One More Powerful King

There remains this tension between the social contract of Egypt and the covenant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Pharaoh is a powerful king. Perhaps at this point, the most powerful in all the world. The social contract is fickle. The power and the maturity of a social contract waxes and wanes, and ends. Social contracts always break eventually. They always end.

Joseph recognizes this vulnerability and that the children of Israel can never integrate.

So the lever of power in this world is social contract. This power recognizes the value of the wisdom of covenant without embracing the covenant itself. Co-exist. Like modern Amish in America, there is a faint appreciation for quaint anachronism. But a community of covenant always retains a counter-cultural determination to centralize God. And every social contract will eventually find this inconvenient.