Joseph, and the Descent into Egypt

Chapter 37 opens on a household that was broken three chapters ago. 'Now Israel loved Joseph more than his other sons, because Joseph had been born to him in his old age; so he made him a robe of many colors.' The BSB footnote is candid about that phrase: 'Possibly a robe with long sleeves'. The meaning of the Hebrew ketonet passim is uncertain; the Septuagint and Vulgate support something like many colours, which is where the traditional rendering comes from, and the Syriac supports a robe with long sleeves. Nobody knows what it looked like. What the narrative needs from it is clear enough: it is a garment that marks the wearer out and that no one could work in. And a preference of this kind is close to what the law will later fence in: Deuteronomy 21:15-17 forbids a man with two wives, one loved and one not, to treat the son of the loved wife as the firstborn over the actual firstborn. Be exact about what that regulates, which is the assignment of the inheritance and not a father's affections, and a decorated coat is not an inheritance assignment. Jacob was the unfavoured son of his father in a divided house, married into another, and then built a third.

Joseph at seventeen is not presented as charming. He reports a dream in which his brothers' sheaves bow to his, and when that lands badly he reports a second in which the sun, moon and eleven stars bow to him as well. The narrator says his brothers hated him and that his father rebuked him. Genesis does not excuse him, and a reading that makes him a blameless victim from verse one has stopped reading.

The plot against him has two attempted mitigations, and both are morally filthy. Reuben talks them out of killing him and suggests the pit, intending to come back for him. Judah, seeing a caravan, says: 'Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay a hand on him; for he is our brother, our own flesh.' Read that sentence twice. The appeal to kinship and the opportunity for profit arrive in the same breath, and the mercy consists of selling the boy instead of leaving him to die. Twenty shekels of silver change hands.

The traders are called Ishmaelites in 37:25 and 37:27, Midianites in 37:28 and 37:36, and Ishmaelites again in 39:1. This alternation is one of the standard examples in classical documentary analysis, which from Wellhausen onward reads two interwoven strands here, and the strength of that case is that the shift happens inside a single sentence in 37:28. The counter-case, argued by Gordon Wenham and by scholars working from the ancient Near Eastern evidence such as K. A. Kitchen, points to Judges 8:24, where the men of the Midianite kings are called Ishmaelites, so the two terms may be overlapping designations for the same caravan peoples. Both arguments rest on real evidence. Present the question to a student as open, because it is.

Then the robe comes back covered in goat's blood, with a message: 'We found this. Examine it to see whether it is your son's robe or not.' They do not lie outright. They hand their father the evidence and let him do the work, which is a more careful cruelty than lying would have been.

Watch the shape of the next two chapters, because it is the architecture of the whole story. Joseph goes down into a pit, down to Egypt, into a slave market, into Potiphar's house, and then into a prison, and only after the lowest point does anything go up. And notice the narrator's one direct theological statement in all of it, which comes four times in chapter 39, twice of Joseph by name and twice more of him by pronoun, so that it frames each half of the chapter. The LORD was with Joseph in 39:2; his master sees that the LORD is with him in 39:3; the LORD is with Joseph again in 39:21, now in the prison; and in 39:23 the keeper of the prison leaves everything in his hands because the LORD is with him. That is nearly the entire inventory of narrated divine action in fourteen chapters. God spoke to Abraham repeatedly, to Isaac, to Jacob in dreams and at a ford. He never speaks to Joseph once. Every theological sentence in these chapters is spoken by a character, usually Joseph himself, and that change of mode is deliberate. The most famous providence narrative in the Bible is told almost entirely without God on stage.

One line to keep. When Potiphar's wife propositions him, Joseph's reason for refusing is not that he would be caught, which is where his father's reasoning stopped in 27:12. It is this: 'So how could I do such a great evil and sin against God?' That is the first time anyone in the Joseph narrative names sin against God, and it is said by a slave, about an offence no human being would have discovered.

Joseph has just been carried off to Egypt, and the narrative stops dead and spends a chapter on Judah. Readers have been calling this an intrusion for a long time, and older source criticism treated it as a separate block dropped in at an awkward seam. The abruptness is real. The claim that it is therefore out of place is not, and the argument against it is one every student of the Old Testament should know.

Robert Alter made the case in The Art of Biblical Narrative, and it turns on verbal links. The brothers send Joseph's bloodied robe to their father with the words 'Examine it to see whether it is your son's robe or not' (37:32). Tamar sends Judah his own pledge with the words 'Please examine them. Whose seal and cord and staff are these?' (38:25). The same Hebrew imperative stands behind both, hakker na, please examine or please identify, though the BSB adds the 'please' only the second time. A goat is the instrument of both deceptions: the kid Judah sends as the fee, and the goat whose blood went on the robe. A garment and a goat are used by Judah to deceive his father, and a garment and a goat are used by Tamar to expose Judah. The juxtaposition is the comment, and Alter's further point is that this chapter is the first movement in the education of the man who will dominate the second half of the book.

