Historicity
Modern day scholars believe the historicity of the events in the Joseph narrative cannot be demonstrated.[10][11] Hermann Gunkel, Hugo Gressmann and Gerhard von Rad identified the story of Joseph as a literary composition,[12] in the genre of romance,[13][14] or the novella.[15][16][17] As a novella, it is read as reworking legends and myths, in particular the motifs of his reburial in Canaan, associated with the Egyptian god Osiris.[18] Others compare the burial of his bones at Shechem, with the disposal of Dionysus’s bones at Delphi.[19][20][21] For Schenke, the tradition of Joseph's burial at Shechem is understood as a secondary, Israelitic historical interpretation woven around a more ancient Canaanite shrine in that area.[22] The reworked legends and folklore were probably inserted into the developing textual tradition of the Bible between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. Most scholars[23] place its composition in a genre that flourished in the Persian period of the Exile.[24][25][26][27][28]
Some scholars, such as: Israel Finkelstein and Israel Knohl, claim Joseph to be a summarizing character of the Hyksos period, created as a referent of the glorious past of Hyksos which was still preserved by their descendents the time of the Israelites' emergance during the Iron Age in Canaan. From these scholars' point of view the Hyksos' descendents were part of the Proto-Israelite groups which join to form the Biblical Israelite nation.
Narrative
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