By the time that Joseph was sold into Egypt there was little outward difference between the court at Zoan and the court of the native princes at Thebes. The very names and titles borne by the Hyksos officials had become Egyptian; and though they still regarded the god Set as the chief object of their worship, they had begun to rebuild the Egyptian temples, and pay honour to the Egyptian deities. Potiphar, to whom Joseph was sold, bore a purely Egyptian name, meaning “the gift of the risen one,” while the name of Potipherah, the high priest of On, whose daughter, Asenath, was married by Joseph, is equally Egyptian, and signifies “the gift of the Sun-God.” The Sun-God was the special deity of On; to him the great temple of the city was dedicated, and the name by which the place was known to the Greeks was Heliopolis, “the city of the sun.” It was the city whose name is played upon in Isaiah xix. 18, where the prophet declares that in the day when Egypt shall be converted to the Lord, “the City of the Sun” (_’ir ha-kheres_) shall become “the city of the destruction” of idols (_’ir ha-heres_). Jeremiah, too, plays similarly upon the name, when he says that Nebuchadnezzar, “shall break also the images of Beth-Shemesh (the house of the Sun-God) that is in the land of Egypt” (Jer. xliii. 13); while Ezekiel changes the Egyptian word On into the Hebrew _aven_, “nothingness,” and prophesies that “the young men of Aven shall fall by the sword” (Ezek. xxx. 17). The ruins of On are within an afternoon’s drive of Cairo: but nothing remains of the city except mounds of earth, and a solitary obelisk that once stood in front of the great temple of the sun, and had been reared by Usertasen I, of the twelfth dynasty, a thousand years before the daughter of its priest became the wife of Joseph. The name of this daughter, Asenath, is the Egyptian ’Snat. We are told that when the Pharaoh had made Joseph “ruler over all the land of Egypt” he gave him a new name, Zaphnath-paaneah (Gen. xli. 45). According to Dr. Brugsch, this name is the Egyptian _Za pa-u nt pa-aa-ankh_, “governor of the district of the place of life,” that is, of the district in which the Israelites afterwards built the towns of Raamses and Pithom, and in which the land of Goshen seems to have been situated. In after times Egyptian legend confounded Joseph with Moses, and changing the divine name which formed the first element in his into that of the Egyptian god Osiris, called him Osar-siph. The Jewish historian, Josephus, has preserved for us the story which made Osar-siph the leader of the Israelites in their flight from Egypt.