Researchers: We know secret of Joseph’s Biblical Pest control

The remains of a burnt beetle found in a grain of wheat about 3,500 years old provided a group of researchers from Bar-Ilan University with a key to a question the Bible left without a definite answer: How did Joseph the Dreamer, who became the viceroy to the king of Egypt, succeed in preserving the grain during the seven lean years and prevent Egypt’s population from starving?

According to the description in the book of Genesis, during the seven years of plenty in Egypt, Joseph had all the wheat collected in silos. “And he gathered up all the food of the seven years which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities; the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. And Joseph laid up grain as the sand of the sea, very much, until they left off numbering; for it was without number” (Genesis 41, 48-49).

Joseph, thanks to his talent as an interpreter of dreams and his cleverness, quickly attained the rank of viceroy to the king and was appointed to run the kingdom’s food storehouses. His success at the job was based not only on his talent for planning and his ability to see ahead, but also from the manner in which the pests spread. The lesser grain borer was just starting its career in Egypt when Joseph arrived there. Because of its phenomenal reproductive capacity, storing one batch of grain containing a small population of the grain borer was enough to bring about the destruction of the entire granary and to threaten an entire city with starvation.

Kislev, Simhoni and Melamed believe that Joseph was aware of this and therefore - according to the biblical description - he isolated the grain of each city in its own jurisdiction and prevented the transfer of batches of grain from one community to another. In their opinion,
that is the meaning of the verse: “and [he] laid up the food in the cities; the food of the field, which was round about every city.”

In spite of the lack of chemical means of pest control, they add, it is also possible that those living in ancient Egypt were familiar with a simpler means of pest control. They learned this from an explanation of the story by Rashi, an 11th century biblical commentator. “And people put amongst the grain some of the earth of the place, and this prevents it from decaying,” wrote Rashi.

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