Let me begin with a quote from Speiser (EAS, p. 292):
The last major division of Genesis concenetrates with but a few exceptions (notably xxxviii) on the eventful story of Joseph. It is at once the most intricately constructed and the best integrated of all the patriarchal histories. For sustained dramatic effect the narrative is unsurpassed in the whole Pentateuch. The theme is essentially personal and secular. Other aspects, to be sure, are in evidence here and there, yet they are never allowed to distract attention from the central human drama.Many commentators devote much space to the problem of the origins of this story as we have it. As with my treatment of the whole book, here the issue of origins may be thought of as interesting and sometimes instructive, but chiefly insofar as it provides useful keys for understanding the text as a text, not as an exercise in textual archaeology for its own sake. For a non-technical, brief overview I will quote, this time, Lawrence Boadt (LB, p. 123), who first gives his own summary of the story's plot:
The plot is simple and yet a literary masterpiece. Joseph receives strange dreams in which he is more important than his brothers. This leads to their envy and Joseph finds himself in ever-deeper trouble. They sell him into slavery, he is falsely accused of adultery, and he ends up in prison for life. Then, with divine help, the tide changes. He uses his gift to interpret dreams to help royal officials, then Pharaoh himself. He is made prime minister, and in the great famine that follows, his brothers come into his power. But instead of doing to them what they had done to him, he forgives them and brings his father down to Egypt to live in peace and prosperity. The drama ends with the family reunited.Reflecting what many scholars theorize about this text, Boadt went on to say:
This is the kind of plot where nothing can be taken out as unnecessary. It is not just a collection of old inicidents thrown together. But how did it become so different from the rest of the traditions in Genesis? The best solution understands that there must have been older saga stories about Joseph and about Israel's days in Egypt. but the Yahwist (or another) rewrote them into a novel at about the time of Solomon, or even later, and it was included in the final form in the Book of Genesis.It is suggested in the CB commentary that the story or stories on which the Joseph cycle is based were originally independent of the preceding Abraham-Isaac-and-Jacob patriarchal narrative to which it later became attached. Points of detail that seem to point in that direction include, in the present passage, the description of Joseph as Jacob's ben z'qunim in v. 3, when according to the patriarchal narrative it was Benjamin who is Jacob's youngest son, and the reference by Jacob to Joseph's father and mother in v. 10 whereas we know that Joseph's mother, Rachel, was dead.
Thus the specialists assure us that the "novel" about the life of Joseph as told in Genesis must have been pieced together from "older saga stories". There are also strong arguments claiming that the Genesis text itself was not originally the work of a single hand, but, like some other stories (e.g. that of Noah and the Flood), could only have reached its final form by combining fragments that came from more than one source document (the analysis of the Dothan incident will provide some clear examples).
And yet, if that is true, then we can only marvel all the more at the consummate literary artistry with which the author or authors have created out of these elements a jewel of storytelling which displays great coherence both internally (i.e. the story "makes sense") and externally in its integration into the larger text of Genesis and, of course, Exodus which follows. As Everett Fox says (EF, p. 155): "It stands well on its own, although it has been consciously and artfully woven together into both the Yaakov cycle and the entire book."
37:1 wayyéshev ya‛aqov b'éretz m'gure aviw b'éretz k'ná‛an
See my comments in yesterday's "Interlude" post. The subject of Jacob's "quiet life" at home is taken up in these comments in Etz Hayim:
Jacob thought he was going to settle down after all he had been through, but events would not permit him to [Rashi]. We often think that, once we reach a certain milestone, we will be able to settle down to a life free of challenges. But life never promised to be tranquil.37:2 élle tol'dot ya‛aqov
Trad. "These are the generations of Jacob." See my comment in the "Interlude."
yosef...
Without further ado, the narrative now introduces us to Joseph. Although his name has occurred a handful of times previously, we have only known him hitherto as Rachel's first son and Jacob's youngest up until the time of Benjamin's birth wherein Rachel died. Other sons were at least mentioned as agents in earlier stories (so Simeon and Levi in the Dinah story), but Joseph would have been too young at the time to take part. Now he is an adolescent helping his older half-brothers with their herding duties.
ná‛ar
This word also means 'boy, lad', but here the meaning is 'assistant'; young Joseph was helping out the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's wives. This way of framing it makes a statement about their relative rank; although Joseph's own mother was dead, she was of a higher rank than Bilhah and Zilpah in the family's pecking order. It doesn't say outright in the text that Joseph thought himself superior on that account, but the possibililty is left open that he may have. There is also nothing in the text to stop us from joining the dots to link this hierarchical issue, as well as the obvious bone of contention mentioned next, to his brothers' animosity towards him, expressed by the verb s-n-' three times in this short passage (in vv. 4, 5 and 8).
wayyave yosef et dibbatam ra‛a el avihem
'Joseph brought bad reports of them to their father.' The first thing we learn about Joseph's character puts him in a rather ambivalent light: he is a taddle tale. Isn't it always the way with younger siblings, though? Whichever way this information might threaten to dispose the audience towards young Joseph, we can be sure that his behaviour did not have a favourable effect on his popularity ratings with his big brothers, and that is very much to the point in this already unfolding story.
