SYNOPSIS: Joseph and his brothers returned to Egypt. Now, with Jacob no longer alive, the brothers started to worry that Joseph would take revenge on them for what they had done to him years before. They went to talk to Joseph and told him that Jacob had instructed them to tell Joseph that he wished for him to forgive them for the injustice they had done. This caused Joseph to weep. The brothers offered to let him dispose of them as his servants. Joseph replied: "Do not worry. I am not God. You may have had evil intentions towards me but God had other ideas, and thanks to what you did we are all alive now. Relax!"
- Text of the passage (in Nawat)
The story that follows is the saga of a family, but like all great literature it manages to talk of many things and lets itself be read on many levels. The sentence just quoted speaks of a journey, and it is easy to think of the whole story that follows as a journey, beginning to the east of Canaan, in northern Mesopotamia, and ending (for now) in Egypt to the southwest. This story, which we might subtitle "From Haran to Goshen," can be interpreted as an allegory, a legend and a symbolic history, and of course it can be, and has been, told and retold, explained and re-explained, borrowed and usurped by other narratives and ideological projects.
But it is basically the story of a family, and here that story draws to a close. Jacob's death is doubly significant in this narrative, as the end of one of the main characters and the end of the last great patriarch in The Family. Now Jacob is gone, and in this epilogue the final loose end is tied up.
50:14 w'khol ha‛olim itto liqbor et aviw
'And all who had gone up with him to bury his father.' The phrase kol ha‛olim is not a noun phrase ('all the goers-up') but the nucleus of a participial relative clause, 'all the [people] who went up', and itto liqbor et aviw are adjuncts of the verb ‛-l-h.
axare qovro et aviw
'After burying his father.' This, on the other hand, is an adjunct of the preceding main clause: wayyáshov yosef mitzráyma 'Joseph returned to Egypt.'
50:15 kol hara‛a asher gamálnu oto
'All the wrong that we did him.' The verb g-m-l means 'perform, carry out.' So also v. 17, ki ra‛a g'malúkha 'because they did you wrong.'
50:16 avíkha tziwwa lifne moto
'Before his death your father left this instruction.' If we want to read this "historically", in search of "facts", that is a bit iffy. How convenient that Jacob didn't say this to Joseph but now that he is gone, Joseph's brothers suddenly have such information! On the other hand, maybe it was true, who's to say: it would have been easy enough for Jacob to say something when Joseph wasn't there, only couldn't they have told Joseph before Jacob died? Perhaps they never got the chance. On the other hand, it wouldn't be the first time Joseph's brothers had agreed on a lie, remember how Jacob was led to think that Joseph had been eaten by a wild animal, so why believe them this time? So if facts are what we want, it is true that the book says Jacob said this but it says so through the mouths of liars, so what does that prove? On the other hand, what's the difference? Whether Jacob asked Joseph to forgive his brothers or he didn't ask him, Joseph is going to forgive the brothers in any case, so what the brothers achieve by making up that story, if they made it up, is to show things that reflect on themselves and their own moral stature but hardly change the course of the story. Actually it doesn't seem to make much difference what any of them ever say or do, the story seems to proceed the way it wants to, whether because of them or despite them. So Joseph may have been as doubtful as we are about the truthfulness of this report of his father's instructions, but all he probably did was smile to himself. And weep (v. 17).
50:17 anna
Not the interrogative place adverb ána 'whither?', which may be spelt the same in Hebrew, but an interjection which expresses pleading: 'I beseech you.' EK proposes to derive it from the interjection ahah 'ah!' and the particle na 'please.' Only here in Genesis, but it occurs a dozen times in the whole Tanakh.
sa na pésha‛ axékha w'xaTTatam
'Please forgive the offense of your brothers and their guilt.' The verb n-s-' 'to lift' has here the meaning of 'to pardon', cf. (40:13): b'‛od sh'lóshet yamim yissa far‛o et roshékha 'In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head,' i.e. will pardon you. The noun pésha‛ 'rebelion, revolt' has occurred once before in Genesis, in Jacob's angry rejoinder to Laban (31:36): wayyíxar l'ya‛aqov wayyárev b'lavan wayyá‛an ya‛aqov wayyómer l'lavan ma pish‛i ma xaTáti ki daláqta axaray 'Now Jacob became incensed and took up his grievance with Laban. Jacob spoke up and said to Laban: What is my crime, what is my guilt that you should pursue me?'
