Feast and famine

The story of the Patriarchs and the story of the Children of Israel in Egypt is the story of their responses to the natural cycle of feast and famine, and how, as social systems, they responded to or anticipated those cycles. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob deal with famine by leaving their own territories and seeking sustenance under foreign rule. Abraham and Isaac display the nakedness of their women-folk to their respective foreign rulers (Abraham: Egyptian and Philistine; Isaac: Philistine); Jacob attempts to spy the nakedness of his (Egyptian) foreign ruler. 

Joseph becomes part of the foreign leadership. He institutes a centralized administration to cope with the cycle of feast and famine. He concentrates nearly all social power in the hands of the pharaoh, leaving only the priests as an independent locus of decision-making in the country. 

When the Israelites are subsequently enslaved by the Egyptians they are made to build the storehouse cities of Pitom and Ramses. They become an ironic instrument of that (Joseph-designed) centralized distribution of power. 

The Ten Plagues, it might be said, were inflicted on Egypt to persuade the people of Egypt they could no longer depend on the central power of the pharaoh to fend for them in time of need.