Old Testament for August 20, 2023

“Joseph Recognized by His Brothers” by Jean-Charles Tardieu (1788)

START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 45:1-15
CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM

OBSERVE:

When Joseph’s envious brothers sold him into slavery, he was seventeen years old (Genesis 37:2).  When Joseph came to the attention of Pharaoh for his uncanny ability to interpret dreams, he was thirty (Genesis 41:46).  Those intervening thirteen years were tough — he was first a slave and then a prison inmate, imprisoned on false allegations of sexual assault.

Joseph’s status dramatically changes.  When he interprets the Pharaoh’s dreams and predicts seven years of abundant crops in Egypt followed by seven years of famine, his rise to power is meteoric.  The Pharaoh has such confidence in this convict that he makes Joseph second in power and authority in Egypt only to himself!

Seven years of abundance followed by two years of famine have elapsed.  Canaan has also been hit hard by the famine. Joseph is at least thirty-nine years old when his ten brothers come from Canaan to buy food.  (Benjamin is not with them on their first visit.)

Joseph has been a wise vice regent to the Pharaoh — he has made sure that plentiful grain was stored during the abundant years.  Egypt is the only nation that has a surplus of grain.

It should be no surprise that when Joseph’s ten brothers come to Egypt, they don’t recognize Joseph, although he recognizes them (Genesis 42:7).  But Joseph keeps his identity secret from his brothers — for now.  Joseph was a teenager when they last saw him, shackled in the possession of the Ishmaelites.  He has matured and grown into a man, no doubt seasoned by adversity.  Also, the differences of culture and fashion between the Hebrew bedouin and sophisticated Egyptians would certainly explain the failure of the brothers to recognize Joseph. Not to mention the fact that they would never have expected to see their brother Joseph in such a position of power.  They assumed he was long dead (Genesis 42:13).

Joseph was pretty rough with his unsuspecting brothers.  He accused them of spying on Egypt (Genesis 42:9).  He demanded that they bring their youngest brother with them on a second trip in order to prove their sincerity (they have made the mistake of revealing that they have another brother back home with their father Jacob, Genesis 42:13).  In the first visit, Joseph incarcerated the ten brothers for three days (Genesis 42:17), and demanded that they leave one of the brothers as a hostage until they return with Benjamin (Simeon was the unlucky choice made by Joseph, Genesis 42:24).

But Joseph is not made of stone.  He still understands his brothers when they speak in Hebrew.  He hears Reuben castigating his brothers for what they had done so many years earlier against Joseph when they sold him into slavery. Reuben insists that all of this is happening to them because of their guilt from years earlier (Genesis 42:21-24).  Joseph is moved to tears by this admission of responsibility. And Joseph secretly ensures that the money they have paid for the grain is returned to them in the grain sacks.

When this week’s lectionary text begins, the brothers return for a second visit to Egypt, driven by their shortage of grain.  Their father Jacob has very reluctantly allowed his son Benjamin to go with them.  This is an indication of their desperate need for food.  The brothers also bring gifts, and double the money so that they can compensate Joseph for the first grain that was unpaid for.

The tension in the story grows increasingly intense.  The brothers still don’t know who this Egyptian official really is, and Joseph must hide his own intense emotion when he sees his younger brother Benjamin for the first time in more than twenty-two years.

This time, however, Joseph receives them with a demonstration of hospitality.  He brings them all into his own home and offers them a feast. This must have greatly puzzled the brothers, who had feared reprisals from Joseph because of his previous accusations and the money they had found in their grain sacks. Everything seems to be fine.  Simeon is restored to them. Their grain sacks are again filled to overflowing with grain, and they are sent on their way back to Canaan.

But Joseph ratchets up the pressure.  Not only has he had all of the money placed back in their grain sacks, he has his silver divining cup placed in Benjamin’s sack!  He then sends his steward — and presumably a detachment of armed soldiers — to pursue the Hebrew brothers, and accuses them of stealing his divining cup.

The crisis has now reached an extreme intensity.  They are escorted back to Joseph’s house and fall cringing before him.  Joseph offers them a deal — he will let them all go free, but will keep the one whose sack had the cup as a slave.  His own brother Benjamin!

Now it is Judah who intercedes, and tells Joseph that if Benjamin doesn’t return to his father Jacob, it will kill the old man.  Judah offers himself as a substitute, keeping his promise to his father when he offered to stand as collateral in order to protect Benjamin.

At this, Joseph reaches an emotional breaking point:

Then Joseph couldn’t control himself before all those who stood before him, and he cried, “Cause everyone to go out from me!” No one else stood with him, while Joseph made himself known to his brothers. He wept aloud.

All of the hurt, anger, resentment, loss and sorrow of the twenty-two years since his betrayal by his brothers have come to a head.  Joseph’s wailing is so loud that even those in the court of the Pharaoh can hear it.

Now comes the moment when Joseph discloses his true identity.  No interpreter is needed.  Joseph speaks Hebrew as well as they do.  His first question reveals his priorities:

I am Joseph! Does my father still live?

The brothers, understandably, are speechless and terrified.  In this moment they don’t know how Joseph will treat them.  He has the absolute power of the Pharaoh’s court behind him.  Will he put the ten guilty brothers in prison, and adopt Benjamin into his own household? Will he spare Reuben because he wasn’t there when Joseph was sold into slavery? Will Joseph sell all of them into slavery as reprisal? Will he have them all executed?  All of these thoughts must have flashed through their minds in this moment of extreme crisis.

But they have misjudged their brother Joseph.  His years of servitude and his strange rise to power have given him a new perspective on his experiences, and even mellowed him.

Joseph actually speaks gently to them:

“Come near to me, please.” They came near. “He said, I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. Now don’t be grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.”

Joseph is able to see his own life through the theological lens of God’s providence — that all of these experiences have led to this very moment.  Joseph knows that the two years of famine that the known world has suffered are only the beginning.  There would be five more years of famine.

And then Joseph introduces a concept that will become a recurring theme in Hebrew Scripture and the history of Israel:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to save you alive by a great deliverance.

Joseph is no doubt keenly aware of his own family story — that their grandfather Abraham had been uniquely called by God into a covenant that was to bless all nations, with numberless descendants.  This legacy is threatened by the famine — but Joseph believes that he has been set apart by God as a kind of savior.  He has been uniquely placed where he is as a part of the salvation history of Israel.

And in centuries to come the prophets of Israel will speak of the remnant of Israel, even when they are faced with extinction at the hands of the Assyrians or the Babylonians (Amos 5:15; Isaiah 10:21; Jeremiah 23:3 and Micah 5:8 are just a few of the many examples of this concept in Scripture).

Joseph continues with his theological interpretation of his own life:

 So now it wasn’t you who sent me here, but God, and he has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of all his house, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

And this theological reflection is then followed up by a call to action.  Joseph tells them to hurry back to Canaan and tell their father Jacob that Joseph is alive, is lord of all Egypt, and to bring Jacob back to the fertile region of Goshen in the Egyptian delta.  This was good land suitable for raising sheep, the primary livestock of the Hebrews.

Joseph has a sense of urgency when he gives his brothers these instructions.  Perhaps he is concerned about the deepening famine.  Perhaps he is aware of his father Jacob’s advanced age.

What is clear is that this is a moment of profound emotion and the reconciliation of damaged relationships:

He fell on his brother Benjamin’s neck, and wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. He kissed all his brothers, and wept on them. After that his brothers talked with him.

APPLY:  

How do we respond to extreme adversity?  When we have been betrayed and wronged by people we trust, and then find ourselves in power over them — how do we treat them?

Joseph provides a brilliant role model for us. We see such a profound character development in Joseph — nothing short of a spiritual transformation. How this boy has been transformed into a man!

When he was a teen, Joseph seemed to be a snooty, narcissistic, spoiled brat, bragging about his superiority over his brothers.  No wonder they hated his guts!  And their father Jacob only made it worse by lavishing attention and gifts (the many-colored coat, for example) on his favorite son.

When Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, the tables are severely turned against him — the pampered son becomes a slave, and then is unjustly accused of sexual assault. But his resourcefulness and strong work ethic provide the narrow open windows of opportunity for him to overcome even this adversity.  How easily he could have succumbed to self-pity and despair!  Instead, he looks for opportunities to serve — first, his owner and master Potiphar; then the prison warden; the baker and the butler who are briefly incarcerated in the prison (with very different outcomes in their sentences!); and finally Pharaoh himself!

Clearly, Joseph recognizes the providential hand of God guiding his life.  He has taken the lemons of his life and made delicious lemonade, lemon meringue pie, and lemon ice box pie.  And instead of wreaking revenge on his brothers, he extends grace to them.  His life, his motives, his character have been transformed by this same grace of God.

How do we interpret our own experiences through a theological lens?  It is important to remember that when we undergo negative circumstances, betrayal, defeat, and disappointment, these circumstances do not have the final word.  God has the final word.  Following Joseph’s example, we are encouraged to remain faithful despite adversity. And, when the tables are once again turned, and we find ourselves in a position of power over our adversaries, we do well to remember Joseph’s example — forgive, and seek reconciliation with our enemies… even members of our own family.

And though not many of us may be placed in the exalted position Joseph found himself, nonetheless God will still accomplish good for others if we allow him to work through us.

RESPOND: 

Joseph’s theological interpretation of his own life certainly seems to differ from the message we receive from our culture.  Joseph sees that God has been at work in his life all along:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to save you alive by a great deliverance.

The message we tend to get from Hollywood — and in contemporary politics, for that matter — is that when we are hurt by someone we should retaliate ten times more severely.  Revenge provides such sweet satisfaction on the movie screen.

Joseph provides a different narrative.  After he has settled his father and his brothers in Egypt, Jacob lives seventeen years in this new land (Genesis 47:28).  But when Jacob dies, Joseph’s brothers are haunted by their old fears.  They fear that Joseph has been waiting for his father to pass before carrying out his revenge against them.  Joseph puts their fears to rest, once and for all:

Don’t be afraid, for am I in the place of God?  As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is today, to save many people alive.  Now therefore don’t be afraid. I will nourish you and your little ones (Genesis 50:19-21).

What a wonderful response when someone wrongs us — you meant it for evil, but God can use it for good.

