SYNOPSIS: Joseph hurries away to his own room to weep privately, then washes his face and re-enters the room, and they eat. He has generous portions served, but gives special preference to Benjamin. He gives his steward instructions to fill their bags with grain and to put their money back again, and to place his silver cup in Benjamin's sack. They set off on their donkeys, and soon after they have left the city he has his servant run after them to search them for the cup, which is found among Benjamin's things. They are all brought back to town, and Joseph proposes to keep Benjamin there and send the rest of them home.
- Text of the passage (in Nawat)
43:30 ki nikhm'ru raxamaw el axiw
Niphal k-m-r 'be agitated'; raxamim 'compassion.' The singular of this noun, ráxam or réxem, means 'womb.' LXX συνεστρέφετο γὰρ τὰ ἔντερα αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ, Vulg. quia commota fuerant viscera eius, KJC (sic) 'for his bowels did yearn upon his brother' (which perhaps just demonstrates that literalness can be taken too far, way too far), JPS 'for he was overcome with feeling towards his brother.'
wayvaqqesh livqot
EAS 'he wanted to cry', JPS 'he was on the verge of tears', cf. respectively LXX ἐζήτει κλαῦσαι and Vulg. erumpebant lacrimae. The H is an odd expression, perhaps an idiom, literally 'he sought to weep' (as the Greek).
wayyit'appaq
'Collected himself.'
43:33 wayyitm'hu ha'anashim ish el re‛éhu
'The men looked at one another in astonishment.' The at one another part is correct but it corresponds to ish el re‛éhu; note that wayyitm'hu is not a hitpael, it is a qal verb (root t-m-h, with a real h) meaning 'be stunned, be transfixed, be astounded, look in astonishment, be surprised, be shocked' (CHALOT): cf. LXX ἐξίσταντο δὲ οἱ ἄνθρωποι ἕκαστος πρὸς τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ. This raises a question: what were they shocked, astonished etc. about? The brothers sat down in order of age: was this by their own decision, following Joseph's instructions, or did they just sit down at random and then discover that they had accidentally arranged themselves in this seating pattern? If the first, what was there to be astonished about, unless they were astonished by something else, perhaps the fact that Joseph was really inviting them to lunch and this had not been a ruse to get them into his house and then imprison or enslave them? If the last, it was a miracle from God, and they might well be in awe, but what did that have to do with the story? Now we don't really know for sure whether or not Joseph had decided on the seating arrangement, though at a banquet such as this one that seems a distinct possibility considering social custom. The word l'fanaw earlier in the verse is taken by some as a clue, since one of its meanings is precisely 'following his orders' (or as in the JPS translation above, 'by his direction'); but another of its meanings is the basic, literal one of 'in front of him' which also fits just fine in the context. But suppose that, as Speiser and EH would have it, the sense is 'on his command' and he told them to sit in that order: would that be the reason for their astonishment? Puzzled, just possibly; astonished or shocked, I hardly think so! We must still be missing something, and I have a feeling we may never know for certain what. But I have a personal (ungrounded, I suppose) hunch that maybe what is meant is that Joseph told each of the brothers, one by one, where to sit, and since he recognised and knew them he craftily placed each brother in his place so that they would end up in chronological order, as a tease we might say, for we learn from the story that follows that he is not ready to reveal his identity to them yet but he can have a little fun, can't he? Then he waits for the brothers to realise what has happened, and yes they would look at each other with astonishment. This is surely a notion that would have delighted listening audiences, and there is nothing in the text to say that this isn't what was meant...
43:34 xamesh yadot
(JPS) '...but Benjamin's portion was several times that of anyone else.' How to translate this phrase (lit. 'five hands') depends on how we understand xamesh and how we understand yadot. Now, yad 'hand' has to be one of the most polysemic words in BH, so it is fair to ask what it means in this instance. CHALOT says it can mean 'part', with the sub-specification 'multiplicative', and the example it cites is this verse; from that it is not clear to me whether such a meaning is independently corroborated or just an ad hoc conjecture intended to account for the case in hand. Couldn't yad here also just mean a rough measure ('a palm') and xamesh yadot be intended as an approximate and somewhat hyperbolic statement that Ben's portion was a good deal bigger? The tradition of translating xamesh yadot as 'fivefold' goes back apparently to the LXX which has here pentaplasiôs. Other commentators note that the numeral xamesh might serve to convey the notion of 'loads' without specifying how much; this accounts for the translation 'several times.' I think that we might be able to treat xamesh yadot as just meaning 'a more than generous portion' and leave it at that without compromising in any way the literary meaning of the expression!
