SYNOPSIS: As
Joseph predicted, seven years of plenty are followed by a great famine
which also affects Canaan, and Jacob sends his sons down to Egypt where
he has heard that there is grain available. Only the youngest son,
Benjamin (Joseph's only full brother), stays behind because he is
Jacob's favourite, as the only remaining son of Rachel, and he is afraid
of losing him. In Egypt the brothers have an interview with Joseph
himself, but they don't recognise him although he recognises them. He
accuses them of being spies. Protesting their innocence, they tell him
about their family, but Joseph pretends not to believe them.
Here the main drama begins in earnest. With swift strokes, the narrative takes us through time and space, through the seven years of plenty when Joseph had the foresight to implement a plan to store up supplies and up to the beginning of the long famine that he had predicted in which he administered the distribution of the stored grain to Egyptians and its sale to foreigners whose countries were also affected by the drought. And then away we go to Canaan where many families have been brought to their knees by hunger, amongst them that of Joseph's father and brothers. Jacob sends his sons to Egypt to buy grain since he has heard that food may be bought there (little does he know that this is thanks to his lost son's doings!), and off they all go, all except Jacob's youngest, Benjamin, who is Joseph's only full brother. And so we find ourselves back in Egypt, where the ten arrive and go to see the man in charge of everything there: Joseph. Now, fulfilling Joseph's childhood dreams, he has absolute power over his brothers for two reasons: (1) they need food, he has it to sell; (2) they don't know his true identity, but he knows theirs! What is more, he happens to be the most powerful man in Egypt, other than the king himself. In storybook manner, the tables are turned and now Joseph has all the cards. How will he play them?
Joseph strikes out boldly, going on the attack. What do you want? We have come to buy grain. Of course he knows that, but let's make them squirm: "No you haven't," he counters: "you've come to find out what the situation is like in Egypt: you are spies." In alarm, his brothers plead innocence, threatened by a double danger: not obtaining food for their father and family, and being unjustly imprisoned or worse for something they haven't done (I wonder what that feels like!). "No, no!" they start to blurt out, "we're innocent! We're all from one family. We're brothers. There's ten of us here, and two more, making twelve altogether. Well... eleven. The youngest stayed at home with our father. And the other one... ummmm... something happened to him." Joseph, listening to their explanations, cannot have missed any of the irony. But he keeps his poker face: "Nope, I don't believe you," he retorts, "you're spies."
A comment in EH provides some interesting background regarding the years of plenty and want in Egypt, and also raises an unexpected problem. Egyptian agriculture was dependent on the ebb and flow of the waters of the all-important River Nile. It was not rains in Egypt that watered the Egyptian fields, it was the river, and the river was fed by rains at is source in sourthern Sudan. If it didn't rain enough there, the effect in Egypt was often devastating, and seven-year droughts were not unheard-of. The problem is this: Canaan wasn't affected by what the Nile did. Its agriculture depended on local rainfall, and famine in Canaan was caused by the lack of it. Thus while it is not impossible that both Egypt and Canaan had famines, the two events could hardly have been causally related: it must have been a coincidence.
41:55 l'khu el yosef
'Go to Joseph!' Pharaoh orders that whoever wishes to obtain grain must appear before Joseph. In terms of plot, this establishes a link which will force Joseph's brothers into his presence.
41:56 wayyiftax yosef et kol asher bahem wayyishbor l'mitzráyim
'Joseph laid open all that was within, and rationed out grain to the Egyptians.' As regards meaning there seem to be two homonymous verbs sh-b-r: the most common one which means 'to break', and the one occurring here and often in this story, which means 'buy, sell or ration grain.' EK's conjecture that the second meaning is denominal from shéver 'fracture, fraction, grain [for sale]' which in turn comes from the verb root in its first meaning seems plausible. Speiser, who suggests that the real meaning of shéver is 'emergency supplies', would derive it from the verb 'to break' in the specialized sense of 'break the fast.' Anyway, here wayyishbor l'mitzráyim means that he provided Egypt with grain (or emergency supplies) or that he rationed it/them out to them, but there is a syntactic difficulty in the preceding clause: wayyiftax yosef et kol asher bahem lacks an antecedent for bahem, though we can imagine that it refers to the stores of grain previously referred to. Lit. 'Joseph opened [up] everything that was in them' (??).
42:1 wayyar ya‛aqov... lámma titra'u
There seems to be here a playful double use of the root r-'-h 'to see', first in its simplest (qal) form as Jacob observes the situation that they have no food but there is grain to be had in Egypt, and then in the reciprocal-iterative (hitpael) form meaning literally 'look at each other' or 'look around', perhaps both of these simultaneously ('look around at each other'), but meaning by this 'stand around doing nothing like idiots' or something of the sort, which is what he accuses his sons of doing.
42:6 wayyavó'u axe yosef wayyishtaxawu lo appáyim ártza
'And Joseph's brothers came and bowed low to him, with their faces to the ground.' Cf. 37:7 (w'hinne t'subbéna alummotekhem wattishtaxawéna la'alummati), 37:9 (w'hinne hasshémesh w'hayyaréax w'axad ‛asar kokhavim mishtaxawim li) and 37:10 (havo navo ani w'imm'kha w'axékha l'hishtaxawot l'kha ártza). Joseph's childhood dreams are coming true.
42:7 wayyakkiram wayyitnakker alehem
'He recognized them but he acted like a stranger towards them.' There is an interesting interplay of words in the H, based on a dual use of another verb root, n-k-r (cf. note on v. 1 above). According to the observations in EK it would seem that scholars are not entirely clear about the etymological relationships among the forms and between them and the nouns nekhar 'foreign land' and nokhri 'foreign, strange, alien.' The central question would seem to be whether all the verb's different forms and meanings are derived from or cognates of these, or whether there has been a merger of two originally different roots. In any case, the forms and meanings are as follows, acc. to CHALOT: (1) *nikkar (niphal) 'dissemble, pretend; be recognized'; (2) nikkar (piel) 'misrepresent; disfigure, deface; deliver over; consider carefully'; (3) hikkir (hiphil) 'investigate, recognize, know; (4) *hitnakker (hitpael) 'disguise oneself, keep one's identity from; make oneself known.' The forms preceded by asterisks are not themselves attested but inflected forms of them are. Looking at this array of senses it is no wonder that scholars are confused, and so are we! But of course, etymology is one thing; whatever the historical explanation, when words appear to form a single family Genesis is not averse to playing around with that resemblance - chance or not - for rhetorical effect. In the present instance it is (3) and (4) that are juxtaposed, the hiphil and the hitpael, and we might paraphrase the sentence: 'He knew who they were but he didn't let on to them as to who he was.' Only it manages this without a negation! Perhaps: 'Aware of their identity, he kept his own identity to himself.' In case that is lost on anyone in the audience, the same idea is spelt out in the simplest, most direct fashion possible in v. 8, using the hiphil (the most common binyan of this verb root) in two successive clauses, the first positive and the second negative: wayyakker yosef et exaw w'hem lo hikkirúhu 'Joseph reconised his brothers but they didn't recognise him.' Got it.
42:9 wayyizkor yosef et haxalomot...
'Recalling the dreams...' Joseph seems here to perceive the same irony to which the audience became privy three verses back.
42:12 lo ki...
The brothers protest that they are not spies, to which Joseph says, basically: 'Oh yes you are!' Compare the same use of lo in 18:15.
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