Genesis41chapter 41

Genesis 41:1-4

Chapter 40 ended with the butler forgetting Joseph, and chapter 41 opens two full years later. Pharaoh dreams of cattle coming up out of the river, and in Egypt the river is the Nile, on which the whole food supply of the country depended. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note that oxen stood in Egyptian picture writing for the earth and its food, so the dream strikes at the nation's life at its source. Seven lean beasts eat seven fat ones, and Pharaoh wakes.

Genesis 41:5-7

He sleeps again and dreams a second time, seven full ears on one stalk swallowed by seven thin ones. Clarke observes that the east wind is the blighting wind throughout Scripture, blamed for the ruin of corn and fruit from Exodus to Jonah, and that in Egypt it arrives off the Arabian desert. Genesis has doubled a dream twice already, at the sheaves and the stars in chapter 37 and at the butler and the baker in chapter 40, and the reason for the doubling gets stated outright at verse 32.

Genesis 41:8

his spirit was troubled: In the morning his spirit is troubled and he calls for all the magicians of Egypt and all the wise men, and none of them can read it. Egypt kept a trained profession for exactly this work, and the profession fails in front of the king. The same shape returns centuries later in Babylon, where Nebuchadnezzar's wise men cannot read his dream, a Hebrew captive can, and the captive is set over the province.

Genesis 41:9-13

The butler speaks at last, and his opening words are about himself. He describes Joseph as a young man, an Hebrew, servant to the captain of the guard, three descriptions that place him at the bottom of every ladder in Egypt. Two years of silence end because Pharaoh needed something, not because the butler kept his word. Joseph is remembered on the day he becomes useful.

Genesis 41:14

He is brought hastily out of the dungeon, and before he can stand in front of Pharaoh he shaves and changes his raiment. Three times now a garment has come off Joseph, the coat his brothers stripped from him in chapter 37, the garment he left in Potiphar's wife's hand in chapter 39, and the prison clothes here. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note that the Egyptians alone among their neighbours wanted a smooth chin, so even the shaving is Egypt's custom laid on a Hebrew. Within thirty verses a king will array him in fine linen.

Genesis 41:15-16

Pharaoh credits him with the skill and Joseph gives it away in his first sentence, It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace. He had said the same thing to two prisoners in chapter 40, that interpretations belong to God, and thirteen years of slavery and prison have not moved him off the line. Clarke reads the Hebrew as saying that Joseph is not necessary to the king's comfort, because God already has him under his care.

Genesis 41:17-21

Pharaoh retells the first dream, and the retelling runs longer than the telling did. He adds that he never saw cattle so bad in all the land of Egypt, and that after the lean ones had eaten the fat ones it could not be known that they had eaten them. Genesis could have written that Pharaoh told Joseph his dream and moved on, and instead it prints both accounts in full. The detail the king adds is the one that makes the famine terrible, that swallowing the plenty will leave no sign of plenty behind.

Genesis 41:22-24

He retells the second dream and ends where the chapter began, that he told this to the magicians and there was none that could declare it to him. The failure of Egypt's wise men is reported twice, once by the narrator at verse 8 and once by the king himself here. Nothing has been solved by the retelling, and the man who can read it has been standing in the room since verse 14.

Genesis 41:25-27

Joseph's first word on the meaning is that the two dreams are one dream, and his second is that God hath shewed Pharaoh what he is about to do. He tells a pagan king to his face that the God of the Hebrews is the one who spoke to him in his own bed. Clarke points out that Egypt credited the Nile with both plenty and want, and Joseph puts the river under the hand of God before he says a word about years. Then he reads it out, seven and seven.

Genesis 41:28-31

Seven years of great plenty, then seven of famine so heavy that all the plenty shall be forgotten and the plenty shall not be known in the land. The language of forgetting comes back at verse 51, where Joseph names his firstborn Manasseh because God made him forget all his toil. What the famine will do to Egypt's memory of good years, God does for Joseph with the bad ones. Gill notes that abundance on this scale rested on the Nile rising high year after year, and that seven such years running is credited in the text to God rather than to the river.

