Genesis41chapter 41

Rashi reads Pharaoh's dream as a picture whose every detail carries its meaning. The well-favoured cattle stand for the years of plenty, and he gives the sign a social sense: "This was an indication of a period of plenty, when people show themselves well-disposed one to another, for no-one then envies another person's prosperity" (Rashi on Genesis 41:2:1, the Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary by M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann, 1929 to 1934, public domain). The eating of the fat cattle by the lean he reads the same way, "indicating that all the joy occasioned by the years of plenty would be forgotten in the days of famine" (Rashi on Genesis 41:4:1). He notices how the butler speaks of Joseph and judges him for it: "Cursed be the wicked for the favours they do are never really complete!", because he named him as a lad, a Hebrew and a slave (Rashi on Genesis 41:12:1). Joseph's disclaimer before Pharaoh he takes at its word, that the skill is not Joseph's own and that God will put an answer in his mouth for Pharaoh's welfare (Rashi on Genesis 41:16:1). On the doubled dream he rules plainly, "all together they are only seven years", and explains the repetition as a sign that the thing is ready to happen (Rashi on Genesis 41:26:1). Much of the rest of his commentary here is translation work, and several times he gives the old French word he used himself for a thing the Hebrew names. Sforno reads the failure of the Egyptian wise men as a failure of method: "He noted that all his professional wise men proceeded from the premise that they had to interpret two separate dreams", where Pharaoh himself held it to be one dream, "and this is why all your interpreters have failed to come up with the correct answer" (Sforno on Genesis 41:24:1 and 41:25:1, translated by Eliyahu Munk, HaChut Hameshulash, CC-BY). Radak notes the ordinary fact that a man repeating his own account adds and drops details, and reads Pharaoh's second telling by that rule (Radak on Genesis 41:17:1 and 41:20:1, Munk translation, CC-BY). Ibn Ezra comments here at 41:9:1, 41:10:1 and 41:21:1, and the corpus holds no English of him under a licence permitting quotation, so he stands as a citation.