves and their flocks alive in famine. The Bible's account of going "down to Egypt" fits the hard evidence of Egypt's own walls and papyri.

Everyone has an Egypt, the reliable-looking place we run to when life gets lean and God feels slow. It may be a paycheck, a relationship, a habit, a compromise, some source of supply we can see and control instead of waiting on the rain of heaven. Egypt is not always sin; sometimes God Himself sends His people there. The question is whether we go at His leading or in our fear.

So when the famine comes, and it will, do not bolt for Egypt out of unbelief. Look up. Ask the God whose eyes are always on your land to send the rain in His time. He fed Abram, He fed Jacob, He kept His own Son, and He has never once failed to provide for those who wait on Him. Live in the land of dependence, and let your dry seasons teach you to trust the One who waters the earth from heaven.