Genesis 41:32

Genesis stops here and states its own rule, that the dream was doubled because the thing is established by God and God will shortly bring it to pass. Repetition in this book is confirmation rather than emphasis, and the rule reaches further than dreams. Joseph had two dreams of his own as a boy, the sheaves and then the stars, and by the rule he is now reciting to a king, those two were established as well. He is standing in the palace at the hour they begin to come true.

Genesis 41:33-36

Joseph was asked for a meaning and hands back a policy, a fifth part taken through the plenty and stored in the cities against the famine. The interpretation on its own would have saved nobody. He does not name himself for the post, and the older writers read that silence two ways: Ephrem the Syrian took him to be speaking of himself out of modesty, while Clarke held that he could not have foreseen his own elevation and gave the counsel without reference to it.

Genesis 41:37-40

The plan pleases Pharaoh and all his servants, and the king's question is whether they can find such a one as this, a man in whom the Spirit of God is. Clarke notes that the Hebrew behind that phrase is the same pair of words used in Genesis 1:2, and here they sit in an Egyptian king's mouth. Pharaoh hands over his house and the ruling of his people and keeps only the throne. The man he is speaking to came out of a dungeon that morning.

Genesis 41:41-43

The whole investiture takes three verses, the signet ring off Pharaoh's own hand, vestures of fine linen, a gold chain, the second chariot, and a cry going before him. Clarke takes the ring to make Joseph keeper of the royal seal, so the man who could sign nothing for himself now signs for Egypt. The word cried before him, abrech, is left untranslated in the Hebrew, and Clarke says plainly that its meaning is unknown while Jerome records that Aquila and Symmachus went in different directions with it. His brothers stripped a coat off him in chapter 37 and a king clothes him in linen here.

Genesis 41:44-45

Pharaoh gives him an Egyptian throne name and an Egyptian wife, Asenath, daughter of the priest of On, which is Heliopolis and the centre of Egypt's sun worship. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the marriage as completing his naturalisation by tying him to a family of high rank. Gill records that the Jewish writers took his new name to mean a revealer of secrets, and Clarke answers that its sense is as little known as abrech. Two tribes of Israel will descend from this Egyptian priest's daughter.

Genesis 41:46-49

He is thirty, and chapter 37 had him at seventeen when his brothers sold him, so thirteen years stand between the pit and the palace. He gathers corn as the sand of the sea until he left numbering, for it was without number. Genesis has used that measure before for the seed promised to Abraham and claimed back by Jacob in prayer, and here the same words are counting grain. The grain is what keeps the family carrying that promise alive.

Genesis 41:50-52

Two sons are born before the famine, and their names carry the whole story. Manasseh, because God hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house, said by a man whose father's house is about to walk into Egypt looking for bread. Ephraim, because God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction, said by the man who governs that land. Genesis names them here in birth order, and in chapter 48 a blind Jacob will cross his hands over these same two boys and set the younger in front of the elder, which is the sixth time the book does that.

Genesis 41:53-55

The plenty ends on schedule and the dearth comes according as Joseph had said, in all lands, with bread in the land of Egypt alone. When his own people cry to him, Pharaoh sends them to a Hebrew who had been a slave in his kingdom, with one instruction, Go unto Joseph; what he saith to you, do. Matthew Henry and Ambrose of Milan both read that sentence as pointing past Joseph to Christ opening his stores to the hungry. The New Testament never once calls the Joseph story typology, so this stands as what those writers saw in it.

Genesis 41:56-57

Joseph opens the storehouses, and all countries come into Egypt to buy corn because the famine was sore in all lands. Clarke reads the phrase all the face of the earth as the face of that land, since the verse itself closes on Egypt. That last sentence is what starts ten brothers down a road they do not know they are walking, and it is the road Abram took in chapter 12 when a famine drove him down to Egypt. In chapter 46 God will tell Jacob to go down without fear and will promise to bring him up again.