“... A huge price included a token fee of twenty drachmas each to be paid to the dispossessed owners out of the royal treasury. According to William Linn Westerman, in the time of Philadelphus, the lowest price paid for a slave was fifty drachmas. Even that compensation looks totally unrealistic for Ernest Abel: “The Ptolemies were not the kind of rulers who readily paid out money from their own treasuries for the advancement of their subjects’ welfare, and the fantastic idea only illustrates a fanciful imagination.” It seems to me that the source of this imagination may be the story of Joseph. That patriarch was sold to the Ishmeelites for twenty pieces of silver (according to the Septuagint, for twenty pieces of gold) “and they brought Joseph into Egypt” (Gen. 37:28). The Jews are liberated in Egypt for the money paid for their forefather to sell him to Egypt. ...”