St. Augustine of Hippo said it this way:

God permits evil, so as to transform it into a greater good.

Lord, you are present in all of our lives.  Many of us fail to see that you are with us always, and fail to see that you take even the most negative of circumstances and transform them into good.  Open our eyes, as you did with Joseph, so that we can see what you are doing through our lives. Amen. 

PHOTOS:
“Joseph Recognized by His Brothers” (1788) by Jean-Charles Tardieu, also called “Tardieu-Cochin” is in the Public Domain.

Old Testament for August 13, 2023

Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. took this photograph of Butterfield’s mosaic depicting Joseph being sold into slavery. The mosaic is in the chapel of Keble College chapel in Oxford.

START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM

OBSERVE:

The tales of the ancestors of the Israelites continues with the story of Joseph.  He is the fourth generation removed from Abraham, the family patriarch, and he is one of eleven sons and one daughter of Jacob as our story begins.

Just a word of backstory.  Jacob has returned to Canaan after a twenty-year sojourn at Haran in Mesopotamia (Genesis 31-32).  He has managed to avoid reprisals from his embittered brother Esau, and even managed to find reconciliation with him.  And his identity has been changed — Jacob’s name is now Israel, after his night-long struggle with the Angel of Yahweh. 

However, Israel’s family situation is still… complicated.  He has two wives — the sisters Leah and Rachel. And he also has two additional “servant” wives — Bilhah and Zilpah, who are the servants of Rachel and Leah respectively.  Each of his four “wives” has borne children to Israel, in a kind of competition between these “sister wives.”

For the sake of simplicity, here are the twelve, with a number assigned to indicate birth order:

Leah was the mother of the oldest, Reuben (1). Leah also gave birth to Simeon (2), Levi (3), Judah (4), Issachar (9), Zebulun (10), and Dinah, the only daughter (11). 

Bilhah, Rachel’s servant, gave birth to two sons in Rachel’s effort to compete with her sister Leah — Dan (5) and Naphtali (6). 

Zilpah was pressed into service as “breed stock” by Leah when she thought she couldn’t bear any more children. Zilpah bore Gad (7) and Asher (8). 

When Rachel finally was able to bear a child, Israel was now an old man.  Her son Joseph (12) was the twelfth child sired by Israel up to this point.  Rachel bore another son for Israel — Benjamin (13) — and she died in childbirth.

If this all sounds a bit competitive and even dehumanizing, it is.  The servants of Leah and Rachel were treated as mere breeders for their mistresses’ strange rivalry.

Our story picks up when Joseph is seventeen years old, working as a shepherd with his ten older brothers. And we again see strong evidence of family dysfunction.  Joseph is a tattletale, bringing an evil report on his brothers back to their father.  And Israel plays favorites, with predictable results:

Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a coat of many colors. His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, and they hated him, and couldn’t speak peaceably to him.

We speculate that Joseph was also Israel’s favorite son because he was Rachel’s first child.  Rachel was the true love of Israel’s life. Joseph and his younger brother Benjamin must have been physical reminders of his beloved Rachel.

Joseph’s brothers highly resented him. And his coat of many colors certainly didn’t help. To make matters worse, Joseph has two extraordinary dreams that suggest he will one day be preeminent over all of his brothers and even his own father — and Joseph has the nerve to blurt out the details of his dreams of superiority to his whole family!  Even Israel is taken aback by Joseph’s apparent audacity:

“What is this dream that you have dreamed? Will I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves down to you to the earth?”  His brothers envied him, but his father kept this saying in mind (Genesis 37:10-11).

Now, the plot thickens, as the cliche says.  Israel’s sons are feeding the flocks in Shechem.  Israel is now encamped in Hebron, which is in a valley nestled in the mountains, where Sarah, Abraham, Isaac and Rebekah were buried. Hebron was about sixty-seven miles south of Shechem, which was in the central highlands of Canaan.  Presumably it was good pastureland for sheep.  (It should be remembered that traveling sixty-seven miles while driving a massive flock would take much longer than driving it on the interstate.)

Israel sends his son Joseph on an errand to find his brothers.  Presumably, Joseph has been kept home close to “dad” up to this point.  Is Israel sending his son to spy on his brothers, or to supervise them, or simply to check on their welfare? He seems to be simply asking Joseph to determine the well-being of his brothers, and the flock:

He said to him, “Go now, see whether it is well with your brothers, and well with the flock; and bring me word again.”

But when Joseph makes this long trip, he can’t find his brothers. They have moved on.  A stranger directs him to seek them at Dothan, which is about eighteen miles to the northwest of Shechem.

We get a pretty clear picture of what happens next.  The brothers see Joseph coming from a distance.  Perhaps they are high on a hill and see him climbing toward them.  And they have plenty of time to talk as they see him coming from afar.   They conspire against their hated brother:

They said to one another, “Behold, this dreamer comes.  Come now therefore, and let’s kill him, and cast him into one of the pits, and we will say, ‘An evil animal has devoured him.’ We will see what will become of his dreams.”

We are witnessing a premeditated crime of murder in the making!  Fortunately for Joseph, a cooler head prevails.  Reuben, the oldest brother of them all (and the son of Leah), intervenes.  He finds an alternative that can spare his much younger brother:

Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood. Throw him into this pit that is in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him”—that he might deliver him out of their hand, to restore him to his father.

Reuben is seeking to appease the envy of his brothers, while still saving Joseph’s life.  To be thrown into a dark, damp well would be a chastening experience, to be sure — but at least he would be alive!

They act quickly when Joseph arrives — they strip him of his coat of many colors. Joseph is lucky.  The well has no water.  He won’t drown!

While Joseph languishes at the bottom of a dark well, the brothers sit down to their meal — perhaps feeling a little festive now that their nemesis has been “brought down a peg.” They can eat, happily knowing their brother is in the pit.

But the plot thickens even more.  Apparently Reuben has gone away to tend the flock, or some other task.  He is not present when the boys hatch their next conspiracy.  A caravan of Ishmaelites riding camels from Gilead with spices and balms and myrrh comes near.  We are reminded that the Ishmaelites are related to the sons of Israel — they are distant cousins descended from their mutual grandfather Abraham.  Gilead was the mountainous region to the east of the Jordan River.

These Ishmaelites were merchants who were trading and selling their spices in Egypt, the center of political and military power and the cultural center of civilization at that time.  These Ishmaelites could be expected to bargain for anything worth selling. Or anyone.

It is Judah who suggests that the brothers shouldn’t kill Joseph.  Why not make a profit from this good looking, smart-alecky teenager?

Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood?  Come, and let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not let our hand be on him; for he is our brother, our flesh.”

The narrative is just a little confusing.  Judah’s brothers heed his advice, but the text tells us:  

Midianites who were merchants passed by, and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. They brought Joseph into Egypt.

The Midianites were also descendants of Abraham, like the Ishmaelites and the sons of Israel.  The Midianites were descendants of Keturah, the woman Abraham married after Sarah died (Genesis 25:1-2).

Did the brothers negotiate with some Midianites to pull their brother out of the well, and then sell him to the Ishmaelites on their behalf? If so, perhaps this gave them some “deniability” so they could say to their father — we had nothing to do with it!

We note the price of the sale of Joseph into slavery — twenty pieces of silver.  This was notoriously the price of a slave.  And we note that many centuries later, the life of a distant relative of Joseph’s (Jesus) would be sold out for thirty pieces of silver.

APPLY:  

Once again, we see the honesty of the Scriptures when it comes to describing even the Biblical patriarchs.  The brothers of Joseph, who will become the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel, are deeply resentful of their brother.

From a family perspective, there is a serious lack of emotional health in Israel’s attitudes.  He not only is partial to Joseph, he advertises this favoritism by giving him a splendid coat.  And Joseph compounds the problem by boasting to his family of his dreams of superiority.

This reminds us that God works through very fallible people in order to accomplish his purposes.  We will find, if we follow the tale of the slave Joseph into Egypt, that God uses even these horrible circumstances to bring good out of evil.  And perhaps these circumstances will even smooth off some of the rough edges of Joseph’s narcissistic character.

RESPOND: 

One needn’t be a student of Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory to conclude that Israel’s family is dysfunctional.

• Thirteen different kids by four different women, who also lived under the same roof (or tent canopy).
• A father who enmeshes one of his sons so deeply that his other sons come to hate their brother!
• A son who is so narcissistic that he brags about his superiority in front of these very brothers!
• And brothers whose moral compass permits them to seriously consider killing their brother, and have no qualms about selling him into slavery!

On the one hand, all this actually reassures me that even as weird and dysfunctional as my family sometimes may be, we’re not as bad as Israel’s family!  And Israel was the father of a great nation and a founder of a great dynasty which would be the focus of the entire Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Malachi!  And even more comforting, despite all of these rivalries, enmeshments, and conspiracies, God kept his covenant with Israel.

So, when I read about the tale of Joseph and his brothers, I am reminded that this is only a snapshot, a frame, in the greater story. My Dad used to have a sign on his desk — Please be patient. God isn’t finished with me yet.  God wasn’t finished with Joseph or his brothers yet.

Lord, families are so meaningful to us, and yet they can be so dysfunctional, and even hurtful! But no matter how painful our childhoods may have been, you aren’t finished with us yet. Help us to trust you even when we feel that we have been betrayed and enslaved by our family systems.  Amen.

PHOTOS:
“Joseph sold as a slave” by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Old Testament for February 20, 2022

“Joseph Recognized by His Brothers” by Jean-Charles Tardieu (1788)

START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 45:3-11, 15
CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM

A NOTE FROM CELESTE LETCHWORTH:

As most of you know, Tom went to be with the Lord in June 2018.

Since the lectionary cycles every 3 years, I am able to copy Tom’s SOAR studies from the archives and post them each week with our current year’s dates.

However — since Easter falls so late in 2022, this Sunday (February 20, 2022) is the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany. We haven’t had a Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany for Year C since way before Tom started a Lectionary Bible Study.

I was able to find the following SOAR study that Tom wrote for Genesis 45:1-15 (this week’s Old Testament reading is only verses 3-11 and 15). He posted it for August 20, 2017.