Tell the content straight. Judah marries a Canaanite woman and has three sons. He marries the eldest, Er, to Tamar; Er dies. The duty that now falls on the family is the levirate, which Deuteronomy 25:5-10 later codifies: the dead man's brother takes the widow so that her first son carries the dead man's name, and the family line and the widow's future are both preserved. Onan takes her and deliberately refuses the duty, and dies. Judah then promises Tamar his third son, Shelah, when he is grown, and sends her back to her father's house. He does not keep the promise, because he has begun to suspect that his sons die around her. That leaves Tamar legally frozen: she belongs to Judah's family and so cannot remarry, and the husband she is owed is withheld indefinitely. She has no children, no protector and no legal route.

So she takes one. She veils herself and sits by the road to Timnah, and her father-in-law, who does not recognise her, propositions her. She asks for a pledge against payment and he gives her his seal, his cord and his staff, which together are an ancient man's signature, identification and credit. Three months later Judah is told his daughter-in-law is pregnant by immorality, and he orders her burned. She sends out the pledge.

Judah's verdict is the verse the chapter exists for: 'She is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah.' Do not soften that in either direction. This woman set out to get pregnant by her father-in-law and did, by deception, posing as a prostitute, and the text calls her the more righteous of the two. The ground of the verdict is stated plainly, and it is not her method: it is that he withheld what the family owed her, and she did not give up on the obligation he abandoned. Genesis is not recommending the technique. It is telling you which of the two was keeping faith with a dead man's name.

Then the line, which is why the Bible keeps coming back to this chapter. The twins are Perez and Zerah, and Perez is the ancestor of David; the genealogy at Ruth 4:18-22 runs through him, and the elders at the gate in Ruth 4:12 bless Boaz by naming Perez and Tamar out loud. Matthew 1:3 puts Tamar into the genealogy of Jesus, the first of the four Old Testament women he brings into it, alongside Rahab, Ruth and the wife of Uriah, whom he designates rather than names at 1:6. Be accurate about the count, since it is usually got wrong: Mary is named at 1:16, so there are five women in that genealogy, which is why the careful formulation is the four women besides Mary. If you have worked the Ruth lesson earlier in this track, this chapter is where that genealogy starts.

And now track Judah through the rest of the story, because this is the pay-off and it is invisible if you skip chapter 38. In 37:26 he proposes selling his brother. In 38:26 he says out loud, in public, that a woman he was about to execute is more righteous than he is. In 43:9 he offers himself as surety for Benjamin and tells his father to hold him personally to blame. And in 44:33 he says: 'Now please let your servant stay here as my lord's slave in place of the boy. Let him return with his brothers.' The man who sold one brother into slavery for silver volunteers to become a slave in place of another, so that his father will not lose a second son. That is the turning point of the entire Joseph narrative, and it is also why the blessing in 49:8-12 gives the scepter to Judah and not to Joseph. Skip chapter 38 and both 44:33 and 49:10 arrive from nowhere.

The rise is told quickly: the prison, the cupbearer and the baker, two years forgotten, then Pharaoh's two dreams and a man brought up out of the dungeon to interpret them. Joseph's refrain in both the prison and the palace is that interpretation is God's business and not his, which is the opposite of what a court diviner would say. Then he does something nobody asked him to do: he attaches a policy to the interpretation, proposes a national grain reserve and a commissioner to run it, and is given the job. He gets Pharaoh's ring, fine linen, a gold chain, an Egyptian name and an Egyptian wife.

The names of his sons are worth sitting with, because they are the only window the text gives onto what he actually felt in those years. Manasseh, because God made him forget his hardship and all his father's house. Ephraim, and the explanation is given verbatim: 'God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction.' He names his firstborn for forgetting his family and his second for fruitfulness in a place he is still calling affliction. That is not a man at peace, and it is a long way from the serenity he is usually preached with.

