The Sale of Joseph: Was He Really a Bargain?

The tribes sold Joseph to the Egyptians for twenty pieces of silver.

The whole saga of the Israelites in Egypt kicked off with the greed of a few Egyptians. They bought a slave for twenty pieces of silver, and in hindsight, that slave turned out to be Joseph, who eventually became the Pharaoh's second-in-command. The rest is history.

This begs the question: did they snag Joseph at a bargain price?

After all, the Torah in the Mishpatim portion establishes that if a bull gores someone's slave, the compensation is thirty pieces of silver.

We're not talking thirty shekels here, but quite a bit of money. So, what's the real going rate?

Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen delved into this topic and found intriguing insights: slave prices varied over different eras.

In the time of the Patriarchs, when Joseph was sold, Hammurabi's laws from Babylon and legal documents from the Babylonian city of Mari note that the price of a slave was "twenty pieces of silver," so it seems the merchant caravan that took Joseph got a fair deal.

Three hundred years later, the market shifted. In the age of the Patriarchs, many nomadic tribes roamed, supplying more slaves—whether through rivalries like Joseph's brothers selling him, or encounters with foreign tribes. By the Iron Age, with people settling into permanent communities, slaves became harder to come by, raising the price to thirty pieces of silver—a significant increase in a world without inflation or printed money.

From that point on, the slave's price only climbed. It seems that society progressed with fewer individuals selling themselves or their children cheaply. By the Persian period, when the Second Temple was built, a slave's price soared to one hundred and twenty silver shekels. It was only during the Roman era, when they practiced selling entire towns' inhabitants into slavery, that prices dipped again.

Professor Kitchen thus demonstrates the authenticity and the historical precedence of the Torah's account of slave pricing.