OBSERVE:

When Joseph’s envious brothers sold him into slavery, he was seventeen years old (Genesis 37:2).  When Joseph came to the attention of Pharaoh for his uncanny ability to interpret dreams, he was thirty (Genesis 41:46).  Those intervening thirteen years were tough — he was first a slave and then a prison inmate, imprisoned on false allegations of sexual assault.

Joseph’s status dramatically changes.  When he interprets the Pharaoh’s dreams and predicts seven years of abundant crops in Egypt followed by seven years of famine, his rise to power is meteoric.  The Pharaoh has such confidence in this convict that he makes Joseph second in power and authority in Egypt only to himself!

Seven years of abundance followed by two years of famine have elapsed.  Canaan has also been hit hard by the famine. Joseph is at least thirty-nine years old when his ten brothers come from Canaan to buy food.  (Benjamin is not with them on their first visit.)

Joseph has been a wise vice regent to the Pharaoh — he has made sure that plentiful grain was stored during the abundant years.  Egypt is the only nation that has a surplus of grain.

It should be no surprise that when Joseph’s ten brothers come to Egypt, they don’t recognize Joseph, although he recognizes them (Genesis 42:7).  But Joseph keeps his identity secret from his brothers — for now.  Joseph was a teenager when they last saw him, shackled in the possession of the Ishmaelites.  He has matured and grown into a man, no doubt seasoned by adversity.  Also, the differences of culture and fashion between the Hebrew Bedouin and sophisticated Egyptians would certainly explain the failure of the brothers to recognize Joseph. Not to mention the fact that they would never have expected to see their brother Joseph in such a position of power.  They assumed he was long dead (Genesis 42:13).

Joseph was pretty rough with his unsuspecting brothers.  He accused them of spying on Egypt (Genesis 42:9).  He demanded that they bring their youngest brother with them on a second trip in order to prove their sincerity (they have made the mistake of revealing that they have another brother back home with their father Jacob, Genesis 42:13).  In the first visit, Joseph incarcerated the ten brothers for three days (Genesis 42:17), and demanded that they leave one of the brothers as a hostage until they return with Benjamin (Simeon was the unlucky choice made by Joseph, Genesis 42:24).

But Joseph is not made of stone.  He still understands his brothers when they speak in Hebrew.  He hears Reuben castigating his brothers for what they had done so many years earlier against Joseph when they sold him into slavery. Reuben insists that all of this is happening to them because of their guilt from years earlier (Genesis 42:21-24).  Joseph is moved to tears by this admission of responsibility. And Joseph secretly ensures that the money they have paid for the grain is returned to them in the grain sacks.

When this week’s lectionary text begins, the brothers return for a second visit to Egypt, driven by their shortage of grain.  Their father Jacob has very reluctantly allowed his son Benjamin to go with them.  This is an indication of their desperate need for food.  The brothers also bring gifts, and double the money so that they can compensate Joseph for the first grain that was unpaid for.

The tension in the story grows increasingly intense.  The brothers still don’t know who this Egyptian official really is, and Joseph must hide his own intense emotion when he sees his younger brother Benjamin for the first time in more than twenty-two years.

This time, however, Joseph receives them with a demonstration of hospitality.  He brings them all into his own home and offers them a feast. This must have greatly puzzled the brothers, who had feared reprisals from Joseph because of his previous accusations and the money they had found in their grain sacks. Everything seems to be fine.  Simeon is restored to them. Their grain sacks are again filled to overflowing with grain, and they are sent on their way back to Canaan.

But Joseph ratchets up the pressure.  Not only has he had all of the money placed back in their grain sacks, but he also has his silver divining cup placed in Benjamin’s sack!  He then sends his steward — and presumably a detachment of armed soldiers — to pursue the Hebrew brothers, and accuses them of stealing his divining cup.

The crisis has now reached an extreme intensity.  They are escorted back to Joseph’s house and fall cringing before him.  Joseph offers them a deal — he will let them all go free, but will keep the one whose sack had the cup as a slave.  His own brother Benjamin!

Now it is Judah who intercedes, and tells Joseph that if Benjamin doesn’t return to his father Jacob, it will kill the old man.  Judah offers himself as a substitute, keeping his promise to his father when he offered to stand as collateral in order to protect Benjamin.

At this, Joseph reaches an emotional breaking point:

Then Joseph couldn’t control himself before all those who stood before him, and he cried, “Cause everyone to go out from me!” No one else stood with him, while Joseph made himself known to his brothers. He wept aloud.

All of the hurt, anger, resentment, loss and sorrow of the twenty-two years since his betrayal by his brothers have come to a head.  Joseph’s wailing is so loud that even those in the court of the Pharaoh can hear it.

Now comes the moment when Joseph discloses his true identity.  No interpreter is needed.  Joseph speaks Hebrew as well as they do.  His first question reveals his priorities:

I am Joseph! Does my father still live?

The brothers, understandably, are speechless and terrified.  In this moment they don’t know how Joseph will treat them.  He has the absolute power of the Pharaoh’s court behind him.  Will he put the ten guilty brothers in prison, and adopt Benjamin into his own household? Will he spare Reuben because he wasn’t there when Joseph was sold into slavery? Will Joseph sell all of them into slavery as reprisal? Will he have them all executed?  All of these thoughts must have flashed through their minds in this moment of extreme crisis.

But they have misjudged their brother Joseph.  His years of servitude and his strange rise to power have given him a new perspective on his experiences, and even mellowed him.

Joseph actually speaks gently to them:

They came near. He said, “I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. Now don’t be grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.

Joseph is able to see his own life through the theological lens of God’s providence — that all of these experiences have led to this very moment.  Joseph knows that the two years of famine that the known world has suffered are only the beginning.  There would be five more years of famine.

And then Joseph introduces a concept that will become a recurring theme in Hebrew Scripture and the history of Israel:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to save you alive by a great deliverance.

Joseph is no doubt keenly aware of his own family story — that their grandfather Abraham had been uniquely called by God into a covenant that was to bless all nations, with numberless descendants.  This legacy is threatened by the famine — but Joseph believes that he has been set apart by God as a kind of savior.  He has been uniquely placed where he is as a part of the salvation history of Israel.

And in centuries to come the prophets of Israel will speak of the remnant of Israel, even when they are faced with extinction at the hands of the Assyrians or the Babylonians (Amos 5:15; Isaiah 10:21; Jeremiah 23:3 and Micah 5:8 are just a few of the many examples of this concept in Scripture).

Joseph continues with his theological interpretation of his own life:

 So now it wasn’t you who sent me here, but God, and he has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of all his house, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

And this theological reflection is then followed up by a call to action.  Joseph tells them to hurry back to Canaan and tell their father Jacob that Joseph is alive, is lord of all Egypt, and to bring Jacob back to the fertile region of Goshen in the Egyptian delta.  This was good land suitable for raising sheep, the primary livestock of the Hebrews.

Joseph has a sense of urgency when he gives his brothers these instructions.  Perhaps he is concerned about the deepening famine.  Perhaps he is aware of his father Jacob’s advanced age.

What is clear is that this is a moment of profound emotion and the reconciliation of damaged relationships:

 He fell on his brother Benjamin’s neck, and wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. He kissed all his brothers, and wept on them. After that his brothers talked with him.

APPLY:  

How do we respond to extreme adversity?  When we have been betrayed and wronged by people we trust, and then find ourselves in power over them — how do we treat them?

Joseph provides a brilliant role model for us. We see such a profound character development in Joseph — nothing short of a spiritual transformation. How this boy has been transformed into a man!

When he was a teen, Joseph seemed to be a snooty, narcissistic, spoiled brat, bragging about his superiority over his brothers.  No wonder they hated his guts!  And their father Jacob only made it worse by lavishing attention and gifts (the many-colored coat, for example) on his favorite son.

When Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, the tables are severely turned against him — the pampered son becomes a slave, and then is unjustly accused of sexual assault. But his resourcefulness and strong work ethic provide the narrow open windows of opportunity for him to overcome even this adversity.  How easily he could have succumbed to self-pity and despair!  Instead, he looks for opportunities to serve — first, his owner and master Potiphar; then the prison warden; the baker and the butler who are briefly incarcerated in the prison (with very different outcomes in their sentences!); and finally Pharaoh himself!

Clearly, Joseph recognizes the providential hand of God guiding his life.  He has taken the lemons of his life and made delicious lemonade, lemon meringue pie, and lemon ice box pie.  And instead of wreaking revenge on his brothers, he extends grace to them.  His life, his motives, his character have been transformed by this same grace of God.

How do we interpret our own experiences through a theological lens?  It is important to remember that when we undergo negative circumstances, betrayal, defeat, and disappointment, these circumstances do not have the final word.  God has the final word.  Following Joseph’s example, we are encouraged to remain faithful despite adversity. And, when the tables are once again turned, and we find ourselves in a position of power over our adversaries, we do well to remember Joseph’s example — forgive, and seek reconciliation with our enemies… even members of our own family.

And though not many of us may be placed in the exalted position Joseph found himself, nonetheless God will still accomplish good for others if we allow him to work through us.

RESPOND: 

Joseph’s theological interpretation of his own life certainly seems to differ from the message we receive from our culture.  Joseph sees that God has been at work in his life all along:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to save you alive by a great deliverance.

The message we tend to get from Hollywood — and in contemporary politics, for that matter — is that when we are hurt by someone we should retaliate ten times more severely.  Revenge provides such sweet satisfaction on the movie screen.

Joseph provides a different narrative.  After he has settled his father and his brothers in Egypt, Jacob lives seventeen years in this new land (Genesis 47:28).  But when Jacob dies, Joseph’s brothers are haunted by their old fears.  They fear that Joseph has been waiting for his father to pass before carrying out his revenge against them.  Joseph puts their fears to rest, once and for all:

Don’t be afraid, for am I in the place of God?  As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is today, to save many people alive.  Now therefore don’t be afraid. I will nourish you and your little ones (Genesis 50:19-21).

What a wonderful response when someone wrongs us — you meant it for evil, but God can use it for good.

St. Augustine of Hippo said it this way:

God permits evil, so as to transform it into a greater good.

