Genesis44chapter 44

Genesis 44:1-2

Joseph orders the money put back into every sack a second time and his own silver cup hidden in Benjamin's. Silver had gone into these sacks once before in chapter 42, and silver had come into these men's hands once before that, when they took twenty pieces for their brother at Dothan. The thing that will convict them is the metal they were paid in.

Genesis 44:3-4

They are sent off at first light and overtaken before they are clear of the city. The charge Joseph puts in his steward's mouth is that they have rewarded evil for good, which is what these men had done at Dothan to the brother his father sent out to find them. He is holding a sentence over them that states their own history, and none of them hears it.

Genesis 44:5-6

The cup is described as the one the governor drinks from and divines by, and readers have long differed over what that means. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take it as the ordinary Egyptian practice of divining by cups, spoken by a man playing an Egyptian ruler to the hilt. Adam Clarke reads the Hebrew verb in its wider sense of looking at something closely and holds that no sorcery is being claimed. Genesis reports the words and explains neither of them.

Genesis 44:7-9

Their answer is confident, and it has a fact behind it, since they carried the returned money back from Canaan themselves. Then they swear past their knowledge and offer death for whoever has the cup and slavery for the rest. Their father had made the same kind of oath over a stolen object hidden in the baggage when Laban searched the tents for his gods, and it was Rachel who had them. This search will end at Rachel's other son.

Genesis 44:10-11

The steward softens the terms they had offered, taking one man as a servant and letting the rest go blameless. That is the shape of the test rather than an act of mercy, because it leaves eleven brothers free to walk home without the twelfth. Every man takes his sack down and opens it, and not one of them hesitates.

Genesis 44:12-13

The search runs from the eldest down to the youngest, so the last sack opened is the one with the cup in it. When it appears they rend their clothes, which is what Reuben did at the empty pit and what their father did over the bloodied coat. They could have left Benjamin and gone home clear under the steward's own terms, and instead every man loads his ass and turns back with him.

Genesis 44:14-15

They fall before him on the ground for the third time in three chapters, and the boy who dreamed of their sheaves bowing is the man standing over them. Genesis states its own rule at 41:32, that a doubled dream means the thing is established by God, and this one has now been acted out more often than it was dreamed. Joseph asks what deed this is and says a man like him can certainly divine, still speaking as the Egyptian they take him for.

Genesis 44:16-17

Judah never argues about the cup, and what he confesses is not theft. God hath found out the iniquity of thy servants reaches back more than twenty years to a pit and a sale, which is how Ephrem the Syrian read the line. Joseph refuses to take them all as servants and sets the terms exactly: the man with the cup stays, and the rest go up in peace to their father.

Genesis 44:18

The longest speech any brother makes in Genesis begins here, and Judah opens it by putting himself under a man he calls even as Pharaoh. Clarke notes that Judah is the one who speaks because he had made himself surety for Benjamin before Jacob would let the boy leave home. He never returns to the question of the cup.

Genesis 44:19-20

Judah repeats their own words about Benjamin back to Joseph, a child of his old age, and he alone is left of his mother. That mother is Rachel, whose long barrenness in chapter 29 and whose death bearing this boy in chapter 35 stand behind the whole sentence. They also tell the man in front of them that his brother is dead, which is the story a coat dipped in blood had sold to their father.

Genesis 44:21-23

Judah quotes the governor's own demand back to him, that the boy be brought down so that he could set his eyes on him. Gill points out that the flat threat of verse 23, that they would see his face no more, was not recorded when the first meeting was told in chapter 42, though chapter 43 shows Jacob had heard it. The speech fills in what the narrative had left out.

Genesis 44:24-26

The return home is told in three lines: they reported the words, the food ran out, and their father said go and buy a little more. Judah lets the famine do the arguing, because hunger and not persuasion is what finally moved Jacob to release Benjamin. Their answer to him had been flat, that they could not go down at all unless the youngest went with them.

Genesis 44:27-28

Jacob counts two sons when he has twelve, and the ten men listening had grown up under that arithmetic. Gill notes that the wife he means is Rachel, the one he had served fourteen years for. Then Judah repeats his father's conclusion about Joseph, surely he is torn in pieces, knowing which of them dipped the coat in a kid's blood and carried it home.

Genesis 44:29-31

The line about gray hairs brought down with sorrow to the grave is said twice here, once as Jacob's words and once as Judah's own reckoning of what will follow. Judah has watched for twenty years what the first loss did to the old man, and the coat that caused it was his brothers' work and his own idea of a sale. He tells the governor that his father's life is bound up in the lad's life, which is as close as Genesis comes to saying what Jacob had left.

Genesis 44:32

Judah stakes everything on a word he had used once before and dishonoured. He had handed Tamar a pledge against a kid he promised and never delivered, and the Hebrew behind that pledge and the Hebrew behind the surety he becomes here run back to one root. The man who defaulted on the first now offers to bear the blame for ever on the second.

Genesis 44:33-34

Judah asks to stay as a slave in Benjamin's place so that the boy can go up to his father. The man who had asked what profit there was in killing a brother, and proposed selling him instead, now offers himself for the other son of Rachel. Matthew Henry reads the offer as a figure of Christ standing in the room of the guilty, and Christ came out of Judah's own tribe, though the New Testament nowhere calls this scene a type. Genesis lets the speech end and adds no comment of its own.