Canter Bridge

Joseph in his maturity is one of the appealing characters of Israel’s patriarchal narratives. We have seen his youthful dreamery and felt a mild revulsion before it. Even the way he toys with his brothers when they come to Egypt in search of grain and do not recognize Joseph in his Egyptian finery leaves one to wonder whether there are still dark demons aflutter in this man’s soul, whether they can ever be tamed now that power’s corrupting agency has joined them there.

Yet in the end Joseph appears to have learned to love and, certainly, to forgive.

Following the death of their father Jacob/Israel and the elaborate pilgrimage of mourning that reaches its conclusion by burying his bones in Canaan’s soil, the troupe returns to Egypt. Without the safe passage that their father’s life—while it lasted—provided for the brothers before Joseph, they become terrified that he will now take his revenge for the heartless way they had left him for dead decades earlier in the desert.

Perhaps with some warrant, they approach David and plead with him on their father’s authority to forgive them this wrong and accept them as his slaves in Egypt. Joseph is aghast, yet his horror at the thought is tempered by what looks very much like compassion:

But Joseph said to them, ‘Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.’ In this way he reassured them, speaking kindly to them.

When the book of Genesis has reached its end, its successor—Exodus by name—takes up the narrative by alerting its reader that the descendants of Jacob’s sons have now become a numerous tribe, indeed a nation within Egypt.

It might have been otherwise. Had Joseph not learned humility before YHWH’s inscrutable purposes, had his heart not grown large in the process, Jacob’s old bones might have turned to soil alone up in Canaan. Unkept. Unmourned. Unpromising.