Joseph Rules in Egypt

Drama is one of the finest ways for children to experience Bible stories. Many passages in the history books of the Bible lend themselves to drama. Here we did Joseph supervising the collection of grain during the 7 good years of crops in Egypt.

You will probably have most of the props on hand for this story. You need:

• A throne: cover any chair that has arms with gold colored cloth
• 2 robes: raid your Christmas program costumes (I used the wise men’s robes)
• A kid’s ring with fake jewel:  you might have one in your prize box or try the Dollar Tree or look online.
• A gold chain: I had one, but Dollar Tree usually has strands of plastic beads for sale. You could even spray paint them if they didn’t have gold in stock.
• Pharaoh’s headpiece: I printed mine up from online here.
• 2 large, empty containers: cardboard boxes, totes, garbage cans…
• Lots and lots of bags of wheat: stuff plastic garbage bags or paper grocery bags and label them wheat (this was by far the most time-consuming part of lesson preparation. I think you could almost leave the paper bags empty and just staple them shut. I put different things in them to stuff them.  Crumpled paper, cardboard blocks, plastic bags…)

I told the story first using visuals from "Joseph: Pharaoh’s Dreams" and "Joseph Rules in Egypt" from Free Bible Images.  (There are two sites for these types of pictures: Free Bible Images and Sweet Publishing on Distant Shores.)

Here is the script I wrote. It explains how the kids collected the bags of wheat and brought them to the storage bins each “year.” The beauty of this drama is that you can do it with as few as three kids or as many as 20 or 30. If you had a larger amount, you would want to make up a lot more bags of wheat than I did.

As we re-enacted the story, I had a helper continue to refill the room we had the bags of wheat in. I made sure the bags were in groups of five, since Joseph told them to take 1/5^th of the harvest each year. This made it easy for the kids to get – although during the last couple of years I think our numbers got crazy. No matter, Joseph had stopped keeping count by then anyway.

 

Pharaoh and Joseph after Pharaoh robed and decorated him.

Storing up the gathered wheat, year four.