[Unbracketed commentary and chapter title are from Pentateuch and Haftorahs, ed. Dr. J.H. Hertz. An update about this particular commentary in case you, reader, have not read it in previous posts: P&H is a composite/collection of many commentators, and so many names are mentioned . The editor, Dr. Hertz, makes clear that the best of Jewish scholars (Rabbinical) as well as a few gentile input, are included in his collection. We benefit much from this valuable resource and we share it with all in our posts but this does not mean we agree with the commentary all the time.
Additional commentary come from RA/Robert Alter as well as EF/Everett Fox whose translation, The Five Books of Moses is featured here.—Admin1.]
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The stories of Genesis, and especially the story of Joseph, have at all times called forth the admiration of mankind. Dealing with the profoundest thoughts in terms of everyday life, yet a child is thrilled by the story; and at the same time the greatest thinkers are continually finding in it fresh depths of unexpected meaning (Ryle). Like summer and the starry skies, like joy and childhood, these stories touch and enthrall the human soul with their sublime simplicity, high seriousness and marvelous beauty. And they are absolutely irreplaceable in the moral and religious training of children. The fact that, after having been repeated for three thousand years and longer, these stories still possess an eternal freshness to children of all races and climes, proves that there is in them something of imperishable worth. There is no other literature in the world which offers that something. This is recognized even in educational circles that are far removed not only from the Traditional attitude towards the Bible, but even from the religious outlook. The uniqueness of these stories consists in the fact that there is in them a sense of overruling the Divine Providence realizing its purpose through the complex interaction of human motives. They are saturated with the moral spirit. Duty, guilt and its punishment, the conflict of conscience with inclination, the triumph of moral and spiritual forces amidst the vicissitudes of human affairs—are the leading themes. And what is pre-eminently true of Genesis applies to the whole of Bible history. Not by means of abstract formulae does it bring God and duty to the soul of man, but by means of lives of human beings who feel and fail, who stumble and sin as we do; yet who, in their darkest groping, remain conscious of the one true way—and rise again. Witness the conduct of the brothers of Joseph when they had fully grasped the enormity of their crime.
Asked the agnostic T.H. Huxley:
‘By the study of what other book, could children be so much humanized and made to feel that each figure in the vast procession of history fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between the eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time according to its effort to do good and hate evil?’
Genesis/Bereshith 37
JOSEPH’S DREAMS
1 Yaakov settled in the land of his father’s sojournings, in the land of Canaan.
After a brief enumeration of Esau’s descendants, without giving their history, Scripture resumes the account of the fortunes of Jacob and his sons.
[RA] 1-2. And Jacob dwelled in the land of . . . Canaan. This is the lineage of Jacob. The aptness of these verses as a transition from the genealogy of Esau to the story of Joseph is nicely observed by Abraham ibn Ezra: “The text reports that the chieftains of Esau dwelled in the high country of Seir and Jacob dwelled in the Chosen Land. And the meaning of ‘This is the lineage of Jacob’ is, ‘These are the events that happened to him and the incidents that befell him.” Ibn Ezra’s remark demonstrates that there is no need to attach these two verses to the end of the preceding genealogy, as some modern scholars have argued. The writer exploits the flexibility of the Hebrew toledot, a term that can equally refer to genealogical list and to story, in order to line up the beginning of the Joseph story with the toledot passage that immediately precedes it.
2 These are the begettings of Yaakov. Yosef, seventeen years old, used to tend the sheep along with his brothers, for he was serving-lad with the sons of Bilha and the sons of Zilpa, his father’s wives.
And Yosef brought a report of them, an ill one, to their father.
the generations. Joseph alone is mentioned because he is the centre of the narrative which fills the remainder of Genesis, and forms its notable climax.
feeding. Or, ‘supervising.’ The picture of Joseph doing the same work as his brothers is out of accord with what is told in the next verse. Erlich therefore translates: ‘Joseph, being seventeen yiers old, used to supervise—although only a lad—his brethren, viz., the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah (when they were) with the sheep.’ <span style=”color: #000000;”>Joseph would thus be placed in charge of only the sons of the handmaids.
evil report of them. Probably, their inattention to duty.
[EF] begettings: In the sense of “family history.” As noted above, the Yosef story is a continuation of the Yaakov saga. seventeen: Together with 47;28, this provides another example of numerical balance in these stories. Yosef lives with Yaakov for the first seventeen years of his life and for the last seventeen of his father’s. along with his brothers: A hint that he would one day “shepherd” (rule) his brothers? The Hebrew is open to that interpretation (Redford). brought a report: Or “gossip.” Although the doting father’s love is crucial, it seems really to be Yosef’s own behavior (which precedes the information about his coat) that causes his abuse by the brothers.
[RA] assisting. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “he was a lad with the sons of Bilhah.” But the Hebrew for “lad,” na’ar, has a secondary meaning, clearly salient here, of assistant or subaltern. The adolescent Joseph is working as a kind of apprentice shepherd with his older brothers.
brought ill report. The first revelation of Joseph’s character suggests a spoiled younger child who is a tattletale. The next revelation, in the dreams, intimates adolescent narcissism, even if the grandiosity eventually is justified by events.
