Genesis42chapter 42

Rashi hears a prophecy in the word Jacob uses for going down to Egypt. He says the father did not tell them to go but to go down, "an allusion to the 210 years during which Israel was to be enslaved in Egypt", the number being the value of the letters (Rashi on Genesis 42:2:1, the Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary by M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann, 1929 to 1934, public domain). He reads the brothers' hiding in the crowd as obedience to their father, who had told them not to enter the city all at one gate, and later as the ground of Joseph's charge against them (Rashi on Genesis 42:5:1 and 42:12:1). Jacob's fear for Benjamin at home as well as on the road he answers with a saying of Rabbi Eliezer the son of Jacob: "We may infer from this that Satan accuses a man at the time of danger" (Rashi on Genesis 42:4:1). Joseph's disguise he puts in his speech, that he made himself "a stranger to them in his conversation, speaking harshly", on Genesis Rabbah 91:7 (Rashi on Genesis 42:7:1), and the reason he knew them while they did not know him he takes from Yevamot 88a: "because, when he left them they were full-bearded" when he last saw them (Rashi on Genesis 42:8:1). Joseph's oath he reads as a form of words rather than an oath: "Whenever he swore for the sake of appearance (literally, falsely) he swore by Pharaoh's life" (Rashi on Genesis 42:15:1). When the brothers say they are all one man's sons he finds more in it than they meant, "The Holy Spirit was enkindled in them and they included him with themselves", so that the missing brother was counted in (Rashi on Genesis 42:11:1). At the weeping he keeps the detail plain: "He moved some distance away from them so that they should not see him weeping" (Rashi on Genesis 42:24:1). Radak reads Joseph's change of plan as a mercy with a purpose: he will not hold them all while their families starve, "I will only detain one of you in order to put your claim to the test" (Radak on Genesis 42:18:1, translated by Eliyahu Munk, HaChut Hameshulash, CC-BY). Every one of the twenty-four commentaries the corpus holds for this chapter carries its English, so no classical comment on it stands here as a bare citation.