Genesis39chapter 39

Genesis 39:1-2

The verse says brought down twice, and going down to Egypt is a road Genesis keeps returning to. Abram went down in a famine and came back rebuked, Isaac was forbidden to go at all, and Jacob's whole house will go down in chapter 46 with God promising to bring them up again. Joseph is the first of the family carried there against his will, sold by his brothers into the country their descendants will be enslaved in. Then comes the sentence that governs the chapter, that the LORD was with Joseph, and it is said of a slave.

Genesis 39:3-4

his master saw that the Lord was with him: An Egyptian who knows nothing of the God of Abraham can see the effect of him on the work of a slave's hands, and Calvin says the grace on Joseph shone plainly enough to become visible to a heathen. What Joseph finds in his master's sight is grace, the same phrase used of Noah in chapter 6 where the word first appears in the Bible, and here it falls on a man in front of a foreign owner. Everything Potiphar has goes into Joseph's hand, which is the word this chapter keeps reaching for.

Genesis 39:5-6

A pagan household is blessed for the sake of the one Hebrew slave inside it, which is the promise of chapter 12 working at the smallest possible scale. It widens from this house to a prison, then to Pharaoh's court, and at last to all countries coming into Egypt for bread. The section closes by calling Joseph a goodly person and well favoured, the same description given to Rachel his mother in chapter 29, and that line is the hinge into the trouble.

Genesis 39:7-9

cast her eyes upon Joseph: Joseph gives two reasons in order, his master's trust first and then God, and he calls the thing sin against God rather than an injury to the household. His words are that nothing has been kept back from him but her, because she is his master's wife, which is the shape of the first prohibition in the book, everything given and one thing withheld. One chapter earlier Judah turned aside to a woman by the road and said nothing about God at all.

Genesis 39:10-12

The pressure is daily and the text says so, which makes the refusal a repeated act rather than one good moment. When the house is empty she takes hold of him, and he leaves the garment in her hand and runs. That is the second garment of his used as evidence for a lie, after his brothers dipped his coat in the blood of a kid and carried it to their father, and both times the man handed the cloth believes it.

Genesis 39:13-15

She calls the servants first and frames it as a grievance against her husband, saying he hath brought in an Hebrew unto us to mock us, so the household is set against Potiphar as much as against Joseph. Matthew Henry notices that she never once calls him her husband in the speech, only he. Adam Clarke points out that the word she chooses for mock is the verb behind Isaac's name and the word used of Isaac sporting with Rebekah in chapter 26, so it carries what she wants without her having to say it.

Genesis 39:16-18

She keeps the cloth and waits for Potiphar to come home, so the charge is prepared rather than blurted out. Told the second time the story shifts, and the Hebrew becomes the Hebrew servant which thou hast brought unto us, laying part of the blame on the man she is complaining to. John Gill asks the question the account leaves standing, why a man fleeing an assault would strip off his coat and leave it behind, and nobody in that house asks it.

Genesis 39:19-20

Potiphar's wrath is kindled, and then he stops well short of what the charge would allow, since an attempt on his wife by a slave could have cost Joseph his life. He is put instead into the king's prison, which older readers took as a sign the master did not wholly believe the story he had been handed. Joseph answers nothing here, and no defence of his is recorded anywhere in the chapter. Psalm 105 says his feet were hurt with fetters and he was laid in iron, and that prison is the one place where Pharaoh's butler and baker will be within reach of him in the next chapter.

Genesis 39:21-22

The sentence that opened the chapter is said again in a far worse place, and this is the fourth time in twenty-three verses. What follows runs the same order as before, favour in the eyes of the man in charge, then everything in the place committed to Joseph's hand. Falling from a great house to a prison changes his circumstances entirely and changes nothing about the one thing the chapter keeps repeating.

Genesis 39:23

The word hand runs the length of the chapter, from the hands of the Ishmeelites who sold him, to all that Potiphar put into his hand, to the garment left in her hand, to every prisoner committed to his. The closing clause repeats what was said of him in the great house, that the LORD made it to prosper, so the chapter ends where it began with the man now in irons. Matthew Henry and John Wesley both read Joseph here as a figure of Christ, a servant falsely accused and bound and numbered with transgressors, and the New Testament never says so itself, which is why this is offered as their reading rather than as a claim the text makes.