Lord, you are present in all of our lives.  Many of us fail to see that you are with us always, and fail to see that you take even the most negative of circumstances and transform them into good.  Open our eyes, as you did with Joseph, so that we can see what you are doing through our lives. Amen. 

PHOTOS:
“Joseph Recognized by His Brothers” (1788) by Jean-Charles Tardieu, also called “Tardieu-Cochin” is in the Public Domain.

Old Testament for August 16, 2020

“Joseph Recognized by His Brothers” by Jean-Charles Tardieu (1788)

START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 45:1-15
CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM

OBSERVE:

When Joseph’s envious brothers sold him into slavery, he was seventeen years old (Genesis 37:2).  When Joseph came to the attention of Pharaoh for his uncanny ability to interpret dreams, he was thirty (Genesis 41:46).  Those intervening thirteen years were tough — he was first a slave and then a prison inmate, imprisoned on false allegations of sexual assault.

Joseph’s status dramatically changes.  When he interprets the Pharaoh’s dreams and predicts seven years of abundant crops in Egypt followed by seven years of  famine, his rise to power is meteoric.  The Pharaoh has such confidence in this convict that he makes Joseph second in power and authority in Egypt only to himself!

Seven years of abundance followed by two years of famine have elapsed.  Canaan has also been hit hard by the famine. Joseph is at least thirty-nine years old when his ten brothers come from Canaan to buy food.  (Benjamin is not with them on their first visit.)

Joseph has been a wise vice regent to the Pharaoh — he has made sure that plentiful grain was stored during the abundant years.  Egypt is the only nation that has a surplus of grain.

It should be no surprise that when Joseph’s ten brothers come to Egypt, they don’t recognize Joseph, although he recognizes them (Genesis 42:7).  But Joseph keeps his identity secret from his brothers — for now.  Joseph was a teenager when they last saw him, shackled in the possession of the Ishmaelites.  He has matured and grown into a man, no doubt seasoned by adversity.  Also, the differences of culture and fashion between the Hebrew bedouin and sophisticated Egyptians would certainly explain the failure of the brothers to recognize Joseph. Not to mention the fact that they would never have expected to see their brother Joseph in such a position of power.  They assumed he was long dead (Genesis 42:13).

Joseph was pretty rough with his unsuspecting brothers.  He accused them of spying on Egypt (Genesis 42:9).  He demanded that they bring their youngest brother with them on a second trip in order to prove their sincerity (they have  made the mistake of revealing that they have another brother back home with their father Jacob, Genesis 42:13).  In the first visit, Joseph incarcerated the ten brothers for three days (Genesis 42:17), and demanded that they leave one of the brothers as a hostage until they return with Benjamin (Simeon was the unlucky choice made by Joseph, Genesis 42:24).

But Joseph is not made of stone.  He still understands his brothers when they speak in Hebrew.  He hears Reuben castigating his brothers for what they had done so many years earlier against Joseph when they sold him into slavery. Reuben insists that all of this is happening to them because of their guilt from years earlier (Genesis 42:21-24).  Joseph is moved to tears by this admission of responsibility. And Joseph secretly insures that the money they have paid for the grain is returned to them in the grain sacks.

When this week’s lectionary text begins, the brothers return for a second visit to Egypt, driven by their shortage of grain.  Their father Jacob has very reluctantly allowed his son Benjamin to go with them.  This is an indication of their desperate need for food.  The brothers also bring gifts, and double the money so that they can compensate Joseph for the first grain that was unpaid for.

The tension in the story grows increasingly intense.  The brothers still don’t know who this Egyptian official really is, and Joseph must hide his own intense emotion when he sees his younger brother Benjamin for the first time in more than twenty-two years.

This time, however, Joseph receives them with a demonstration of hospitality.  He brings them all into his own home and offers them a feast. This must have greatly puzzled the brothers, who had feared reprisals from Joseph because of his previous accusations and the money they had found in their grain sacks. Everything seems to be fine.  Simeon is restored to them. Their grain sacks are again filled to overflowing with grain, and they are sent on their way back to Canaan.

But Joseph ratchets up the pressure.  Not only has he had all of the money placed back in their grain sacks, he has his silver divining cup placed in Benjamin’s sack!  He then sends his steward — and presumably a detachment of armed soldiers — to pursue the Hebrew brothers, and accuses them of stealing his divining cup.

The crisis has now reached an extreme intensity.  They are escorted back to Joseph’s house and fall cringing before him.  Joseph offers them a deal — he will let them all go free, but will keep the one whose sack had the cup as a slave.  His own brother Benjamin!

Now it is Judah who intercedes, and tells Joseph that if Benjamin doesn’t return to his father Jacob, it will kill the old man.  Judah offers himself as a substitute, keeping his promise to his father when he offered to stand as collateral in order to protect Benjamin.

At this, Joseph reaches an emotional breaking point:

Then Joseph couldn’t control himself before all those who stood before him, and he cried, “Cause everyone to go out from me!” No one else stood with him, while Joseph made himself known to his brothers. He wept aloud.

All of the hurt, anger, resentment, loss and sorrow of the twenty-two years since his betrayal by his brothers have come to a head.  Joseph’s wailing is so loud that even those in the court of the Pharaoh can hear it.

Now comes the moment when Joseph discloses his true identity.  No interpreter is needed.  Joseph speaks Hebrew as well as they do.  His first question reveals his priorities:

I am Joseph! Does my father still live?

The brothers, understandably, are speechless and terrified.  In this moment they don’t know how Joseph will treat them.  He has the absolute power of the Pharaoh’s court behind him.  Will he put the ten guilty brothers in prison, and adopt Benjamin into his own household? Will he spare Reuben because he wasn’t there when Joseph was sold into slavery? Will Joseph sell all of them into slavery as reprisal? Will he have them all executed?  All of these thoughts must have flashed through their minds in this moment of extreme crisis.

But they have misjudged their brother Joseph.  His years of servitude and his strange rise to power have given him a new perspective on his experiences, and even mellowed him.

Joseph actually speaks gently to them:

“Come near to me, please.” They came near. “He said, I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. Now don’t be grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.”

Joseph is able to see his own life through the theological lens of God’s providence — that all of these experiences have led to this very moment.  Joseph knows that the two years of famine that the known world has suffered are only the beginning.  There would be five more years of famine.

And then Joseph introduces a concept that will become a recurring theme in Hebrew Scripture and the history of Israel:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to save you alive by a great deliverance.

Joseph is no doubt keenly aware of his own family story — that their grandfather Abraham had been uniquely called by God into a covenant that was to bless all nations, with numberless descendants.  This legacy is threatened by the famine — but Joseph believes that he has been set apart by God as a kind of savior.  He has been uniquely placed where he is as a part of the salvation history of Israel.

And in centuries to come the prophets of Israel will speak of the remnant of Israel, even when they are faced with extinction at the hands of the Assyrians or the Babylonians (Amos 5:15; Isaiah 10:21; Jeremiah 23:3 and Micah 5:8 are just a few of the many examples of this concept in Scripture).

Joseph continues with his theological interpretation of his own life:

 So now it wasn’t you who sent me here, but God, and he has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of all his house, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

And this theological reflection is then followed up by a call to action.  Joseph tells them to hurry back to Canaan and tell their father Jacob that Joseph is alive, is lord of all Egypt, and to bring Jacob back to the fertile region of Goshen in the Egyptian delta.  This was good land suitable for raising sheep, the primary livestock of the Hebrews.

Joseph has a sense of urgency when he gives his brothers these instructions.  Perhaps he is concerned about the deepening famine.  Perhaps he is aware of his father Jacob’s advanced age.

What is clear is that this is a moment of profound emotion and the reconciliation of damaged relationships:

He fell on his brother Benjamin’s neck, and wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. He kissed all his brothers, and wept on them. After that his brothers talked with him.

APPLY:  

How do we respond to extreme adversity?  When we have been betrayed and wronged by people we trust, and then find ourselves in power over them — how do we treat them?

Joseph provides a brilliant role model for us. We see such a profound character development in Joseph — nothing short of a spiritual transformation. How this boy has been transformed into a man!

When he was a teen, Joseph seemed to be a snooty, narcissistic, spoiled brat, bragging about his superiority over his brothers.  No wonder they hated his guts!  And their father Jacob only made it worse by lavishing attention and gifts (the many-colored coat, for example) on his favorite son.

When Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, the tables are severely turned against him — the pampered son becomes a slave, and then is unjustly accused of sexual assault. But his resourcefulness and strong work ethic provide the narrow open windows of opportunity for him to overcome even this adversity.  How easily he could have succumbed to self-pity and despair!  Instead, he looks for opportunities to serve — first, his owner and master Potiphar; then the prison warden; the baker and the butler who are briefly incarcerated in the prison (with very different outcomes in their sentences!); and finally Pharaoh himself!

Clearly, Joseph recognizes the providential hand of God guiding his life.  He has taken the lemons of his life and made delicious lemonade, lemon meringue pie, and lemon ice box pie.  And instead of wreaking revenge on his brothers, he extends grace to them.  His life, his motives, his character have been transformed by this same grace of God.

How do we interpret our own experiences through a theological lens?  It is important to remember that when we undergo negative circumstances, betrayal, defeat, and disappointment, these circumstances do not have the final word.  God has the final word.  Following Joseph’s example, we are encouraged to remain faithful despite adversity. And, when the tables are once again turned, and we find ourselves in a position of power over our adversaries, we do well to remember Joseph’s example — forgive, and seek reconciliation with our enemies… even members of our own family.

And though not many of us may be placed in the exalted position Joseph found himself, nonetheless God will still accomplish good for others if we allow him to work through us.

RESPOND: 

Joseph’s theological interpretation of his own life certainly seems to differ from the message we receive from our culture.  Joseph sees that God has been at work in his life all along:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to save you alive by a great deliverance.

The message we tend to get from Hollywood — and in contemporary politics, for that matter — is that when we are hurt by someone we should retaliate ten times more severely.  Revenge provides such sweet satisfaction on the movie screen.

