Jamin Bradley

As with all Marvel characters, there are many variations as to how Venom’s character acts. In some universes, he’s just a straight-up bad guy, but in other universes, he helps Eddie Brock beat the bad guys. But even when fighting for the right team, he fights immorally, making him an antihero. He gets the results we hoped for, but not in the way we hoped he would.

Joseph is a bit of an antihero in the Bible. While God raised him up to save the Egyptians from an intense famine—which he effectively did—one can’t help but wonder if he could have gone about it differently. First, he stored up all the grain in Egypt and then sold it to the hungry until they all ran out of money. Joseph then gave these dead-broke Egyptians food in exchange for their livestock, which effectively robbed them of their ways of life. They returned to Joseph again with nothing to give but their bodies and land, and so Joseph accepted their bodies and land as payment, turning all Egyptians into slaves of the state. Joseph gave them seeds to grow on their properties, forcing them to give 20% of their crops back to Egypt at every harvest time.

Joseph the Hebrew managed to turn the Egyptians into slaves, transforming pandemic into power. Through his decisions, Pharoah gained a monopoly on all things: wealth, livestock, land, and people. Oddly enough, the Egyptians thanked their antihero leader for this—they were just happy to be alive! But how might Egypt have felt when the famine finally ended, and life started to return to normal? What would happen when they woke up from the nightmare of famine and discovered they were in a new nightmare?

There are some odd interactions between the Hebrews and the Egyptians throughout Genesis. Abraham cheated a pharaoh and got rich off of the interaction. Abraham and Sarah turned an Egyptian into a sex slave for procreational purposes. And now Joseph had taken literally every last thing from the Egyptians and turned them all into slaves. With this in mind, it’s perhaps less shocking that the book of Exodus starts with a great reversal in which the Hebrews are now slaves in Egypt.

Domination is never an answer—it’s the cycle that keeps a dark spiritual machine in operation. Every once in a while, the oppressed rise up to dominate their oppressors, but they don’t change the machine, which causes the once-oppressed to become the new oppressors that need to be overthrown. And because they rise up to power with great pain, the new oppressors are often even more oppressive than the original. It’s no wonder Jesus preached an entirely different way of living. If we don’t change, the machine will never stop turning.