Stranger in the Valley of the Kings: The Identification of Yuya as the Patriarch Joseph, Ahmed Osman (San Francisco:

Harper & Row, 1988); Reviewed by Donald B. Redford This ingenious work is one of those books whose author inexplicably fails to do his homework in one part, and lets his critical judgment lapse in the other. Sadly, Mr. Osman has no new evidence to offer, nor any new reconstruction of history other than that which, at one time or another, has suggested itself to many an undergraduate, only to be dismissed upon sober reflection. I find myself wondering, then, why Mr. Osman felt obliged to write the book at all. But he did write it, and my remarks are directed toward those who might be misled into taking it seriously. The author seems to accept (p. 117) the notion that the Exodus must have taken place early in the XIXth Dynasty (13071196 B.C.). Accepting a four-generation span for the sojourn in the desert on the basis of Genesis 15:16 (And they shall return here in the fourth generation), he concludes that Joseph must have come to Egypt under Thutmose IV (last quarter of the 15th century B.C.), and that the family of Jacob lived during the following reign (Amenophis III [called Amenhotep III in the book]). Then, working backward chronologically, our author designates Thutmose III (c. first half of the 15th century B.C.) as the pharaoh of Abrahams descent. He claims that Thutmose III sired Isaac by Sara (save the mark). Joseph himself is found to be none other than Yuya, the father-in-law of Amenophis III and the source of the monotheism that came to the fore during the reign of Yuyas grandson Akhenaten. To bolster this pastiche of remarkable brainwaves, our author has recourse, from time to time, to passages not only from the Bible, but also from the Talmud and the Koran. His solemn trotting out of what can only be called a Childs Guide to the Documentary Hypothesis does not save his theory from complete disaster. Mr. Osman certainly fails to make the case that Yuya and Joseph are identical. The author treats the evidence as cavalierly as he pleases. He presents himself as a sober historian, yet when it suits him, the Biblical evidence is accepted at face value and literally. See, for example, Osmans treatment of the chronological implications of Moses age on the supposed sequence of pharaohs (pp. 118119), and his handling of the age of Joseph (p. 120). When the Biblical evidence does not suit Osman, it is discarded (pp. 114ff. on the length of the wilderness wandering of the Israelites) or ignored completely (e.g., the age of Jacob [Genesis 47:28], which by Osmans reconstruction would put his birth well before that of his father, Isaac!). The narratives need not be binding, Osman advises, since they were handed down over several centuries by word of mouth (p. 31), yet we are invited to marvel at the

precision in the numbers of the genealogy of Genesis 46 (p. 131). Again, all the author thinks he has to do is to state that there is a scholarly consensus, and this automatically becomes (for him) compelling evidence (pp. 7173, 132). Needless to say, it is not generally thought, as Osman claims, that monotheism had its origins in Yuya (p. 139). The work betrays a profound linguistic ignorancefor example, the ludicrous distinction implied between Amurrites and Semitic elements (p. 73); or the authors inability to translate Hebrew (p. 73); or his outlandish derivation of the Turkish word wazir, vizier, from Egyptian wsr, powerful (p. 126). Anyone who would derive the Philistine seren, ruler, the West Semitic sar, magistrate, and the Latin personal name Caesar from the same root and the same source (p. 36, note 2) simply has a world of linguistic training ahead of him. The work abounds in outright errors of fact. The -ham in the name Abraham has nothing to do with Egyptian h?m, majesty (p. 35); there is no cat-goddess Bes (p. 65; he has confused Bes with Bast); Dharukha is not Sile (p. 111); the Yo- and Ya- in the names Joseph and Jacob are imperfect (or precative) preformatives of Amorite, and have nothing to do with YHWH (pp. 122123); Yuya was priest of the ithyphallic Min, not the pious monotheist Osman conjures up (p. 123); the Hyksos were not shepherds as the author several times claims, completely misled by the erroneous folk-etymology in Josephus. This list could easily be doubled. Osmans bibliography is only 50 items in length, and over half consists of works published prior to 1945! The gaps are enormous. He talks about Yuyas physical remains, yet never cites the epoch-making x-raying of the Cairo mummies; he ponders the location of Pi-Raamses and Goshen (p. 107), and completely ignores the revolution in our knowledge of the eastern Delta brought about by the work of Alan Gardiner, Manfred Bietak, John Holladay and others within the last two decades. The enormous amount of research during the same period by Biblical scholars on the Exodus and the sources relating thereto are passed over in silence. Recent studies for our author (p. 95) means works written 35 years ago! If this work had been submitted as a term paper by one of my undergraduates, I would have felt constrained to fail him or her. Mr. Osman is not an undergraduate, but I dont see why he should be let off the hook: Stranger in the Valley of the Kings deserves nothing but an F, and its author a rap on the knuckles for wasting our time.