Then the testing of the brothers in chapters 42 to 44, which should be presented honestly because it is strange. Joseph recognises them immediately, speaks to them harshly through an interpreter, accuses them of espionage, holds them for three days, keeps Simeon as a hostage, has their silver planted in their sacks, demands that Benjamin be brought, plants a silver cup on Benjamin, and threatens to keep the youngest as a slave. In between he leaves the room to weep, and the narrator reports the weeping several times. Two readings are serious. The first, which Gerhard von Rad and many others take, is that this is a designed test: Joseph has to find out whether these men would again sell a favoured younger son of Rachel to save their own skins, and the test is passed at the exact moment Judah offers himself instead of Benjamin. The second, pressed by various Jewish commentators and by modern critical readers, notices the length and the sharpness of it and concludes that the text shows a man working through a desire for revenge and arriving at forgiveness by way of it rather than before it. The narrator never once evaluates Joseph's methods. Both readings account for the weeping, and a student should hold both.

Now chapter 47, which is the part that gets left out of the sermons. Verses 13 to 26 give Joseph's famine administration in stages. The famine is severe, so he sells grain and collects all the money in Egypt and Canaan into Pharaoh's house. When the money runs out, the people come back and he takes their livestock, all of it, for a year's food. The year after that they have nothing left to offer but their land and their bodies, and they offer both. He buys the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, and then: 'Joseph reduced the people to servitude from one end of Egypt to the other.'

Give the student the footnote with the verse, because this is a live textual decision and English versions differ. The BSB follows the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint and the Vulgate there, and its footnote says so: 'Hebrew removed the people to the cities'. In Hebrew the two readings differ partly by letters that are easily confused in copying, which is why a committee can judge either one the slip. The case for the versions is the context, where the people have just offered themselves as servants (47:19) and will thank him as Pharaoh's servants (47:25). The case for the Masoretic Hebrew is that it is the received text and that moving people to the cities fits a policy built on grain stored in the cities (41:48). So whether the sentence says Joseph reduced the population to servitude or relocated it into the towns depends on which witnesses a translator follows, and that single clause changes the colour of the whole episode. This is exactly the sort of thing a student should be shown rather than shielded from, and it is a good moment to notice that footnotes in a study Bible are not decoration.

Either way, the surrounding facts are not in dispute. By 47:20 Pharaoh owns the land of Egypt. 47:22 and 47:26 exempt the priests, who keep their land and their allowance. And 47:24 and 47:26 impose a permanent levy of a fifth of the harvest, set up as a statute. And then 47:25: 'You have saved our lives,' they said. 'We have found favor in our lord's eyes, and we will be Pharaoh's servants.' The population thanks him for the arrangement.

There are two strong readings of all this and a student deserves both. The critical reading, pressed by Leon Kass in The Beginning of Wisdom and in different terms by Walter Brueggemann, is that Joseph converts a natural disaster into the total consolidation of royal power: a free peasantry becomes a dependent one, the crown acquires everything, and the machinery of Egyptian state labour is assembled by the hand of a Hebrew whose own descendants will be ground up in it four centuries later. Exodus 1 opens with a king who does not know Joseph and who puts Israel to forced labour, and in a book arranged this carefully the symmetry is unlikely to be accidental. The sympathetic reading is equally real: in an ancient famine the alternative to debt servitude was death; the narrator records no disapproval whatever; 47:25 reads as genuine gratitude and not as irony; a fifth is a moderate rate by ancient standards, and the Egyptians keep four fifths and their own seed; the priests are protected; and the whole narrative frames Joseph as the man through whom many were kept alive, which is precisely what 50:20 will say in a verse nobody disputes. Both readings have the text on their side. The one position that is not available is pretending chapter 47 is not there.

Jacob dies, and the brothers panic. They send Joseph a message claiming their father left instructions that he should forgive them, which may be true and reads like men who are not sure. Joseph weeps, and then asks a question his father once snapped at Rachel in 30:2 and which here means something entirely different: am I in the place of God? And then the sentence this lesson is anchored on. 'As for you, what you intended against me for evil, God intended for good, in order to accomplish a day like this - to preserve the lives of many people.'

Argue it carefully, because it is usually deployed as a slogan and it will not bear that. Four observations, each from the wording.

First, the verb is the same for both parties. The Hebrew is chashav, which the previous module's lesson on Genesis 15:6 identified as the ledger verb behind 'it was credited to him as righteousness'. Here it carries intention, and the BSB keeps the repetition: what you intended for evil, God intended for good. Using one verb twice holds the two intentions in exactly parallel grammar, so that neither absorbs the other. Second, and following from that, the verse does not revise the act. It does not say that selling your brother turned out to be a good thing, or that the brothers were secretly instruments with nothing to answer for. Joseph's first clause is an accusation delivered to their faces, and it stands in the same sentence as the second clause rather than being cancelled by it. Third, the good that is named is concrete and historical: the lives of many people preserved, in 'a day like this'. It is a claim about one famine and one survival, not a general theory that every evil contains a hidden benefit waiting to be discovered.

