Joseph

Joseph is Jacob's eleventh son and the first child of Rachel, the wife Jacob had worked fourteen years for. Genesis picks him up at seventeen, tending flocks with his brothers, wearing a robe his father gave him and telling dreams his brothers could not stand. In that same chapter they sell him to a caravan going down to Egypt. He never saw Canaan again. The errand itself covered real ground: Hebron to Shechem is reckoned at roughly sixty-five to eighty kilometers by the ridge road, and Genesis 37:17 has him go on from there to Dothan, another twenty-five kilometers north, before he found them. The middle of his life is the part the retelling skips. He was a household slave in Potiphar's house, then a convict, and Genesis 41:46 says he was thirty years old when he entered Pharaoh's service. That is thirteen years between the pit and the palace, and Genesis spends almost all of them on a man working for other people and waiting. What he got right is in the text. He refused his master's wife and gave his own reason for it, that it would be sin against God. He kept refusing, day after day. He ran the household, then the jail, then the country. He noticed that two frightened prisoners looked downcast one morning and asked them why, and the whole deliverance runs through that question. When he finally stood in front of Pharaoh he opened by disowning the skill: “I myself cannot do it.” The same book records what a reader would rather skip past. He told the dreams to the people the dreams were about, and Genesis says twice that the hatred grew afterward. He put his brothers through a long ordeal and never explains why, and their father is left grieving through most of it. He ran the famine as a grain monopoly that ended with the Egyptian people handing Pharaoh their money, their livestock, their land and finally themselves. Genesis reports all of it and praises and blames none of it. The one story he is known for is Genesis 45. He has had them in front of him for two chapters, speaking through an interpreter, and Judah has just offered to stay a slave in Benjamin's place. Joseph clears the room and tells them who he is. He names the crime plainly, that they sold him into Egypt, and in the next breath he says God sent him ahead of them to save lives. Five chapters later, after their father's funeral, they come back afraid he has only been waiting, and he says the same thing again in the sentence everyone knows. He brought his father and the whole household into the district of Goshen and fed them there. He lived a hundred and ten years and saw his great-grandchildren. Then he made his brothers swear that when God brought them out of Egypt they would carry his bones with them. Four centuries later Moses took the coffin out on the night of the Exodus, and Joshua put it in the ground at Shechem, in the field his father had bought. Hebrews 11:22 names that instruction, and nothing else in his life, as his faith.

The New Testament handles Joseph in two places, and it is worth knowing what each one actually claims. The longer is Stephen's, in Acts 7:9-16, spoken on trial in Jerusalem. He opens with the crime and with God's answer to it: “Because the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. But God was with him and rescued him from all his troubles. He granted Joseph favor and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh king of Egypt, who appointed him ruler over Egypt and all his household.” He goes on through the famine, the two journeys, the revelation on their second visit, and the sending for Jacob and all his relatives, seventy-five in all at Acts 7:14. Stephen is not drawing a portrait of Christ out of Joseph's biography. He is laying down the first beat of the pattern his whole speech is built on. God sends a deliverer, the man's own people refuse him, and God sends him again. Moses is the second beat at Acts 7:35, and the pattern lands on the Just One at Acts 7:52. Hebrews 11:22 picks one act out of the whole life and calls it faith: “By faith Joseph, when his end was near, spoke about the exodus of the Israelites and gave instructions about his bones.” Not the refusal in Potiphar's house, not the thirteen years of slavery and prison, not the scene in Genesis 45. A funeral instruction. Theodoret of Cyrus gave the logic in one line in the fifth century, that Joseph would not have given directions about his remains if he had not believed the divine promises. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, writing in 1871, read two claims out of the verse, that Joseph had no doubt his descendants would obtain the land, and that he believed in the resurrection of the body. That second claim is their reading and this page gives it as theirs. Beyond those two passages, the parallels most readers know were drawn by the church rather than by the apostles. This site scores them on its Joseph and Joshua page, which sets nine parallels beside their texts and marks each one for what stands behind it. Four rest on something Stephen states as fact in Acts 7. Five are readings the church has drawn with no New Testament text behind them. The number of times the New Testament itself calls Joseph a type of Christ is zero. That ledger is the instrument this page defers to, and nothing here contradicts its scoring. Genesis 50:20 is the sentence everyone knows and no apostle quotes. Joseph tells his brothers that they intended evil against him and that God intended the same act for good. The Hebrew verb is chashab, which means to weave or to fabricate, and it stands on both sides of the sentence. The brothers wove the act one way and God wove it another out of the same threads. Peter makes the identical move about the cross at Acts 2:23, an act carried out by wicked men and handed over by God's set purpose. No apostle cites Genesis 50:20 of the cross, so the logic is apostolic where the citation is not. The fathers who built the tradition said plainly what they were doing. Ambrose of Milan wrote the most sustained ancient reading of the cycle, On Joseph the Patriarch, in the late fourth century, and takes “Please come near me” at Genesis 45:4 as Christ speaking to his own. Chromatius of Aquileia, preaching around AD 400, set the twenty pieces of Genesis 37:28 beside the thirty of Matthew 26:15 and observed that the servant was sold at the higher price. Caesarius of Arles, in the early sixth century, opens his own treatment by calling it mystical or allegorical interpretation, which is an author telling his hearers that Genesis is not making the claim he is about to make. These readings are given here at full strength and named for what they are. None of this takes anything from Israel. Genesis 48 gives Joseph two tribes inside the land, and Genesis 49:22-26 gives him the long blessing. Ezekiel 37:16-19 makes the stick of Joseph half of a promised reunion of the whole house of Israel in their own country, joined into one stick in God's hand. Acts 7 is a Jewish man arguing from Jewish history in the Temple courts, in front of Jewish judges. The type is a reading laid over a history that stays Israel's own, and this site's tradition holds that God's promises to Israel stand.