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).
The stores of wheat and barley served the inhabitants of Egypt during the period of drought and hunger that followed. But how did