Fourth, and this is the observation most often missing, notice who says it, to whom, and when. Joseph says it at the end of a long life, about his own suffering, to the men who caused it. He is not consoling a stranger and nobody in the text says this sentence to a sufferer. He could not have said it in the pit, and the narrative never asks him to. That is not a soft pastoral gloss on the verse; it is an exegetical fact about the speaker and the setting, and it is what separates a true use of Genesis 50:20 from a cruel one.

What the verse does not settle is the mechanism. Whether 'God intended for good' describes a decree that ordained the act itself, or a sovereign redirection of an act God permitted, is the question that divides the Reformed account of meticulous providence from Arminian, Molinist and Eastern Orthodox accounts, and this verse together with Acts 2:23 is the main ground all of them fight over. A survey of Genesis cannot settle a four-century argument, and should not pretend to. Make sure you know what the verse says; the lesson on providence in the Systematic Theology track states the competing positions properly and names what each one does with this text. Note too that 45:5-8 is the earlier and apparently stronger form of the same claim, where Joseph tells his brothers it was not they who sent him to Egypt but God, and that this sits oddly beside the three chapters of testing that immediately precede it. That oddity is worth thinking about rather than smoothing over.

Then the ending, which is the hinge the next module swings on. Jacob blesses the twelve in chapter 49, and the scepter goes to Judah rather than to Joseph or to the firstborn Reuben. Look at 49:10 while you are there, because the half-line is one of the most disputed in the Torah. The BSB prints 'until Shiloh comes', which is the Hebrew as it stands, and footnotes 'Or until the one to whom tribute belongs'. Those are not the only options. Read with the same letters, the Hebrew can also mean 'until he comes to Shiloh', the town where the tabernacle later stood. With a slight revocalization it speaks of tribute coming to him, which some other translations print. And with a slight emendation it yields 'until he comes to whom it belongs', a sense the ancient versions point toward and which Ezekiel 21:27 seems to echo. A committee prints 'Shiloh' because it is the received text, and because printing it leaves the riddle for the reader rather than solving it by changing a letter. The strongest objection is that Shiloh is nowhere else in the Bible a person or a title; everywhere else it is a town in Ephraim, so a person called Shiloh who comes has no parallel, and many scholars think one of the other readings is original. Notice that the messianic reading does not stand or fall with the name: the Targums read the clause of the Messiah through the 'to whom it belongs' sense. The messianic reading of the verse has always turned on that clause, and you should know the ground it stands on. Jacob then makes his sons swear to bury him at Machpelah, and 50:13 carries his body back to the cave Abraham bought in chapter 23, which is where this module began.

Joseph's last words are the bridge. 'I am about to die, but God will surely visit you and bring you up from this land to the land He promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.' The verb is paqad, to visit, attend to or muster, and Exodus 3:16 and 4:31 will use it of exactly this. Joseph does not say if. He says when, and he names the three men this module has been about. Then he makes them swear: 'God will surely attend to you, and then you must carry my bones up from this place.' The BSB's 'visit' and 'attend to' are the same Hebrew verb, doubled for emphasis both times.

And then the last verse of Genesis. He dies at a hundred and ten, is embalmed in the Egyptian manner, and is put in a coffin, which is the only coffin in the Hebrew Bible and an Egyptian object through and through. Worth one more sentence than it usually gets: the Hebrew word is aron, and it is the same word as the ark of the covenant, so the one box in the Hebrew Bible that holds a dead Israelite waiting on a promise and the box that holds the tablets of that promise are named alike. The vizier of Egypt, with an Egyptian name, an Egyptian wife and two Egyptian-born sons, refuses an Egyptian grave and leaves his body above ground as a claim on a promise. Exodus 13:19 records Moses collecting the bones on the night Israel leaves, quoting the oath almost word for word. Joshua 24:32 records their burial at last, at Shechem, in ground Jacob had bought. It takes three books and several centuries to finish that one sentence.

So Genesis ends with seventy people in Egypt, a family that owns a cave in Canaan and a coffin in Egypt, and a promise with no visible means of fulfilment. Exodus 1 opens by listing the names of the sons of Israel who came into Egypt, and ten of the eleven names in that list were given by women quarrelling in tents in chapters 29 and 30. The eleventh is Benjamin, and his exception is the better point. His mother named him Ben-oni as she was dying on the road, and 35:18 says that his father called him Benjamin instead. So the one name in Exodus 1 that a woman did not give is the one a woman gave and a man overruled. Then it says Joseph died. Then it introduces a king who did not know Joseph and who puts the family to work with mortar and brick. And in Exodus 2:24-25, which is where the next module of this track begins, God hears their groaning and remembers his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You have now met all three of them, and you know what each of those names cost.