Joseph provides a different narrative.  After he has settled his father and his brothers in Egypt, Jacob lives seventeen years in this new land (Genesis 47:28).  But when Jacob dies, Joseph’s brothers are haunted by their old fears.  They fear that Joseph has been waiting for his father to pass before carrying out his revenge against them.  Joseph puts their fears to rest, once and for all:

Don’t be afraid, for am I in the place of God?  As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is today, to save many people alive.  Now therefore don’t be afraid. I will nourish you and your little ones (Genesis 50:19-21).

What a wonderful response when someone wrongs us — you meant it for evil, but God can use it for good.

St. Augustine of Hippo said it this way:

God permits evil, so as to transform it into a greater good.

Lord, you are present in all of our lives.  Many of us fail to see that you are with us always, and fail to see that you take even the most negative of circumstances and transform them into good.  Open our eyes, as you did with Joseph, so that we can see what you are doing through our lives. Amen. 

PHOTOS:
“Joseph Recognized by His Brothers” (1788) by Jean-Charles Tardieu, also called “Tardieu-Cochin” is in the Public Domain.

Old Testament for August 9, 2020

Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. took this photograph of Butterfield’s mosaic depicting Joseph being sold into slavery. The mosaic is in the chapel of Keble College chapel in Oxford.

START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM

OBSERVE:

The tales of the ancestors of the Israelites continues with the story of Joseph.  He is the fourth generation removed from Abraham, the family patriarch, and he is one of eleven sons and one daughter of Jacob as our story begins.

Just a word of backstory.  Jacob has returned to Canaan after a twenty year sojourn at Haran in Mesopotamia  (Genesis 31-32).  He has managed to avoid reprisals from his embittered brother Esau, and even managed to find reconciliation with him.  And his identity has been changed — Jacob’s name is now Israel, after his night-long struggle with the Angel of Yahweh. 

However, Israel’s family situation is still….complicated.  He has two wives — the sisters Leah and Rachel. And he also has two additional “servant” wives —  Bilhah and Zilpah, who are the servants of Rachel and Leah respectively.  Each of his four “wives” has borne children to Israel, in a kind of competition between these “sister wives.”

For the sake of simplicity, here are the twelve, with a number assigned to indicate birth order:  Leah was the mother of  the oldest, Reuben (1). Leah also gave birth to Simeon (2), Levi (3), Judah (4), Issachar (9), Zebulun (10), and Dinah, the only daughter (11).  Bilhah, Rachel’s servant, gave birth to two sons in Rachel’s effort to compete with her sister Leah — Dan (5) and Naphtali (6).  Zilpah was pressed into service as “breed stock”  by Leah when she thought she couldn’t bear any more children. Zilpah bore Gad (7) and Asher (8).  When Rachel finally was able to bear a child, Israel was now an old man.  Her son Joseph (12) was the twelfth child sired by Israel up to this point.  Rachel bore another son for Israel — Benjamin (13) — and she died in childbirth  (If this all sounds a bit competitive and even dehumanizing, it is.  The servants of Leah and Rachel were treated as mere breeders for their mistresses’ strange rivalry).

Our story picks up when Joseph is seventeen years old, working as a shepherd with his ten older brothers. And we again see strong evidence of family dysfunction.  Joseph is a tattle-tale, bringing an evil report on his brothers back to their father.  And Israel plays favorites, with predictable results:

Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a coat of many colors. His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, and they hated him, and couldn’t speak peaceably to him.

We speculate that Joseph was also Israel’s favorite son because he was Rachel’s first child.  Rachel was the true love of Israel’s life. Joseph and his younger brother Benjamin must have been physical reminders of his beloved Rachel.

Joseph’s brothers highly resented him. And his coat of many colors certainly didn’t help. To make matters worse, Joseph has two extraordinary dreams that suggest he will one day be preeminent over all of his brothers and even his own father — and Joseph has the nerve to blurt out the details of his dreams of superiority to his whole family!  Even Israel is taken aback by Joseph’s apparent audacity:

“What is this dream that you have dreamed? Will I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves down to you to the earth?”  His brothers envied him, but his father kept this saying in mind (Genesis 37:10-11).

Now, the plot thickens, as the cliche says.  Israel’s sons are feeding the flocks in Shechem.  Israel is now encamped in Hebron, which is in a valley nestled in the mountains, where Sarah, Abraham, Isaac and Rebekah were buried. Hebron was about sixty-seven miles south of Shechem, which was in the central highlands of Canaan.  Presumably it was good pasture land for sheep.  (It should be remembered that traveling sixty-seven miles while driving a massive flock would take much longer than driving it on the interstate.)

Israel sends his son Joseph on an errand to find his brothers.  Presumably, Joseph has been kept home close to “dad” up to this point.  Is Israel sending his son to spy on his brothers, or to supervise them, or simply to check on their welfare? He seems to be simply asking Joseph to determine the well-being of his brothers, and the flock:

He said to him, “Go now, see whether it is well with your brothers, and well with the flock; and bring me word again.”

But when Joseph makes this long trip, he can’t find his brothers. They have moved on.  A stranger directs him to seek them at Dothan, which is about eighteen miles to the northwest of Shechem.

We get a pretty clear picture of what happens next.  The brothers see Joseph coming from a distance.  Perhaps they are high on a hill and see him climbing toward them.  And they have plenty of time to talk as they see him coming from afar.   They conspire against their hated brother:

They said to one another, “Behold, this dreamer comes.  Come now therefore, and let’s kill him, and cast him into one of the pits, and we will say, ‘An evil animal has devoured him.’ We will see what will become of his dreams.”

We are witnessing a premeditated crime of murder in the making!  Fortunately for Joseph, a cooler head prevails.  Reuben, the oldest brother of them all (and the son of Leah), intervenes.  He finds an alternative that can spare his much younger brother:

Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood. Throw him into this pit that is in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him”—that he might deliver him out of their hand, to restore him to his father.

Reuben is seeking to appease the envy of his brothers, while still saving Joseph’s life.  To be thrown into a dark, damp well would be a chastening experience, to be sure — but at least he would be alive!

They act quickly when Joseph arrives — they strip him of his coat of many colors. Joseph is lucky.  The well has no water.  He won’t drown!

While Joseph languishes at the bottom of a dark well, the brothers sit down to their meal — perhaps feeling a little festive now that their nemesis has been “brought down a peg.” They can eat, happily knowing their brother is in the pit.

But the plot thickens even more.  Apparently Reuben has gone away to tend the flock, or some other task.  He is not present when the boys hatch their next conspiracy.  A caravan of Ishmaelites riding camels from Gilead with spices and balms and myrrh comes near.  We are reminded that the Ishmaelites are related to the sons of Israel — they are distant cousins descended from their mutual grandfather Abraham.  Gilead was the mountainous region to the east of the Jordan River.

These Ishmaelites were merchants who were trading and selling their spices in Egypt, the center of political and military power and the cultural center of civilization at that time.  These Ishmaelites could be expected to bargain for anything worth selling. Or anyone.

It is Judah who suggests that the brothers shouldn’t kill Joseph.  Why not make a profit from this good looking, smart-alecky teenager?

Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood?  Come, and let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not let our hand be on him; for he is our brother, our flesh.”

The narrative is just a little confusing.  Judah’s brothers heed his advice, but the text tells us:  

Midianites who were merchants passed by, and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. They brought Joseph into Egypt.

The Midianites were also descendants of Abraham, like the Ishmaelites and the sons of Israel.  The Midianites were descendants of Keturah, the woman Abraham married after Sarah died (Genesis 25:1-2).

Did the brothers negotiate with some Midianites to pull their brother out of the well, and then sell him to the Ishmaelites on their behalf? If so, perhaps this gave them some “deniability” so they could say to their father — we had nothing to do with it!

We note the price of the sale of Joseph into slavery — twenty pieces of silver.  This was notoriously the price of a slave.  And we note that many centuries later, the life of a distant relative of Joseph’s (Jesus) would be sold out for thirty pieces of silver.

APPLY:  

Once again, we see the honesty of the Scriptures when it comes to describing even the Biblical patriarchs.  The brothers of Joseph, who will become the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel, are deeply resentful of their brother.

From a family perspective, there is a serious lack of emotional health in Israel’s attitudes.  He not only is partial to Joseph, he advertises this favoritism by giving him a splendid coat.  And Joseph compounds the problem by boasting to his family of his dreams of superiority.

This reminds us that God works through very fallible people in order to accomplish his purposes.  We will find, if we follow the tale of the slave Joseph into Egypt, that God uses even these horrible circumstances to bring good out of evil.  And perhaps these circumstances will even smooth off some of the rough edges of Joseph’s narcissistic character.

RESPOND: 

One needn’t be a student of Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory to conclude that Israel’s family is dysfunctional.

• Thirteen different kids by four different women, who also lived under the same roof (or tent canopy).
• A father who enmeshes one of his sons so deeply that his other sons come to hate their brother!
• A son who is so narcissistic that he brags about his superiority in front of these very brothers!
• And brothers whose moral compass permits them to seriously consider killing their brother, and have no qualms about selling him into slavery!

On the one hand, all this actually reassures me that even as weird and dysfunctional as my family sometimes may be, we’re not as bad as Israel’s family!  And Israel was the father of a great nation and a founder of a great dynasty which would be the focus of the entire Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Malachi!  And even more comforting, despite all of these rivalries, enmeshments, and conspiracies, God kept his covenant with Israel.

So, when I read about the tale of Joseph and his brothers, I am reminded that this is only a snapshot, a frame, in the greater story. My Dad used to have a sign on his desk — Please be patient. God isn’t finished with me yet.  God wasn’t finished with Joseph or his brothers yet.

Lord, families are so meaningful to us, and yet they can be so dysfunctional, and even hurtful! But no matter how painful our childhoods may have been, you aren’t finished with us yet. Help us to trust you even when we feel that we have been betrayed and enslaved by our family systems.  Amen.

PHOTOS:
“Joseph sold as a slave” by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Old Testament for February 24, 2019

“Joseph Recognized by His Brothers” by Jean-Charles Tardieu (1788)

START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 45:3-11, 15
CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM

A NOTE FROM CELESTE LETCHWORTH:

As most of you know, Tom went to be with the Lord 7 months ago.

Since the lectionary cycles every 3 years, I am able to copy Tom’s SOAR studies from the archives and post them each week with our current year’s dates.

