ABSTRACT
The story of Joseph, favored son of the patriarch Jacob, derives from the Old Testament book of Genesis, chapters 37-50. It constitutes a free standing diaspora novella which seemed to have been inserted by the post-exilic Jewish redactors of the Hebrew Bible as a link or bridge between the patriarchal narratives of Genesis and the book of Exodus. Joseph is the beloved son of Jacob, the well-to-do grandson of the arch-patriarch, Abraham. Joseph's mother is Jacob's favored wife, Rachel, who dies giving birth to Joseph's younger sibling, Benjamin. The rise of Afrikaner nationalism in the early part of the twentieth century relied upon the successful retrospective fashioning of a unifying history of origins and a common foe, the British Empire/English. The biblical story of Joseph is a story of a family and the anticipation of an unfolding national history. This appealed to the sensibilities of Afrikaner civil religion.
