In 2165 B.C. (circa), God chose Abram, and renamed him Abraham. Abraham had Isaac; Isaac had Jacob; Jacob had twelve sons. They went into Egypt because of hunger and draught in Canaan where they lived. Joseph (Jacob's last but one son) rose to the position of Prime Minister in Egypt. One day, a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph arose, and the tide turned against the Hebrews. They were already outnumbering the Egyptians, and Egypt decided that something had to be done to stem that. Egypt enslaved them and put them to work with hard labor. Many of them wound up in the Americas as slaves, then freed, still undergoing untold discrimination.