However — since Easter falls so late in 2019, this Sunday (February 24, 2019) is the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany. We haven’t had a Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany for Cycle C since way before Tom started a Lectionary Bible Study.

I was able to find the following SOAR study that Tom wrote for Genesis 45:1-15 (this week’s Old Testament reading is only verses 3-11 and 15). He posted it for August 20, 2017.

OBSERVE:

When Joseph’s envious brothers sold him into slavery, he was seventeen years old (Genesis 37:2).  When Joseph came to the attention of Pharaoh for his uncanny ability to interpret dreams, he was thirty (Genesis 41:46).  Those intervening thirteen years were tough — he was first a slave and then a prison inmate, imprisoned on false allegations of sexual assault.

Joseph’s status dramatically changes.  When he interprets the Pharaoh’s dreams and predicts seven years of abundant crops in Egypt followed by seven years of  famine, his rise to power is meteoric.  The Pharaoh has such confidence in this convict that he makes Joseph second in power and authority in Egypt only to himself!

Seven years of abundance followed by two years of famine have elapsed.  Canaan has also been hit hard by the famine. Joseph is at least thirty-nine years old when his ten brothers come from Canaan to buy food.  (Benjamin is not with them on their first visit.)

Joseph has been a wise vice regent to the Pharaoh — he has made sure that plentiful grain was stored during the abundant years.  Egypt is the only nation that has a surplus of grain.

It should be no surprise that when Joseph’s ten brothers come to Egypt, they don’t recognize Joseph, although he recognizes them (Genesis 42:7).  But Joseph keeps his identity secret from his brothers — for now.  Joseph was a teenager when they last saw him, shackled in the possession of the Ishmaelites.  He has matured and grown into a man, no doubt seasoned by adversity.  Also, the differences of culture and fashion between the Hebrew bedouin and sophisticated Egyptians would certainly explain the failure of the brothers to recognize Joseph. Not to mention the fact that they would never have expected to see their brother Joseph in such a position of power.  They assumed he was long dead (Genesis 42:13).

Joseph was pretty rough with his unsuspecting brothers.  He accused them of spying on Egypt (Genesis 42:9).  He demanded that they bring their youngest brother with them on a second trip in order to prove their sincerity (they have  made the mistake of revealing that they have another brother back home with their father Jacob, Genesis 42:13).  In the first visit, Joseph incarcerated the ten brothers for three days (Genesis 42:17), and demanded that they leave one of the brothers as a hostage until they return with Benjamin (Simeon was the unlucky choice made by Joseph, Genesis 42:24).

But Joseph is not made of stone.  He still understands his brothers when they speak in Hebrew.  He hears Reuben castigating his brothers for what they had done so many years earlier against Joseph when they sold him into slavery. Reuben insists that all of this is happening to them because of their guilt from years earlier (Genesis 42:21-24).  Joseph is moved to tears by this admission of responsibility. And Joseph secretly insures that the money they have paid for the grain is returned to them in the grain sacks.

When this week’s lectionary text begins, the brothers return for a second visit to Egypt, driven by their shortage of grain.  Their father Jacob has very reluctantly allowed his son Benjamin to go with them.  This is an indication of their desperate need for food.  The brothers also bring gifts, and double the money so that they can compensate Joseph for the first grain that was unpaid for.

The tension in the story grows increasingly intense.  The brothers still don’t know who this Egyptian official really is, and Joseph must hide his own intense emotion when he sees his younger brother Benjamin for the first time in more than twenty-two years.

This time, however, Joseph receives them with a demonstration of hospitality.  He brings them all into his own home and offers them a feast. This must have greatly puzzled the brothers, who had feared reprisals from Joseph because of his previous accusations and the money they had found in their grain sacks. Everything seems to be fine.  Simeon is restored to them. Their grain sacks are again filled to overflowing with grain, and they are sent on their way back to Canaan.

But Joseph ratchets up the pressure.  Not only has he had all of the money placed back in their grain sacks, he has his silver divining cup placed in Benjamin’s sack!  He then sends his steward — and presumably a detachment of armed soldiers — to pursue the Hebrew brothers, and accuses them of stealing his divining cup.

The crisis has now reached an extreme intensity.  They are escorted back to Joseph’s house and fall cringing before him.  Joseph offers them a deal — he will let them all go free, but will keep the one whose sack had the cup as a slave.  His own brother Benjamin!

Now it is Judah who intercedes, and tells Joseph that if Benjamin doesn’t return to his father Jacob, it will kill the old man.  Judah offers himself as a substitute, keeping his promise to his father when he offered to stand as collateral in order to protect Benjamin.

At this, Joseph reaches an emotional breaking point:

Then Joseph couldn’t control himself before all those who stood before him, and he cried, “Cause everyone to go out from me!” No one else stood with him, while Joseph made himself known to his brothers. He wept aloud.

All of the hurt, anger, resentment, loss and sorrow of the twenty-two years since his betrayal by his brothers have come to a head.  Joseph’s wailing is so loud that even those in the court of the Pharaoh can hear it.

Now comes the moment when Joseph discloses his true identity.  No interpreter is needed.  Joseph speaks Hebrew as well as they do.  His first question reveals his priorities:

I am Joseph! Does my father still live?

The brothers, understandably, are speechless and terrified.  In this moment they don’t know how Joseph will treat them.  He has the absolute power of the Pharaoh’s court behind him.  Will he put the ten guilty brothers in prison, and adopt Benjamin into his own household? Will he spare Reuben because he wasn’t there when Joseph was sold into slavery? Will Joseph sell all of them into slavery as reprisal? Will he have them all executed?  All of these thoughts must have flashed through their minds in this moment of extreme crisis.

But they have misjudged their brother Joseph.  His years of servitude and his strange rise to power have given him a new perspective on his experiences, and even mellowed him.

Joseph actually speaks gently to them:

“Come near to me, please.” They came near. “He said, I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. Now don’t be grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.”

Joseph is able to see his own life through the theological lens of God’s providence — that all of these experiences have led to this very moment.  Joseph knows that the two years of famine that the known world has suffered are only the beginning.  There would be five more years of famine.

And then Joseph introduces a concept that will become a recurring theme in Hebrew Scripture and the history of Israel:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to save you alive by a great deliverance.

Joseph is no doubt keenly aware of his own family story — that their grandfather Abraham had been uniquely called by God into a covenant that was to bless all nations, with numberless descendants.  This legacy is threatened by the famine — but Joseph believes that he has been set apart by God as a kind of savior.  He has been uniquely placed where he is as a part of the salvation history of Israel.

And in centuries to come the prophets of Israel will speak of the remnant of Israel, even when they are faced with extinction at the hands of the Assyrians or the Babylonians (Amos 5:15; Isaiah 10:21; Jeremiah 23:3 and Micah 5:8 are just a few of the many examples of this concept in Scripture).

Joseph continues with his theological interpretation of his own life:

 So now it wasn’t you who sent me here, but God, and he has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of all his house, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

And this theological reflection is then followed up by a call to action.  Joseph tells them to hurry back to Canaan and tell their father Jacob that Joseph is alive, is lord of all Egypt, and to bring Jacob back to the fertile region of Goshen in the Egyptian delta.  This was good land suitable for raising sheep, the primary livestock of the Hebrews.

Joseph has a sense of urgency when he gives his brothers these instructions.  Perhaps he is concerned about the deepening famine.  Perhaps he is aware of his father Jacob’s advanced age.

What is clear is that this is a moment of profound emotion and the reconciliation of damaged relationships:

 He fell on his brother Benjamin’s neck, and wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. He kissed all his brothers, and wept on them. After that his brothers talked with him.

APPLY:  

How do we respond to extreme adversity?  When we have been betrayed and wronged by people we trust, and then find ourselves in power over them — how do we treat them?

Joseph provides a brilliant role model for us. We see such a profound character development in Joseph — nothing short of a spiritual transformation. How this boy has been transformed into a man!

When he was a teen, Joseph seemed to be a snooty, narcissistic, spoiled brat, bragging about his superiority over his brothers.  No wonder they hated his guts!  And their father Jacob only made it worse by lavishing attention and gifts (the many-colored coat, for example) on his favorite son.

When Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, the tables are severely turned against him — the pampered son becomes a slave, and then is unjustly accused of sexual assault. But his resourcefulness and strong work ethic provide the narrow open windows of opportunity for him to overcome even this adversity.  How easily he could have succumbed to self-pity and despair!  Instead, he looks for opportunities to serve — first, his owner and master Potiphar; then the prison warden; the baker and the butler who are briefly incarcerated in the prison (with very different outcomes in their sentences!); and finally Pharaoh himself!

Clearly, Joseph recognizes the providential hand of God guiding his life.  He has taken the lemons of his life and made delicious lemonade, lemon meringue pie, and lemon ice box pie.  And instead of wreaking revenge on his brothers, he extends grace to them.  His life, his motives, his character have been transformed by this same grace of God.

How do we interpret our own experiences through a theological lens?  It is important to remember that when we undergo negative circumstances, betrayal, defeat, and disappointment, these circumstances do not have the final word.  God has the final word.  Following Joseph’s example, we are encouraged to remain faithful despite adversity. And, when the tables are once again turned, and we find ourselves in a position of power over our adversaries, we do well to remember Joseph’s example — forgive, and seek reconciliation with our enemies . . . even members of our own family.

And though not many of us may be placed in the exalted position Joseph found himself, nonetheless God will still accomplish good for others if we allow him to work through us.

RESPOND: 

Joseph’s theological interpretation of his own life certainly seems to differ from the message we receive from our culture.  Joseph sees that God has been at work in his life all along:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to save you alive by a great deliverance.

The message we tend to get from Hollywood — and in contemporary politics, for that matter — is that when we are hurt by someone we should retaliate ten times more severely.  Revenge provides such sweet satisfaction on the movie screen.

Joseph provides a different narrative.  After he has settled his father and his brothers in Egypt, Jacob lives seventeen years in this new land (Genesis 47:28).  But when Jacob dies, Joseph’s brothers are haunted by their old fears.  They fear that Joseph has been waiting for his father to pass before carrying out his revenge against them.  Joseph puts their fears to rest, once and for all:

Don’t be afraid, for am I in the place of God?  As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is today, to save many people alive.  Now therefore don’t be afraid. I will nourish you and your little ones (Genesis 50:19-21).

