Genesis45chapter 45

Genesis 45:1-2

Joseph clears the room before he speaks, so the men who sold him are not exposed in front of the court of Egypt. He then weeps loudly enough that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh hear it through the wall. The privacy is for his brothers, and the sound that escapes it is what sets the rest of the chapter moving at verse sixteen.

Genesis 45:3-4

His first question is about the old man at home rather than about himself, and the brothers cannot get a word out. When he calls them near he names the crime in the same breath as the kinship, I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. Stephen retells the scene in Acts and marks the timing, that at the second time Joseph was made known to his brethren, and Ambrose of Milan read Come near to me as the voice of Christ calling a people who had refused him.

Genesis 45:5-6

He tells them not to be grieved with themselves in the same sentence in which he says that ye sold me hither, holding the guilt and the comfort together rather than trading one for the other. God did send me before you to preserve life is the first of three times he says it in four verses. He also fixes the clock, two years of famine gone and five still to run, which is why the household has to move rather than wait it out.

Genesis 45:7-8

The second and third statements reach further than the first, a posterity in the earth, a great deliverance, and then it was not you that sent me hither, but God. Genesis tells the reader at 41:32 that a doubled thing is established by God and will shortly come to pass, and Joseph says this one three times over. The sentence never says God did the selling; it says God had a use for the place the selling put him in.

Genesis 45:9-10

The message he sends home is that God hath made him lord of all Egypt and that his father is to come down to him, which is the second dream of chapter thirty-seven arriving in daylight. Jacob had asked whether he and his wife and his sons would really bow to this boy, and now he is the one being told to pack. God meets him at Beersheba in the next chapter and promises to bring him up again, so the descent is authorised before it is made.

Genesis 45:11-13

Goshen and five more years of food are offered to a family that owns no ground in Egypt, and the only ground it owns in Canaan is the cave Abraham bought at Machpelah for a burial. Joseph proves himself by his own mouth speaking to them, which matters because the earlier interviews had run through an interpreter at 42:23. Hebrews says of all these men together that they died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off.

Genesis 45:14-15

The book that opened with a man killing his brother in a field now shows a man weeping on the necks of the brothers who sold him. Isaac and Ishmael had buried their father together in chapter twenty-five, and Esau had run and fallen on Jacob's neck and wept in chapter thirty-three, and the line ends here. At verse three they could not answer him; after he kissed them all and wept upon them, his brethren talked with him.

Genesis 45:16-18

Pharaoh hears the weeping through his own house and is pleased by it, and the invitation that follows comes from him rather than from Joseph, with the good of the land of Egypt attached to it. The Pharaoh of chapter twelve took a patriarch's wife and was plagued for it, and the king of Exodus 1:8 who knew not Joseph will refuse to let this same family leave. This one commands them in and orders the transport himself.

Genesis 45:19-21

Pharaoh orders wagons for the little ones and tells them to leave their goods behind, since the good of all the land of Egypt is theirs. Abram had gone down into Egypt in a famine and come up richer than he went, and the same thing happens here to a household before it happens to a nation. Adam Clarke reads the wagons as evidence that the road between Egypt and Canaan was open and well travelled long before Israel walked it.

Genesis 45:22-23

A coat had set Joseph apart from his brothers, and they stripped it off him and dipped it in the blood of a kid to carry home to their father. Now he is the one handing out clothes, and Benjamin gets five changes and three hundred pieces of silver while the rest get one apiece. The same lopsided favour that started the trouble is shown again in front of the same men, and this time nobody moves against the boy.

Genesis 45:24

His parting word is a warning against quarrelling on the road, which says plainly what he expected them to start doing once he was out of sight. Adam Clarke reads it as guarding two things at once, that they would blame each other for the selling and that they would envy Benjamin his five changes. The fear outlived the reunion, since at chapter fifty, with Jacob buried, they still suspect Joseph has been waiting to pay them back.

Genesis 45:25-26

They went up out of Egypt is the phrase the rest of the Bible will use of a whole nation, and here it is eleven men with wagons. What they carry home is true, and their father does not believe a word of it, so his heart faints. These are the men who brought him a bloodied coat and let him mourn over it for twenty-two years, and their credit with him is spent.

Genesis 45:27-28

A garment had all but put the old man's light out, and Origen noticed that Genesis says the spirit rather than the soul revived when he saw the wagons. Their words could not carry it and the wagons could, because the wagons came out of Egypt and no one in that family could have made them. Then the name shifts: he is Jacob through the fainting and the reviving, and he is Israel when he says It is enough, Joseph my son is yet alive.