44:1 et asher ‛al beto
See 43:16.
44:2 w'et g'vi‛i g'vía‛ hakkésef
I suspect that the repetition of the noun here is not for emphasis but rather a grammatical expediency since a noun may only stand in one genitive relation at a time: 'my cup, the cup of silver' is thus nothing but 'my silver cup' formulated as an obligatory apposition, as in JPS 'my silver goblet.' The LXX got it right (τὸ κόνδυ μου τὸ ἀργυροῦν) as did the Vulg. (scyphum autem meum argenteum); the KJV got it wrong ('my cup, the silver cup').
44:3 habbóqer or
'At the light of day.' This or is the perfect of the qal verb '-w-r 'become day, become bright' (CHALOT) which by the looks of it must by a hollow stative verb approximately comparable to bosh (?).
44:4 w'hissagtam
'And overtake them.' The hiphil verb n-s-g means 'overtake, catch up with.' It was seen in 31:25, wayyásseg lavan et ya‛aqov.
lámma shillamtem ra‛a táxat tova
'Why did you repay good with evil?' But of course the brothers have not in this instance done any such thing; the cup has been planted on Benjamin, and Joseph knows it well. Apparently his object is to have a pretext for retaining Benjamin. But might not he also have chosen to operate in this way, and accuse them of this very thing, precisely because that is what they had done years earlier in the case of his abduction? In that case, the words are true after all, and perhaps Joseph counted on the brothers knowing it, deep down, so that his present accusation, while "unfair", is nonetheless true. On the other hand, from the perspective of the brothers who did not actually steal Joseph's cup, this is unjust and they are now in the position of being punished without having "done anything"; thus they are getting a taste of what that feels like! Was that perhaps also part of Joseph's plan? The narrator may have calculated that these are all things that might have passed through the minds of audiences listening to this narrative, and possibly all these ideas are thus in a sense enclosed in the words lámma shillamtem ra‛a táxat tova. On one reading, that phrase could be considered to sum up the moral of the Joseph story: "Why pay good with evil?" Ironically, the story also drives its point home by showing how God can turn the tables on those guilty of this by completely reversing it, for His response is to repay evil with good (cf. Joseph's moving speech in the next chapter)!
44:6 waydabber alehem et hadd'varim ha'élle
'He spoke these words to them.' Surprising that the narrator didn't draw out the suspense by giving the actual dialogue (again). Perhaps it was thought that there was already enough and didn't need hamming up.
44:8 késef o zahav
One can almost imagine a latter-day brother of Joseph responding: késef shmésef! This impression of colloquial rhetoric is reinforced by the continuation in v. 9.
44:9
Hyperbole abounds, for it is a common strategy for increasing the vehemence of one's assertion, particularly where the context is indignation. It is also a sign that the speakers believe they are in the right. English-speaking Christian children are not unfamiliar with this kind of talk: Cross my heart and hope to die! As a dramatic device, however, this has another dimension: the audience, who knows more than the speaker, will hear these exclamations with increasing alarm.
44:10
The narrator deftly twists the knife by having Joseph's emissary agree with the proposal, although in a more moderate form: the culprit will be his slave, and the rest may go free. But the attentive audience will realise that that is not much better, given their knowledge that the "culprit" is none other than Benjamin, the son whom the other brothers have sworn to their father to keep safe at all costs!
44:11-12
So now we have the second tension-filled search scene in Genesis (remember Laban's gods, ch. 31). Some narrative devices are shared by both scenes, which clearly were of a type that audiences must have relished: the searchers start with the oldest, coming last to the person known by the audience to be the one who will be found "guilty", while most of the group being searched (in this case, including the false culprit) are convinced that they are all innocent and willingly cooperate in the search. But the outcomes of the two searches are different; in Laban's case, Rachel really was the thief but escaped detection, whereas now the cup is found in Benjamin's possession (even though he didn't really take it).
