Lineage and Priesthood

In the Book of Abraham as in many ancient versions of the Abraham story, the hero in his youth challenges a king's assertion of divine authority (Abr. 1:5-6), claiming to have the true authority himself (1:2-3). The king takes up the challenge and tries to make a ritual offering of Abraham as the well-known substitute King or tanist. (Abr. 1:8-14 and Fac. 1.) Abraham's miraculous delivery converts the King, who petitions Abraham for his priesthood and offers his own honors in exchange—such is the burden of many legends and of Facsimile No. 3; he also covets Abraham's wife in hopes of establishing a priestly line in the true succession. (233: Apr. 1970, 79ff.)

Why was Pharaoh, "a righteous man, ... blessed ... with the blessings of wisdom" (Abr. 1:26), denied that priesthood which he "would fain claim from Noah, through Ham" (1:27)? Certainly not because of Ham, "a just man [who] walked with God" (Moses 8:27), but rather because he claimed it through the wrong line, "that lineage by which he could not have the right of Priesthood" (Abr. 1:27). What was wrong with it? Simply this: it was not the patriarchal but the matriarchal line he was following. Even while "seeking earnestly to imitate that order established by the fathers in the first generations (what the Egyptians called the pa'at), in the days of the first patriarchal reign" (1:26), he nonetheless traced his descent and his throne to "a woman, who was the daughter of Ham, the daughter of Egyptus" (1:23); this woman "discovered the land" and "settled her sons in it" (1:24). Her eldest son became the first Pharaoh, ruling "after the manner" of the patriarchal order (1:25), which the King sought earnestly to "imitate." Thus the government of Egypt was carried on under the fiction of being patriarchal while the actual line was matriarchal, the Queen being "the Wife of the God and bearer of the royal lineage." (421:47.) But however noble it may be, a matriarchal line cannot claim patriarchal authority, even though all the parties concerned are sympathetically portrayed. In all of which there is no mention of race, though enemies of the Church have declared with shock and outrage that these passages are proof of Mormon discrimination against blacks.
(Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1981], 133 - 134.)