w'‛atta sa na l'fésha‛ ‛avde elohe avíkha
'Therefore, please forgive the offense of the servants of the God of your father.' Now it is the brothers themselves speaking, with the self-reference as ‛avde elohe avíkha calculated to draw Joseph's attention to the bond they share. For as EH observes, citing Abravanel: "They do not appeal to the claim of brotherliness because they forfeited it by their own actions."
wayyevk yosef b'dabb'ram elaw
'And Joseph wept as they spoke to him.' Why did Joseph weep? Was it because of what his father had (supposedly) said to his brothers? Or was it because of what his brothers expressed, unknowingly no doubt, by the fact of their telling him this. The fact that this was Joseph's reaction also tells the audience a great deal about Joseph, of course.
50:18 wayyel'khu
In v. 16, on the other hand, it says: waytzawwu el yosef lemor 'they sent this message to Joseph'; here it says 'went.' EH suggests that this means the brothers first sent a message because they were afraid of his reaction; upon seeing that he was not angry, they visited him in person.
wayyipp'lu l'fanaw wayyom'ru hinnénnu l'kha la‛avadim
'They fell down (JPS 'flung themselves') before him and said: Behold, we are your servants.' As in Joseph's childhood dream. But displaying wisdom he had not yet acquired then, he now replies...
50:19 hatáxat elohim âni
'Am I a substitute for God?' Cf. 30:2, where Rachel complains to her husband Jacob that she had not conceived, and he angrily retorts: hatáxat elohim anókhi 'ditto.' It must have been a stock phrase. The contexts are admittedly different. Note that táxat 'under' often means 'instead of' as here.
As for what Joseph's reply here means in moral terms, I suspect a whole book could be written on that subject. Fortunately, it is not my job to write it. But if we were intent on looking for a moral to this little story and the long story of which it is the conclusion, it might be this: No man is a substitute for God. If you call a man a god you do so at your peril; you also deny God by doing it. Do not treat a man as a god, do not expect a man's performance to match that of a god, and do not offend God by committing this error. Neither Adam nor Noah nor Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, nor Joseph nor the great Pharaoh himself, nor Moses nor King David nor even the Messiah to come is exempt from this. All sinned and erred, all had God's guidance and played their part in His game, as did all the other men and women in this story: none was perfect, yet they all teach us something about life; they all tried their hardest, they all failed some of the tests, they all glow in their constellations, they all have their mission, and they all know their place, or find out what it is sooner or later: and not one of them replaces God, so they can all say hatáxat elohim âni and the answer will always be: no.
The authors of the Torah had a story to tell and they also had a point to make. The story, we have read. The point is this: sh'ma‛ yisra'el YHWH elohénu YHWH exad 'Listen Israel: YHWH is our God and there is only one YHWH.' Those before us had all sorts of gods. Some think that a piece of wood or stone can be a god; it isn't. Some think a man can; he isn't. God is God, and has no substitute, personification or intermediary.
Joseph may have been using an ordinary, idiomatic catchphrase when he is recorded as saying to his brothers hatáxat elohim âni, but what he is saying, the last and lasting message of this book, is not trivialized or ridiculed thereby, it is merely worked artfully into the fabric or the narrative.
Dreams have a way of coming true but they also have a way of having an unexpected meaning. The Pharaoh's baker and his cupbearer had very similar dreams on the same night, and they both came true yet their meanings were utterly different. What of Joseph's dreams about himself and his brothers, what did they mean and what surprise do they conceal?
Joseph saw his brothers bowing down to him in his dreams. In the present passage, that is what they do: they not only prostrate themselves in front of him but they beg to become his slaves. And there were good reasons: Joseph had become one of the most powerful men in the world, and (on account of their own actions) they had every reason to fear him now!
What Joseph's childish dreams hadn't shown was what happens next, and it is the essential point of this closing scene. Joseph weeps; gracefully tells them not to worry about all that; rejects their offer of service as unnecessary; and all this he does through a simple Hebrew phrase of three words by means of which he points out to them, and us, that neither he, nor (by implication) anything or anyone else, is, or ever will be, táxat elohim, a substitute for God.
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