Genesis42chapter 42

Genesis 42:1-2

Famine drives the family toward Egypt for the third time in three generations. Abram went down without being told to in chapter 12, Isaac was forbidden to go down in chapter 26, and now Jacob orders his sons down so that we may live, and not die. Matthew Henry notes that all three patriarchs met famine in the very land that had been promised them, which was one way of teaching them to look for a better country.

Genesis 42:3-5

The writer calls them Joseph's ten brethren rather than Jacob's ten sons, which points the reader at the man they are walking toward without knowing it. John Gill notes that they go down to buy corn from the brother they sold, and they bow to him three verses later. This descent of ten becomes the descent of the whole house in chapter 46, where God tells Jacob not to fear to go down and promises to bring him up again, and Israel will walk that road as a nation.

Genesis 42:6-8

They bow themselves before him with their faces to the earth, which is the sheaves of his dream standing up in front of him. He knew them and they knew him not, and he made himself strange and spake roughly to them. The deceiving runs down this family in order: Jacob fooled a blind father with his brother's clothes, these men fooled Jacob with a coat and a kid's blood, and now the brother they sold hides behind an Egyptian face. Stephen retells the scene in Acts 7 and says only that Joseph was made known to his brethren at the second time, and the older writers built their whole reading of Joseph on that hinge.

Genesis 42:9

More than twenty years on, the dreams are the first thing the text names, before any word about what he felt. Ten men are on the ground, without Benjamin and without their father, so the sheaves are only partly answered and the eleven stars of the second dream not at all. Genesis states its own rule at 41:32, that a dream doubled is a thing established by God and will shortly come to pass, and the man who told Pharaoh so is now watching it work on himself.

Genesis 42:10-13

They answer with the family register, twelve brethren, the sons of one man in the land of Canaan, and the reader hears the one word in it that is false. One is not, they say, standing in front of the brother they sold, and they will repeat the line to Jacob at the end of the chapter. John Gill notes that their first answer had sounded as though there were no others, so the fuller count now looks to Joseph like a story being adjusted under pressure.

Genesis 42:14-17

The test he sets is aimed at one thing, getting Benjamin down to Egypt, which is the only road left to the rest of the dreams. He swears by the life of Pharaoh, and Adam Clarke reads that as the Egyptian form of an oath, the speech of the man they take him to be. Then he puts all ten of them in ward for three days, and the older writers set that beside chapter 37, where they put him in a pit and sat down to eat bread.

Genesis 42:18-20

On the third day the terms turn around, one brother held instead of nine, and the rest sent home with corn for starving households. Joseph gives his reason in four words, for I fear God, which is the first thing these men have heard about God since they walked in. Adam Clarke notes the definite article in the Hebrew, which sets the God Joseph fears against the gods of the country he governs.

Genesis 42:21-22

They put words to it in front of him without knowing he can hear: we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear. Chapter 37 never reported that Joseph begged, so the reader learns it here, more than twenty years late, from the men who would not listen. Reuben's phrase, his blood is required, reaches back to Abel's blood crying out of the ground in chapter 4, and the arc that opened with a man killing his brother is now moving toward a man weeping on the brothers who sold him.

Genesis 42:23-24

An interpreter stands between them, and it is the wall he keeps up while he listens to a confession meant for no Egyptian ears. He turns himself about from them and weeps, the first of many times he weeps over these men before the story ends. Then he takes Simeon and binds him before their eyes, and Adam Clarke reports the old rabbinic supposition that Simeon was the brother who had bound Joseph and put him in the pit.

Genesis 42:25-26

They came to buy, and they leave with the corn and with the price of it still in their sacks. Matthew Henry read the returned money as a picture of Christ giving out supplies without money and without price, which is what the older writers saw in Joseph rather than anything the New Testament states about him. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note that the kindness lay within Joseph's own discretion and defrauded the revenue of nothing.

Genesis 42:27-28

One sack is opened at the inn for fodder and the money is lying in its mouth. Their heart failed them and they were afraid, and the question they ask, what is this that God hath done unto us, is the first time these men read God into what is happening to them. That reading grows through the rest of the story, to God hath found out the iniquity of thy servants in chapter 44 and to God meant it unto good in chapter 50, and it starts with a kindness that frightened them worse than the accusation had.

Genesis 42:29-34

The report they give Jacob is accurate in its words and short in two places. They leave out what they said to one another in the ward, that they were guilty concerning their brother, and they do not tell him that nobody had asked for a youngest brother until they offered one. They also soften the ending, adding that they shall traffick in the land, which the man never said to them.

Genesis 42:35-36

Every man's bundle of money is in his sack, the father sees it this time as well, and they are afraid together. Jacob counts his losses and says all these things are against me, though Joseph is alive and governing Egypt, Simeon is the pledge that will bring them back, and Benjamin is the one condition of the meeting. Spurgeon preached on that line that we magnify the hosts of our troubles and underestimate the armies of our benefits, and Matthew Henry wrote that we often take for against us what is really working for us.

Genesis 42:37-38

Reuben offers his father the lives of two grandsons, and Jacob does not answer him at all. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the offer as a clumsy way of promising the greatest possible care rather than a bargain anyone meant to keep. The weight of the family shifts in the next chapter, where Judah offers himself as surety and then stands in Benjamin's place in chapter 44, and the blessing in chapter 49 passes the firstborn by and rests on him. Jacob closes with the words he used the day he first believed Joseph dead, that they would bring his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.