37:3 w'yisra'el
I.e. Jacob. (According to Speiser, only the J source refers to him in this way.)
ki ven z'qunim hu lo
'For he was the child of his old age.' Technically, that would actually have been Benjamin, but let's not split hairs: alright, so they can both be children of his old age. Although it doesn't say so here, everyone knows that Joseph was also special in that his late mother had been Jacob's darling Rachel. Maybe that's what they really meant but didn't want to say it in front of all the other sons of concubines. Joseph was doubly special: he was the baby, and he was the firstborn of the babies. Of course he was Dad's boy.
k'tónet passim
In the King James this is a coat of many colours. Others follow the idea even when rephrasing it, so varicoloured tunic and so on and so forth. But this translation was already doubted long ago: k'tónet is the construct state of kuttónet 'long shirt-like (under)garment' (CHALOT), 'tunic coat, shirt' (EK), but what passim means is anyone's guess. (According to EK, kuttónet is a loanword from Aramaic related to similar words in other Semitic languages denoting either a linen-like fabric or a garment made of it. It was borrowed by Greek as khitôn 'tunic', and by Latin, with metathesis, as tunica!) The "many colours" idea originates, apparently, from the Septuagint which has here ἐποίησεν δὲ αὐτῷ χιτῶνα ποικίλον 'he made him a many-coloured tunic.' But according to others, this was not the real meaning at all, so for example CB annotates: "a coat of many colours: a mistranslation adopted from the LXX; the correct rendering is that of R[evised] V[ersion] marg[in note] 'a long garment with sleeves'.." But Speiser remarks: "The traditional 'coat of many colors' and the variant 'coat with sleeves' are sheeer guesses form the context; nor is there anything remarkable about either colors or sleeves." He himself proposes ornamented tunic, which is adopted by JPS; similarly NIV ornate robe, ISV richly-embroidered tunic and other paraphrases of this and the other renderings. Anyway, it is not terribly important to the story to know what the k'tónet passim looked like, the point is that it symbolised the special relationship between Jacob and Joseph and the latter's favoured status among his brothers. From the information provided about Joseph so far, it is impossible to say whether that is justified by any particular merit of his own: Joseph has so far not been portrayed as morally, intellectually, or in any other way superior, he's just young Joseph, their young step-brother and the apple of their father's eye. Of course they hate him!
37:4 wayyisn'u oto
'They hated him.' Why do they hate him? Because they see that he is the one their father loves best. Because of that, they have nothing good to say about him.
37:5 wayyaxalom (yosef) xalom
This typical BH construction which couples a verb with a cognate object (here, x-l-m 'to dream' and xalom '(a) dream)') is sometimes rendered literally into English: 'And Joseph dreamed a dream' (KJV). This construction may have entered literary (not colloquial!) English in some collocations (such as this one) from the Hebrew via these translations, but on the whole is neither natural idiomatic English not the proper translation. In this instance, a natural translation would be 'Joseph had a dream' (JPS) or 'Joseph dreamed.' Stylistically, the H construction with the repetition of the root is undeniably more striking, but in Hebrew it is also idiomatic; that is the difference. Taking vv. 5 and 6 together, I don't think the KJV does itself any favours stylistically by trying to mimic the H with four occurrences of the same root in two sentences: "And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it to his brethren... And he said unto them: Hear, I pray you, this dream which I dreamed." The Septuagint translators made the same mistake; the translators of the Vulgate adapted by substituting videre 'to see' for the two verbs.
37:6 haxalom hazze asher xalámti
Same considerations as in v. 5, qv.
37:7 w'hinne...w'hinne...w'hinne
In this context, the presentative hinne may be thought of as a verbal colon linking the sentences of the description of the dream to the preceding clause which introduces the text: '(Listen to this dream I had): we were binding sheaves..., and my sheaf..., and your sheaves...' It is not really more faithful, pragmatically, to the original to say with JPS: "There we were binding sheaves in the field, when suddenly my sheaf stood up and remained upright; then your sheaves gathered around..." (Here I have underlined discourse markers injected into the English version in a questionable attempt to "make up" for the lack of anything tangible in English to put in place of the three Hebrew hinne's.)
37:9 wayyaxalom ‛od xalom axer
Etz Hayim notes that in the Joseph story, dreams often come in twos, and it is a frequent pattern for both dreams to have the same meaning, expressed through different symbols. That is true in this case: in Joseph's first dream, he and his brothers are represented by sheafs, and in the second by heavenly bodies. It was believed in primitive cultures that dreams are "messages" to people from a superior source of knowledge (e.g. God), from which we can learn important things. So in the pairing of dreams, it is as if Someone is intent on making sure we get the message, so it is given to us in two versions which confirm each other and help us to identify the essence of the message. This is not only an interesting coding strategy, but a perceptive representation of how our subconscious minds work. According to this approach, when someone has a dream there is a meaning but the meaning is not to be found in the specific details: thus Joseph's two dreams are not about sheaves of wheat or about the stars and the sun. The two dreams are telling the same message, but the details change, so they are to be cancelled out of the message, and we are to look at what is left that the dreams have in common, and this is what we, today, would probably call a pattern. What the interpreter of dreams succeeds in doing is picking out the pattern. That pattern has been clothed in different guises to give it a form (by the dreamer's subconscious, or by whoever is thought to provide the dream); underneath that form, there is a pattern, the "hidden" content or meaning. For another pair of dreams that work the same way, see Pharaoh's dreams about the cows and the sheaves of wheat which Joseph will interpret (ch. 41). The dreams of the cup-bearer and the baker, although two in number, are a bit different, first because they are dreamt by different people, and secondly because they have different meanings, but in other ways similar principles apply nonetheless.
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