44:13 wayyiqr'‛u simlotam
The brothers perform the gesture which in their culture signified grieving and bereavement: they rent their clothes.
wayya‛amos
This verb (‛-m-s) means 'to load (an animal)' or 'lift, carry (a load)' (CHALOT). So now that Benjamin has been arrested, they abort their journey, and having loaded their donkeys (not, literally, reloaded as we find in some of the translations, apparently following Vulg. oneratisque rursum asinis) they returned to the city.
44:14 wayyavo y'huda w'exaw béta yosef
Here the elevation of Judah to primacy among the brothers is fully manifest and complete: if Reuben were still considered the leader of the clan, as his condition of firstborn warrants in principle, one would certainly have said r'uven w'exaw. It is a minor detail in the thread of the story, for which it is hardly significant at all, but on the contrary it is of mammoth importance for The Story, i.e. the larger issue of the history of the emergence of Israel as a nation of which this whole cycle of stories is merely an allegory. Historically in the big picture, and currently for the Judaeans who became the Jews, the "first house" of Israel (as in children of) was Judah (I'm referring to Judah the Kingdom); there was no Kingdom of Reuben. Up until this point in the saga, there have been "literary" hints of a gradual displacement, from Reuben to Judah, of the protagonism we would usually associate with primogeniture, but the shift was still not categorical: sometimes Judah appeared to be the spokesman, sometimes Reuben resurfaced. The switch was not explicit; perhaps Judah just had a lot to say for himself... I have not followed other commentators in noting every instance of this, as the meaning of such things on their own is conjectural and the story can be left to speak for itself. Now, however, there can be no doubt, for you simply do not speak of the group as a whole as "Judah and his brothers" if Judah wasn't in the previous sentence and Reuben is still the chief! However, this tells us nothing of chronology; we cannot tell from this replacement whether, as some have it, the story we are reading symbolizes a complete allegory of prehistoric tribal relations and this stands for the fall of the Reuben tribe and the rise of the Judah tribe, or whether, on the contrary, the casting of Judah in the role of top brother is a backwards projection by the Judaean narrator (in which case perhaps Reuben had the role in the original version, and the changes in casting are a vestige of a merging of versions).
44:16 wayyómer y'huda ma nomar ladoni etc.
'Judah replied: What can we say to my lord?' Judah as definitive spokesman; see note on v. 14.
14:17 xalíla
'God forbid' as in 18:25 and v. 7 in the present passage.
END OF SECTION 10
The break is well-placed. The section we are reading ends with a new twist which changes the situation and the outlook for Jacob's family once again and leaves us hanging on a new precipice.
The one thing that wasn't supposed to happen has happened: Benjamin is in trouble, and the rest are obliged to return home without him. Ironic, isn't it, considering that the whole thing started with the same group of ten returning home to Jacob without Benjamin's older brother Joseph, only that time it was their own doing and they thought they were being clever; now they must give their father the news that Benjamin is also lost, and perhaps send him to Sheol grieving for both of Rachel's children. There is so much poetic justice in this story that it is hard to keep track of it!
The character of Joseph is interesting. In effect he has attained a position of abolute power, both as a virtual head of state and as a man now in a position to decide the destiny of his erstwhile family, having risen from one extreme of life's vicissitudes to the opposite pole in the best fairy-tale fashion by means of an odd sort of chess game in which he is at the same time the ingenuous beneficiary of good luck and the unassailable master strategist. Yet that is probably a circumstance that is more or less true of many who reach the top against the odds. What commands our interest in Joseph qua literary figure is not his power, it is the question: How is he going to use it? It is now absolutely clear that he has the upper hand: what action will he take? We can well imagine how a ruthless tyrant intoxicated with his personal power might act; that is hardly a secret. What we really want and hope is for Joseph to show us the other option, the enlightened way. That is the true challenge which the character Joseph is now up against. He has won worldly power; will his moral prowess be able to dazzle as well?
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