Why Joseph isn’t My Hero

Remember the Bible story about Joseph? This wizard of economic interpretation told the king of Egypt that there would be seven good years and seven lean years. Pharaoh put him in charge of taxing the people during the good years. Back then nobody had coins, so the peasants paid in grain. Joseph made sure the grain was stored in vast silos.

Then the lean years came. First Joseph sold the grain back to the peasants for their gold and silver. During the next year he gave them bread in exchange for their horses, cattle, and all their flocks. In the year after that, the destitute people came to Joseph and said, “There is nothing left but our bodies and our lands. Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants to Pharaoh.”

In that way all of Egypt became Pharaoh’s, except for the lands that belonged to the priests. All the Egyptians became Pharaoh’s bondsmen—as the Bible says, “until this day.” And the people thanked Joseph for saving their lives.

The important thing to remember is that the grain in those storehouses was produced by those peasants. Pharaoh didn’t produce it and neither did Joseph.

So why is this legend relevant today? Whose tax money bailed out Wall Street? Why are Americans losing our jobs, our health insurance, our pensions, our homes and any equity we had in those homes—what financial wizards drove the economy into the leanest years we’ve seen since the Great Depression? The more we struggle in this quicksand, the deeper we sink. Get behind on one credit card, and the rates on all the rest go up to heights that would make a loan shark blush. Borrow money to go back to school, but don’t expect to find a job that would enable you to pay it back. You will be enslaved by the banking industry forever.

Today’s Josephs are enthroned on the banks of the Hudson River and the Potomac.

How Sus Domestica Came to Wall Street

Archeological research shows that domesticated pigs first appeared in the Tigris basin at least 9,000 and possibly 15,000 years ago. During the dry season, when other types of food were scarce, our Middle Eastern ancestors slaughtered great numbers of pigs. At some point they began using pigs for healing rituals, or to placate the Mesopotamian demon Lamashtu, or as a sacrifice to the Egyptian god Horus.

Later on the Hebrews stopped eating pork, but nobody really knows why. Verses in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah forbade it. The poor animal is considered so “unclean” that a Jew making a religious pilgrimage shouldn’t touch it, lest it contaminate him. It is permitted, however, to use a porcine heart valve to replace a defective human one. Pigskin shoes are also okay—apparently the tanning process removes the impurities. Mohammad, who initially considered himself the last Jewish prophet, adopted this prohibition, and it is repeated four times in the Koran.

I don’t know why Christians started to eat pork again. I suspect that the various pagan peoples they wanted to convert were reluctant to change their diet. After all, most of us do resist giving up favorite foods, even when the doctor warns us that we are (as the saying goes) digging our graves with our spoons. Maybe the early church thought it would be easier to save souls if they didn’t try to police people’s stomachs as well.

Although the Spaniards first introduced pigs to the Americas, the later-arriving Dutch and English colonists no doubt brought their own herds. Free-roaming pigs wandered New York, rampaging through grain fields, until the human residents built a wall along the northern edge of lower Manhattan to keep them out. The street that followed this wall was named…Wall Street.

Well into the 19^th Century, our porcine companions continued to roam the rest of the island. Pedestrians might encounter sows and boars devouring garbage up and down the streets and alleyways. They didn’t join a union or demand a pension plan; the only drawback was that they left a certain amount of their own excrement behind. Eventually, however, this four-legged sanitation department was banished from the city.

But like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, they stood up and achieved bipedalism. And there have been pigs on Wall Street ever since.