Egypt faced a famine. It was given a Great Reset and sold into serfdom.

How a little-discussed quote from Genesis 47 became one of the most memorable lines in all of cinema in The Shawshank Redemption.

“I believe in two things: discipline and the Bible,” said Warden Norton of The Shawshank Redemption, to a group of new inmates. “Here you'll receive both. Put your trust in the Lord; your ass belongs to me.”

Stop me if you’ve heard it before, but that line was cribbed from the Bible.

The people who spoke it were the Egyptians, in a time of famine. And they were talking about themselves.

Genesis 47 depicts one of the great land thefts in history.

Egypt was in the midst of a famine that was, well, biblical.

Joseph, Pharaoh’s No. 2, does not let the crisis go to waste.

In 47:14, Joseph the tax man drains Egypt and Canaan dry. By verse 16, they’re selling grain for livestock.

Only a year later do the Egyptians realize they have nothing left to sell. By then it’s too late.

“We cannot hide from the lord that since our money is gone and our livestock belongs to your there is nothing left for our lord except our bodies and our land,” the Egyptians say in 47:18.

You feel physical pain at reading it, like if there was a transcript of the land deal for Manhattan.

Joseph’s father, Jacob, snookered big brother Esau’s birthright in Genesis 25 with a bowl of lentil soup. Joseph, in Genesis 47, takes the swindle several steps further. His target is not a man, but the wealth of a nation.

The Egyptians continue: “Buy us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will be in bondage to Pharaoh. Give us seed so that we may live and not die.”

The people of Egypt faced a famine. Their government raised taxes, exchanged grains for livestock, and then — only after all the tax money was collected and the livestock was sold — offered them seed.

In exchange for their very land and their very bodies. Oh, and one-fifth of what the seed produced, in perpetuity.

Call it a Great Reset. One national emergency turns a nation of homeowners and farmers into serfs waiting for grain from a government office. If that was the answer, what was the question?

Only priests were immune from the land grab, and ironically it was Pharaoh’s own fault. Because he gave them grain already, they didn’t need it. So they didn’t need to sell their land.

That it was Pharaoh who put the food on their table, in good times and famine, indebted the priests in its own way.

(47:21 says Joseph “reduced the people to servitude.” The New International Version offers “moved the people into the cities” as an alternate translation. Take from that what you will.)

If you’ve ever questioned whether history is written by winners, read Genesis 47:25.

“You have saved our lives,” the Egyptians said.

Government will break your legs, sell you crutches, and then put you in a commercial thanking Pharaoh for the crutches.

47:25 continues: “May we find favor in the eyes of our lord; we will be in bondage to Pharaoh.”

Warden Norton would’ve loved that. The fresh fish being so resigned to their fate. Putting it into words, even.

Shawshank Correctional Facility was not that place. Not only did the new inmates not know the Bible well enough to quote it, they didn’t even get the reference.