GOSHEN: A region in Egypt generally called
the land of Goshen, which, according to J, was
given by a king of Egypt at the request of Joseph
to his father Jacob and his family as a
dwellingplace, and held by his descendants till the Exodus
(Gen. xlv. 10;
Ex- ix. 26). The priestly writer locates the Children of Israel in the "Land of Rameses"
(Gen. xlvii. 11),
and the Elohist places them
"among" the Egyptians. The location of Goshen
is not definitely given in J, but it appears that the
region was in the eastern part of Egypt and was,
in contradistinction to the land they had left, a
fruitful region. By their occupation as shepherds
the Hebrews were debarred from living directly
among the Egyptians
(Gen. xlvi. 34),
and the stretch of country eastward from Bubastis known
as the Arabian or Heroopolitan region is almost
certainly the region which J had in mind, furnishing as it did all the requisite conditions. The
translators of the Septuagint, possessing a more
exact knowledge of the Nile delta than J had, have
fixed more definitely the location. They identify
Goshen with "Gesem of Arabia," and place the
Hebrews there, and fix also the place where Joseph
met his father, viz., at the city of Heroopolia in the
land of Ramesea
(Gen. xlvi. 28-29).
This city was the capital of a district of lower Egypt which embraced
the region of the modern Wadi Tumilat. By the
excavations of E. Naville the site of Heroopolis is
fixed at the modern Tell el-Mashkutah in the Wadi
Tumilat, not far from the Isthmus of Suez, on the
site of an older city the religious name of which was
Pitum, the Pithom (Coptic Petho»a) of
Ex. i. 11,
on
an arm or canal from the Nile to the Red Sea.
This is confirmed by the Coptic version of
Gen. xlvi. 28.
The Land of Rameses, in which Hero
opolia lay, is shown also to be the same as a dis
trict Tkw, identical with the Succoth of
Ex. xii. 37
or a district of it. To the Greeks the Arabia in
which Gesem was located was the entire region
between the valley of the Nile and the desert, under
the protection of the god Silt, the chief
city of which is called in the cuneiform Piaaptu. This dis
trict has been identified with the Arabian nome
whose capital was Phakouesa, and again with Ge
sem, while the god-name Sgt is preserved in the mod
ern Saft al-Henneh. Of all this J knew nothing:
it is the result of the desire of the translators of
the Septuagint to identify more closely the Goshen
of Genesis and Exodus. The attempt
of Ptolemy to connect Phakouselt, the chief city of "Arabia"
and the later Fakus, with Gesem, is shown by
Naville's researches to be impossible; the only rec
onciliation is that in the course of time the name
was changed. Phakouasa was doubtless a later
capital
northeast of Saft al-Henneh. Undoubtedly
under the influence of the Septuagint, Arabic and
Christian tradition located Goshen in this region.
On the other hand, the Arabic author Makrizi 1o
caked Goshen north of Cairo, at the junction of the
caravan routes from the East to Egypt. Saadia
and Abu Said locate Goshen at Sadir, placed by De
Sacy between Belbeis and Salihieh, to the east of
the delta, while Quatremert; locates this at the en
trance of the Wadi Tumilat. But these later de
terminations present so little of worth that not
much more can be said than that Goshen was east
of the delta and westward from the Isthmus of
Suez.
(G. Steindorff.)
Bibliography:
The two important works are: E. Neville,
Goshen and the Shrine of Saft ebHenneh,
and The Store City of Pithom and the Route of
the Exodus,
the 5th and lot memoirs of the Egypt
Exploration Fund, London, 1887, 1885. Consult further: A. Dillmsnn, in SBA,
1885, pp. 889 sqq.; idem, Genesis, vol. ii.,
Edinburgh, 1897; idem, Exodus urd Leviticus, ed. V. Ryeeel, Lcipaio,
1897. Also C. R. Gillett, in S. M. Jackson,
Concise Dictionary, Appendix, New York, 1898, and see Earn.
