Genesis40chapter 40

Genesis 40:1-3

The chapter opens after the accusation in Potiphar's house, and Joseph's descent has now run from a pit to a slave market to a prison. Two of Pharaoh's officers offend at once, and both are put in the very place where Joseph was bound. Henry's line on it is that high places are slippery places, and nothing is more uncertain than the favour of princes. Genesis has been pairing things since Joseph's own two dreams in chapter 37, and it is about to pair two more.

Genesis 40:4

A prisoner is put in charge of other prisoners, and the man who does it is the captain of the guard, whom Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take to be Potiphar himself. On that reading the master who jailed him is trusting him again with officers of the crown while leaving him in the cell. The word behind a season is simply days, and Clarke reports the older reckoning that it ran a full year, since Pharaoh calls them to account on the next birthday.

Genesis 40:5-7

Two men dream on the same night, and Genesis keeps doubling dreams: Abimelech warned at 20:3, Jacob at the ladder at 28:12, Laban stopped at 31:24, Joseph's own pair at 37:5-11, these two here, and Pharaoh's pair in the next chapter. The book states its own rule at 41:32, that the dream was doubled because the thing is established by God and God will shortly bring it to pass. Clarke's note is that these were not the ordinary workings of a tired mind but dreams with an interpretation waiting in them. Joseph, who is the one who notices in the morning that they look sad, is the man in Genesis whose own dreams nobody ever interprets for him.

Genesis 40:8

Egypt was full of professional interpreters, and these two men have no access to a single one of them. Joseph hands the credit away before anybody offers it to him, which Henry sets beside Daniel doing the same thing in front of Nebuchadnezzar. He asks for the dreams only after he has said whose the answers are.

Genesis 40:9-11

The butler dreams his own daily work: a vine, three branches, ripe grapes, and Pharaoh's cup in his hand. Clarke notes that the wine here is pressed straight from the grape into the cup with no fermenting, which is how the office was really done, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown add that the cup rested on the fingertips rather than in the fist. Nothing in the picture is strange to the man dreaming it, and what he cannot supply is the count of days.

Genesis 40:12-13

Gill points out that three branches would bid as fair to mean three months or three years as three days, so the reading is given to Joseph rather than drawn out of the picture. He tells the butler that Pharaoh will lift up thine head and restore him to his place, back to handing over the cup after the former manner. The same phrase returns six verses later with three words added, and those three words turn it into the opposite sentence.

Genesis 40:14-15

This is the only thing Joseph asks of anybody in the whole story, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown hear in it a longing for release that his faith had not settled. The word behind think on me is the word Genesis uses when God remembered Noah in the ark and remembered Rachel in her barrenness, and it is the word the last verse of this chapter takes away from him. Wesley notes that he says only that he was stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, naming neither the brothers who sold him nor the woman whose word put him here. He calls Canaan the land of the Hebrews while all his family owns in it is a burial cave at Machpelah and a parcel of ground at Shechem.

Genesis 40:16-17

The baker speaks only after he has heard a favourable answer given to the other man, and the text says so in as many words. His dream keeps the three, but the goods sit on his head instead of resting in his hand, and birds are eating them. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note that birds were held sacred in Egypt and could not lawfully be killed, so a man who could not drive them off would feel the dread of the picture before anyone read it. Jerome records that where the Greek had three baskets of wheat, the Hebrew gives three measures of meal.

Genesis 40:18-19

Joseph gives the true reading when the true reading is a death sentence, and that is the harder half of the gift. Pharaoh will lift up thy head from off thee, the butler's own words with three added that turn restoration into execution. Clarke notes that Egyptian practice beheaded the criminal first and hung the body afterwards, so the beheading and the tree are two halves of one procedure rather than two punishments.

Genesis 40:20-22

the third day, which was Pharaoh's birthday: Both readings come true on the third day, and the feast lifts up the head of both men in one sentence, the one to his office and the other to a tree. Clarke notes that this is the earliest birthday feast on record in Scripture, and the only other one it reports is Herod's, which also ends with a head. Gill passes on the Targum's account that the butler was cleared of the plot to poison Pharaoh and the baker was not. What the chapter has now established is that whatever Joseph says happens exactly, which is the one fact Pharaoh will need two years from here.

Genesis 40:23

The verse says it twice over, once as a thing left undone and once as a thing done, and then two full years pass before the next chapter opens. The verb is the one Joseph had used when he asked to be thought on, so the word he reached for is the word that fails him. Henry passes on Lightfoot's reading of the two prisoners as the two thieves at the cross, one saved and one condemned, and adds that the man who asked to be remembered in a kingdom was not forgotten. Clarke reports that many commentators have found a parallel to Christ in every circumstance of Joseph's history, and it is worth saying that the New Testament itself never names the Joseph story as a type.