What Does Genesis 47:21 Mean?

As for the people, he made servants of them from one end of Egypt to the other. The depopulation resettlement: Joseph moved the population from their ancestral lands to other cities: a massive relocation of Egyptian smallholders. The Septuagint reads this as reducing them to servitude ("he made them slaves"); the Hebrew text describes a geographic relocation ("he made them to pass from city to city"). Either way, the social transformation of Egypt's famine years is significant: people who had been independent landowners on their ancestral holdings are now settled in different places, working land that belongs to Pharaoh.

The "from one end of Egypt to the other" is the comprehensive scope of the relocation: not regional but national. The entire agricultural population of Egypt has been affected by the famine-exchange policies. The practical reason for the relocation may be administrative efficiency (concentrating populations near grain distribution points) or resettlement on different land to rationalize the now-royal land use. Whatever the administrative logic, the result is a population that no longer has ancestral connection to specific parcels of land: they live where the administration places them, on land owned by Pharaoh.

The social transformation that Genesis 47 describes: from independent freeholders to dependent tenant farmers: is one of the most consequential administrative changes in the text. It explains why later in the text (verse 22) the priests are specifically exempted: they retained their land because they had Pharaoh's provision from temple endowments, so they did not need to sell their land for grain. The exemption of priestly land demonstrates that the general policy affected everyone except those with alternate income streams that survived the famine independently.