What a wonderful response when someone wrongs us — you meant it for evil, but God can use it for good.

St. Augustine of Hippo said it this way:

God permits evil, so as to transform it into a greater good.

Lord, you are present in all of our lives.  Many of us fail to see that you are with us always, and fail to see that you take even the most negative of circumstances and transform them into good.  Open our eyes, as you did with Joseph, so that we can see what you are doing through our lives. Amen. 

PHOTOS:
“Joseph Recognized by His Brothers” (1788) by Jean-Charles Tardieu, also called “Tardieu-Cochin” is in the Public Domain.

Old Testament for August 20, 2017

“Joseph Recognized by His Brothers” by Jean-Charles Tardieu (1788)

Start with Scripture:

Genesis 45:1-15

CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM

OBSERVE:

When Joseph’s envious brothers sold him into slavery, he was seventeen years old (Genesis 37:2).  When Joseph came to the attention of Pharaoh for his uncanny ability to interpret dreams, he was thirty (Genesis 41:46).  Those intervening thirteen years were tough — he was first a slave and then a prison inmate, imprisoned on false allegations of sexual assault.

Joseph’s status dramatically changes.  When he interprets the Pharaoh’s dreams and predicts seven years of abundant crops in Egypt followed by seven years of  famine, his rise to power is meteoric.  The Pharaoh has such confidence in this convict  that he makes Joseph second in power and authority in Egypt only to himself!

Seven years of abundance followed by two years of famine have elapsed.  Canaan has also been hit hard by the famine. Joseph is at least thirty-nine years old when his ten brothers come from Canaan to buy food.  (Benjamin is not with them on their first visit.)

Joseph has been a wise vice regent to the Pharaoh — he has made sure that plentiful grain was stored during the abundant years.  Egypt is the only nation that has a surplus of grain.

It should be no surprise that when Joseph’s ten brothers come to Egypt, they don’t recognize Joseph, although he recognizes them (Genesis 42:7).  But Joseph keeps his identity secret from his brothers — for now.  Joseph was a teenager when they last saw him, shackled in the possession of the Ishmaelites.  He has matured and grown into a man, no doubt seasoned by adversity.  Also, the differences of culture and fashion between the Hebrew bedouin and sophisticated Egyptians would certainly explain the failure of the brothers to recognize Joseph. Not to mention the fact that they would never have expected to see their brother Joseph in such a position of power.  They assumed he was long dead (Genesis 42:13).

Joseph was pretty rough with his unsuspecting brothers.  He accused them of spying on Egypt (Genesis 42:9).  He demanded that they bring their youngest brother with them on a second trip in order to prove their sincerity (they have  made the mistake of revealing that they have another brother back home with their father Jacob, Genesis 42:13).  In the first visit, Joseph incarcerated the ten brothers for three days (Genesis 42:17), and demanded that they leave one of the brothers as a hostage until they return with Benjamin (Simeon was the unlucky choice made by Joseph, Genesis 42:24).

But Joseph is not made of stone.  He still understands his brothers when they speak in Hebrew.  He hears Reuben castigating his brothers for what they had done so many years earlier against Joseph when they sold him into slavery. Reuben insists that all of this is happening to them because of their guilt from years earlier (Genesis 42:21-24).  Joseph is moved to tears by this admission of responsibility. And Joseph secretly insures that the money they have paid for the grain is returned to them in the grain sacks.

When this week’s lectionary text begins, the brothers return for a second visit to Egypt, driven by their shortage of grain.  Their father Jacob has very reluctantly allowed his son Benjamin to go with them.  This is an indication of their desperate need for food.  The brothers also bring gifts, and double the money so that they can compensate Joseph for the first grain that was unpaid for.

The tension in the story grows increasingly intense.  The brothers still don’t know who this Egyptian official really is, and Joseph must hide his own intense emotion when he sees his younger brother Benjamin for the first time in more than twenty-two years.

This time, however, Joseph receives them with a demonstration of hospitality.  He brings them all into his own home and offers them a feast. This must have greatly puzzled the brothers, who had feared reprisals from Joseph because of his previous accusations and the money they had found in their grain sacks. Everything seems to be fine.  Simeon is restored to them. Their grain sacks are again filled to overflowing with grain, and they are sent on their way back to Canaan.

But Joseph ratchets up the pressure.  Not only has he had all of the money placed back in their grain sacks, he has his silver divining cup placed in Benjamin’s sack!  He then sends his steward — and presumably a detachment of armed soldiers — to pursue the Hebrew brothers, and accuses them of stealing his divining cup.

The crisis has now reached an extreme intensity.  They are escorted back to Joseph’s house and fall cringing before him.  Joseph offers them a deal — he will let them all go free, but will keep the one whose sack had the cup as a slave.  His own brother Benjamin!

Now it is Judah who intercedes, and tells Joseph that if Benjamin doesn’t return to his father Jacob, it will kill the old man.  Judah offers himself as a substitute, keeping his promise to his father when he offered to stand as collateral in order to protect Benjamin.

At this, Joseph reaches an emotional breaking point:

Then Joseph couldn’t control himself before all those who stood before him, and he cried, “Cause everyone to go out from me!” No one else stood with him, while Joseph made himself known to his brothers. He wept aloud.

All of the hurt, anger, resentment, loss and sorrow of the twenty-two years since his betrayal by his brothers have come to a head.  Joseph’s wailing is so loud that even those in the court of the Pharaoh can hear it.

Now comes the moment when Joseph discloses his true identity.  No interpreter is needed.  Joseph speaks Hebrew as well as they do.  His first question reveals his priorities:

I am Joseph! Does my father still live?

The brothers, understandably, are speechless and terrified.  In this moment they don’t know how Joseph will treat them.  He has the absolute power of the Pharaoh’s court behind him.  Will he put the ten guilty brothers in prison, and adopt Benjamin into his own household? Will he spare Reuben because he wasn’t there when Joseph was sold into slavery? Will Joseph sell all of them into slavery as reprisal? Will he have them all executed?  All of these thoughts must have flashed through their minds in this moment of extreme crisis.

But they have misjudged their brother Joseph.  His years of servitude and his strange rise to power have given him a new perspective on his experiences, and even mellowed him.

Joseph actually speaks gently to them:

“Come near to me, please.” They came near. “He said, I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. Now don’t be grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.”

Joseph is able to see his own life through the theological lens of God’s providence — that all of these experiences have led to this very moment.  Joseph knows that the two years of famine that the known world has suffered are only the beginning.  There would be five more years of famine.

And then Joseph introduces a concept that will become a recurring theme in Hebrew Scripture and the history of Israel:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to save you alive by a great deliverance.

Joseph is no doubt keenly aware of his own family story — that their grandfather Abraham had been uniquely called by God into a covenant that was to bless all nations, with numberless descendants.  This legacy is threatened by the famine — but Joseph believes that he has been set apart by God as a kind of savior.  He has been uniquely placed where he is as a part of the salvation history of Israel.

And in centuries to come the prophets of Israel will speak of the remnant of Israel, even when they are faced with extinction at the hands of the Assyrians or the Babylonians (Amos 5:15; Isaiah 10:21; Jeremiah 23:3 and Micah 5:8 are just a few of the many examples of this concept in Scripture).

Joseph continues with his theological interpretation of his own life:

 So now it wasn’t you who sent me here, but God, and he has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of all his house, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

And this theological reflection is then followed up by a call to action.  Joseph tells them to hurry back to Canaan and tell their father Jacob that Joseph is alive, is lord of all Egypt, and to bring Jacob back to the fertile region of Goshen in the Egyptian delta.  This was good land suitable for raising sheep, the primary livestock of the Hebrews.

Joseph has a sense of urgency when he gives his brothers these instructions.  Perhaps he is concerned about the deepening famine.  Perhaps he is aware of his father Jacob’s advanced age.

What is clear is that this is a moment of profound emotion and the reconciliation of damaged relationships:

 He fell on his brother Benjamin’s neck, and wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. He kissed all his brothers, and wept on them. After that his brothers talked with him.

APPLY:  

How do we respond to extreme adversity?  When we have been betrayed and wronged by people we trust, and then find ourselves in power over them — how do we treat them?

Joseph provides a brilliant role model for us. We see such a profound character development in Joseph — nothing short of a spiritual transformation. How this boy has been transformed into a man!

When he was a teen, Joseph seemed to be a snooty, narcissistic, spoiled brat, bragging about his superiority over his brothers.  No wonder they hated his guts!  And their father Jacob only made it worse by lavishing attention and gifts (the many-colored coat, for example) on his favorite son.

When Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, the tables are severely turned against him — the pampered son becomes a slave, and then is unjustly accused of sexual assault. But his resourcefulness and strong work ethic provide the narrow open windows of opportunity for him to overcome even this adversity.  How easily he could have succumbed to self-pity and despair!  Instead, he looks for opportunities to serve — first, his owner and master Potiphar; then the prison warden; the baker and the butler who are briefly incarcerated in the prison (with very different outcomes in their sentences!); and finally Pharaoh himself!

Clearly, Joseph recognizes the providential hand of God guiding his life.  He has taken the lemons of his life and made delicious lemonade, lemon meringue pie, and lemon ice box pie.  And instead of wreaking revenge on his brothers, he extends grace to them.  His life, his motives, his character have been transformed by this same grace of God.

How do we interpret our own experiences through a theological lens?  It is important to remember that when we undergo negative circumstances, betrayal, defeat, and disappointment, these circumstances do not have the final word.  God has the final word.  Following Joseph’s example, we are encouraged to remain faithful despite adversity. And, when the tables are once again turned, and we find ourselves in a position of power over our adversaries, we do well to remember Joseph’s example — forgive, and seek reconciliation with our enemies . . . even members of our own family.

And though not many of us may be placed in the exalted position Joseph found himself, nonetheless God will still accomplish good for others if we allow him to work through us.

RESPOND: 

Joseph’s theological interpretation of his own life certainly seems to differ from the message we receive from our culture.  Joseph sees that God has been at work in his life all along:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to save you alive by a great deliverance.

