View this page in partnership with Bin-Yamin (Benjamin)
Genesis 35:18 has this as the name given to her son by Rachel, and which the text tells us she intended to mean "son of my sorrow". However, this is probably an error by the Redactor, misreading On (און) as Avon (און).
The city of On, known to the Greeks as Heliopolis, was the central shrine and political capital of Egypt at the time of Yoseph, whence Yoseph took his wife, his title and everything else, including, possibly, the proper form of his name, Yah-Suph, the "god of the Reed Sea", which was the Egyptian name for the Nile Delta, the area named in the Genesis tale as Goshen. His wife Asnat was the daughter of Potiphera, the High Priest of Heliopolis, who appeared earlier as Potiphar, for whom Yoseph served as wine-bearer before the alleged rape of Potiphar's wife which caused him to be imprisoned. I mention this only because the role of cup-bearer becomes central to his release from prison, and to the story of Bin-Yamin later on. See my explanation of all this on the Bin-Yamin page.
One particularly interesting detail of the siting of this story in On-Heliopolis is the connection with the Hyksos, a sub-tribe of the Beney Chet (Hittite) who conquered Egypt at the same time as the Yoseph tale. They moved the Egyptian capital a long way north, building it at Avaris, which is in the province of Goshen, precisely where Ya'akov and the Beney Yisra-El settled after Yoseph brought them down to be with him in Mitsrayim (Egypt). On had been the religious centre before then, adjacent as it was to Memphis, the former political capital. There is a very strong case to be made for the arrival of Ya'akov and the establishment of Yoseph as Vizier, as being the legendary depiction of the arrival of the Hyksos. The Hittites were, after all, of Aramaean stock, as was Ya'akov. Statuary found amongst the Egyptian ruins clearly depicts men - merchants as well as priests - wearing coats of multiple colouring, a reflection of the dyes made from the murex which were the principal trading and power source of the Phoenician Hyksos; and all these have been dated precisely to the era of the Hyksos.
There is also a strong case to be made that Yoseph and Bin-Yamin are in fact the same person, and that one, or even both, were in fact Egyptians themselves, born at On-Heliopolis, and only added to the Yisra-Eli genealogical table when later history made it appropriate; the fact that Yoseph gets no tribe, and that Bin-Yamin is later absorbed into Yehudah, as well as their mother Rachel's burial at Beit Lechem rather than in the tribe's royal cemetery in the Cave of Machpelah, all add weight to this hypothesis. Ben Oni would have served for a description of Yoseph, as would Bin-Yamin; the former simply meaning "resident" - or "native" - of the city of On; the latter being a description of his role as Pharaoh's "right-hand man". Yoseph's formal Egyptian name, or title, was Tsaphnat-Paneyach.
Copyright © 2019 David Prashker
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