Tafsiran Kejadian 46:34: Rashi, Chizkuni, Da'at Zekenim & Ibn Ezra

בעבור תשבו בארץ גשן IN ORDER THAT YE MAY ABIDE IN THE LAND OF GOSHEN — and this is the land that you require, for it is a land of pasture. If you tell him that you are inexperienced in other work he will send you far away from him and settle you there.

ואמרתם אנשי מקנה, “you’ll say: ‘we are cattle growers by vocation.’” Joseph was worried that if his brothers would occupy senior positions in Pharaoh’s Palace, this would result in jealousies and they would use this to reduce his status. He remembered that the “uniform” indicating rank, i.e. the striped coat had had worn, had led to all these jealousies once before.

כי תועבת מצרים כל רעה צאן, “for the Egyptians despised people whose vocation was the rising and tending of sheep. The reason they did so was because they hated sheep meat, i.e. mutton, just as they hated goats’ meat. This was something not unique to the Egyptians. This is also why they could not sit at the same table as the Hebrews when the latter were being served lamb. They harboured a deep aversion for anyone stemming from the Euphrates-Tigris region. They considered the Sumerians as a lower class of human beings. (Exodus 8,9) The Hebrews claimed that they would insult the Egyptians if they slaughtered their animals as service to their G–d inside the boundaries of the land of Egypt. They would risk being stoned by them. It is interesting that they did not refer to being just killed, but they spelled out by which method they would be killed, a method which in Jewish law is the most severe kind of death penalty. Our author states that he has also heard a different interpretation of our verse. The Egyptians considered anyone slaughtering sheep or goats and eating their meat as guilty of the kind of perversion that would stamp such a person as a subhuman species. We find the word רועה, which we normally translate as “tending,” i.e. shepherding, also used by the Targum for “providing food” (transitive) on Genesis 48,15 by Yaakov in his blessings for his children when on his deathbed.

כי תועבת מצרים כל רעה צאן FOR EVERY SHEPHERD IS AN ABOMINATION TO THE EGYPTIANS — because they (sheep) are regarded by them as deities.