The message we tend to get from Hollywood — and in contemporary politics, for that matter — is that when we are hurt by someone we should retaliate ten times more severely.  Revenge provides such sweet satisfaction on the movie screen.

Joseph provides a different narrative.  After he has settled his father and his brothers in Egypt, Jacob lives seventeen years in this new land (Genesis 47:28).  But when Jacob dies, Joseph’s brothers are haunted by their old fears.  They fear that Joseph has been waiting for his father to pass before carrying out his revenge against them.  Joseph puts their fears to rest, once and for all:

Don’t be afraid, for am I in the place of God?  As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is today, to save many people alive.  Now therefore don’t be afraid. I will nourish you and your little ones (Genesis 50:19-21).

What a wonderful response when someone wrongs us — you meant it for evil, but God can use it for good.

St. Augustine of Hippo said it this way:

God permits evil, so as to transform it into a greater good.

Lord, you are present in all of our lives.  Many of us fail to see that you are with us always, and fail to see that you take even the most negative of circumstances and transform them into good.  Open our eyes, as you did with Joseph, so that we can see what you are doing through our lives. Amen. 

PHOTOS:
“Joseph Recognized by His Brothers” (1788) by Jean-Charles Tardieu, also called “Tardieu-Cochin” is in the Public Domain.

Old Testament for August 13, 2017

Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. took this photograph of Butterfield’s mosaic depicting Joseph being sold into slavery. The mosaic  is in the chapel of Keble College chapel in Oxford.

Start with Scripture:

Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM

OBSERVE:

The tales of the ancestors of the Israelites continues with the story of Joseph.  He is the fourth generation removed from Abraham, the family patriarch, and he is one of eleven sons and one daughter of Jacob as our story begins.

Just a word of backstory.  Jacob has returned to Canaan after a twenty year sojourn at Haran in Mesopotamia  (Genesis 31-32).  He has managed to avoid reprisals from his embittered brother Esau, and even managed to find reconciliation with him.  And his identity has been changed — Jacob’s name is now Israel, after his night-long struggle with the Angel of Yahweh. 

However, Israel’s family situation is still….complicated.  He has two wives — the sisters Leah and Rachel. And he also has two additional “servant” wives —  Bilhah and Zilpah, who are the servants of Rachel and Leah respectively.  Each of his four “wives” has borne children to Israel, in a kind of competition between these “sister wives.”

For the sake of simplicity, here are the twelve, with a number assigned to indicate birth order:  Leah was the mother of  the oldest, Reuben (1), Simeon (2), Levi (3), Judah (4), Issachar (9), Zebulun (10), and Dinah, the only daughter (11).  Bilhah, Rachel’s servant, gave birth to two sons in Rachel’s effort to compete with her sister Leah — Dan (5) and Naphtali (6).  Zilpah was pressed into service as “breed stock”  by Leah when she thought she couldn’t bear any more children. Zilpah bore Gad (7) and Asher (8).  When Rachel finally was able to bear a child, Israel was now an old man.  Her son Joseph (12) was the twelfth child sired by Israel up to this point.  Rachel bore another son for Israel — Benjamin (13) — and she died in childbirth  (If this all sounds a bit competitive and even dehumanizing, it is.  The servants of Leah and Rachel were treated as mere breeders for their mistresses’ strange rivalry).

Our story picks up when Joseph is seventeen years old, working as a shepherd with his ten older brothers. And we again see strong evidence of family dysfunction.  Joseph is a tattle-tale, bringing an evil report on his brothers back to their father.  And Israel plays favorites, with predictable results:

Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a coat of many colors. His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, and they hated him, and couldn’t speak peaceably to him.

We speculate that Joseph was also Israel’s favorite son because he was Rachel’s first child.  Rachel was the true love of Israel’s life. Joseph and his younger brother Benjamin must have been physical reminders of his beloved Rachel.

Joseph’s brothers highly resented him. And his coat of many colors certainly didn’t help. To make matters worse, Joseph has two extraordinary dreams that suggest he will one day be preeminent over all of his brothers and even his own father — and Joseph has the nerve to blurt out the details of his dreams of superiority to his whole family!  Even Israel is taken aback by Joseph’s apparent audacity:

“What is this dream that you have dreamed? Will I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves down to you to the earth?”  His brothers envied him, but his father kept this saying in mind (Genesis 37:10-11).

Now, the plot thickens, as the cliche says.  Israel’s sons are feeding the flocks in Shechem.  Israel is now encamped in Hebron, which is in a valley nestled in the mountains,  where Sarah, Abraham, Isaac and Rebekah were buried. Hebron was about sixty-seven miles south of Shechem, which was in the central highlands of Canaan.  Presumably it was good pasture land for sheep.  (It should be remembered that traveling sixty-seven miles while driving a massive flock would take much longer than driving it on the interstate.)

Israel sends his son Joseph on an errand to find his brothers.  Presumably, Joseph has been kept home close to “dad” up to this point.  Is Israel sending his son to spy on his brothers, or to supervise them, or simply to check on their welfare? He seems to be simply asking Joseph to determine the well-being of his brothers, and the flock:

He said to him, “Go now, see whether it is well with your brothers, and well with the flock; and bring me word again.”

But when Joseph makes this long trip, he can’t find his brothers. They have moved on.  A stranger directs him to seek them at Dothan, which is about eighteen miles to the northwest of Shechem.

We get a pretty clear picture of what happens next.  The brothers see Joseph coming from a distance.  Perhaps they are high on a hill and see him climbing toward them.  And they have plenty of time to talk as they see him coming from afar.   They conspire against their hated brother:

They said to one another, “Behold, this dreamer comes.  Come now therefore, and let’s kill him, and cast him into one of the pits, and we will say, ‘An evil animal has devoured him.’ We will see what will become of his dreams.”

We are witnessing a premeditated crime of murder in the making!  Fortunately for Joseph, a cooler head prevails.  Reuben, the oldest brother of them all (and the son of Leah), intervenes.  He finds an alternative that can spare his much younger brother:

 Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood. Throw him into this pit that is in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him”—that he might deliver him out of their hand, to restore him to his father.

Reuben is seeking to appease the envy of his brothers, while still saving Joseph’s life.  To be thrown into a dark, damp well would be a chastening experience, to be sure — but at least he would be alive!

They act quickly when Joseph arrives — they strip him of his coat of many colors. Joseph is lucky.  The well has no water.  He won’t drown!

While Joseph languishes at the bottom of a dark well, the brothers sit down to their meal — perhaps feeling a little festive now that their nemesis has been “brought down a peg.” They can eat, happily knowing their brother is in the pit.

But the plot thickens even more.  Apparently Reuben has gone away to tend the flock, or some other task.  He is not present when the boys hatch their next conspiracy.  A caravan of riding camels loIshmaelites aded with spices and balms and myrrh come near.  We are reminded that the Ishmaelites are related to the sons of Israel — they are distant cousins descended from their mutual grandfather Abraham.  Gilead was the mountainous region to the east of the Jordan River.

These Ishmaelites were merchants who were trading and selling their spices in Egypt, the center of political and military power and the cultural center of civilization at that time.  These Ishmaelites could be expected to bargain for anything worth selling. Or anyone.

It is Judah who suggests that the brothers shouldn’t kill Joseph.  Why not make a profit from this good looking, smart-alecky teenager?

Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood?  Come, and let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not let our hand be on him; for he is our brother, our flesh.”

The narrative is just a little confusing.  Judah’s brothers heed his advice, but the text tells us:  

Midianites who were merchants passed by, and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. They brought Joseph into Egypt.

The Midianites were also descendants of Abraham, like the Ishmaelites and the sons of Israel.  The Midianites were descendants of Keturah, the woman Abraham married after Sarah died (Genesis 25:1-2).

Did the brothers negotiate with some Midianites to pull their brother out of the well, and then sell him to the Ishmaelites on their behalf? If so, perhaps this gave them some “deniability” so they could say to their father — we had nothing to do with it!

We note the price of the sale of Joseph into slavery — twenty pieces of silver.  This was notoriously the price of a slave.  And we note that many centuries later, the life of a distant relative of Joseph’s (Jesus) would be sold out for thirty pieces of silver.

APPLY:  

Once again, we see the honesty of the Scriptures when it comes to describing even the Biblical patriarchs.  The brothers of Joseph, who will become the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel, are deeply resentful of their brother.

From a family perspective, there is a serious lack of emotional health in Israel’s attitudes.  He not only is partial to Joseph, he advertises this favoritism by giving him a splendid coat.  And Joseph compounds the problem by boasting to his family of his dreams of superiority.

This reminds us that God works through very fallible people in order to accomplish his purposes.  We will find, if we follow the tale of the slave Joseph into Egypt, that God uses even these horrible circumstances to bring good out of evil.  And perhaps these circumstances will even smooth off some of the rough edges of Joseph’s narcissistic character.

RESPOND: 

One needn’t be a student of Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory to conclude that Israel’s family is dysfunctional.

• Thirteen different kids by four different women, who also lived under the same roof (or tent canopy).
• A father who enmeshes one of his sons so deeply that his other sons come to hate their brother!
• A son who is so narcissistic that he brags about his superiority in front of these very brothers!
• And brothers whose moral compass permits them to seriously consider killing their brother, and have no qualms about selling him into slavery!

On the one hand, all this actually reassures me that even as weird and dysfunctional as my family sometimes may be, we’re not as bad as Israel’s family!  And Israel was the father of a great nation and a founder of a great dynasty which would be the focus of the entire Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Malachi!  And even more comforting, despite all of these rivalries, enmeshments, and conspiracies, God kept his covenant with Israel.

So, when I read about the tale of Joseph and his brothers, I am reminded that this is only a snapshot, a frame, in the greater story. My Dad used to have a sign on his desk — Please be patient. God isn’t finished with me yet.  God wasn’t finished with Joseph or his brothers yet.

Lord, families are so meaningful to us, and yet they can be so dysfunctional, and even hurtful! But no matter how painful our childhoods may have been, you aren’t finished with us yet. Help us to trust you even when we feel that we have been betrayed and enslaved by our family systems.  Amen.

PHOTOS:
“Joseph sold as a slave” by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.