3 Now Yisrael loved Yosef above all his sons, for he was a son of old age to him, so he made
him an ornamented coat.
he was the son of his old age. At this time Benjamin was but an infant, and the father’s affections were centered in Joseph. However, when the latter was sold, Jacob’s whole life was bound up with Benjamin (XVIV,20,30).
coat of many colours. This translation is based on the Septuagint, Targum Jonathan and Kimchi. People have often wondered why a trifle liket his gaudy garment should have provoked the murderous hatred of all the brethren. We now know from the painted Tombs of the Bene Hassein in Egypt that, in the Patriarchal age, Semitic chiefs wore coats of many colours as insignia of rulership. Joseph had made himself disliked by his brothers for reporting on them; and Jacob, in giving him a coat of many colours, marked him for the chieftainship of the tribes at his father’s death. Add to this the lad’s vanity in telling his dreams, and the rage of the brethren becomes intelligible. This sign of rulership and royalty was still in use in the household of King David, as is seen from II Sam. XIII,18, though the chronicler must explain this strange fashion in dress. The fact that in the Joseph story no such explanatory gloss is given is proof of the antiquity of the narrative. When it was first written its implications were perfectly intelligible (M.H.Kyle).
[EF] ornamented: Hebrew obscure. B-R uses “ankle-length.”
[RA] And Israel loved Joseph . . . for he was the child of his old age. The explanation is a little odd, both because the fact that Joseph is the son of the beloved Rachel is unmentioned and because it is the last-born Benjamin who is the real child of Jacob’s old age. It is noteworthy that Jacob’s favoritism toward Joseph is mentioned immediately after the report of questionable behavior on Joseph’s part. One recalls that Jacob was the object of his mother’s unexplained favoritism.
an ornamented tunic. The only clue about the nature of the garment is offered by the one other mention of it in the Bible, in the story of the rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13), in which, incidentally, tehre is a whole network of pointed allusions to the Joseph story. There we are told that the ketonet pasim was worn by virgin princesses. It is thus a unisex garment and a product of ancient haute couture. E.A. Speiser cites a cuneiform text with an apparently cognate phrase that seems to indicate a tunic with appliqué ornamentation. Other scholars have pointed to a fourteenth-century B.C.E. Egyptian fresco showing captive Canaanite nobleman adorned with tunics made of longitudinal panels sewn together.
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[EF] hated: Such a violent emotion nevertheless has once before (with Lea in 29:31) led not to disaster but to the fulfillment of the divine plan (there, the hatred results in the competition to have chidlren). in peace: Or “civilly”—again the key Yaakov word, “peace.”
5 Now Yosef dreamt a dream, and told it to his brothers —from then on they hated him still more—
[RA] And Joseph dreamed. As has often been noted, the dreams in the Joseph story reflect its most secular orientation in comparison with the preceding narratives in Genesis. They are not direct messages from God, like His appearance in the dream-visions to Abimelech and to Jacob: they may be literally portentous, but they require human interpretation (here the meaning is obvious enough), and they may also express the hidden desires and self-perception of the dreamer.
6 he said to them: Pray hear this dream that I have dreamt:
[EF] hear: Which can also mean “understand’ in biblical Hebrew.
[RA] Listen, pray, to this dream that I dreamed. In keeping with the rule about the revelatory force of a character’s first words, this whole speech shows us a young Joseph who is self-absorbed, blithely assuming everyone will be fascinated by the details of his dreams.
7 Here, we were binding sheaf-bundles out in the field, and here, my sheaf arose, it was standing upright, and here, your sheaves were circling round and bowing down to my sheaf!
[RA] And, look. It is standard technique for the dreamer reporting his dream to use the presentative hineh, “look,” to introduce what he has “seen” in the dream. But Joseph repeats the term three times in a single sentence, betraying his own wide-eyed amazement, and perhaps his naïveté. The same attitude is reflected in his exclamatory “arose and actually stood up.”
8 His brothers said to him: Would you be king, yes, king over us? Or would you really rule, yes, rule us? From then on they hated him still more-for his dreams, for his words.
[EF] king, yes, king . . . rule, yes, rule: The doubling might reflect the brothers’ astonishment and bitterness. See also v.10.
[RA] for his dreams and for his words. It is misguided to construe this as a hendiadys (“for speaking about his dreams”) since the sharp point is that they hated him both for having such dreams and for insisting on talking about them.
9 But he dreamt still another dream, and recounted it to his brothers, he said: Here, I have dreamt still (another) dream: Here, the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me!
[RA] And he dreamed yet another dream. Later (41:32) we shall learn that the doubling of the dream is a sign that what it portends will really happen, but it should also be observed that doublets are a recurrent principle of organization in the Joseph story, just as binary divisions are an organizing principle in the Jacob story. Joseph and Pharaoh have double dreams; the chief butler and the chief baker dream their pair of seemingly parallel, actually antithetical dreams. Joseph is first flung into a pit and later into the prison-house. The brothers make two trips down to Egypt, with one of their number seemingly at risk on each occasion. And their descent to Egypt with goods and silver mirrors the descent of the merchant caravan, bearing the same items, that first brought Joseph down to Egypt.
the sun and the moon and eleven stars. Both Hermann Gunkel and Gerhard von Rad have proposed that the eleven stars are actually the eleven constellations known in the ancient Near East, but these should then be twelve, not eleven, and at least in the biblical record, knowledge of definite constellations is reflected only in postexilic literature. The two parallel dreams operate on different levels of intensity. The agricultural setting of the first one reflects the actual setting—Freud’s “day residue”—in which Joseph does his dreaming, and so is attached to the first part of the story, even if the brothers detect in it aspirations to regal grandeur. The second dream shifts the setting upward to the heavens and in this way is an apt adumbration of the brilliant sphere of the Egyptian imperial court over which Joseph will one day preside. From a strict monotheistic view, the second dream teeters on the brink of blasphemy.
10 When he recounted it to his father and his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him:
What kind of dream is this that you have dreamt! Shall we come, yes, come, I, your mother and your brothers, to bow down to you to the ground?
to his father. Joseph is at first the clever child of a large family, too untutored in life to veil his superiority (Moulton).
rebuked him. Because his words were deepening the ill-will against him among his brothers.
thy mother. Who was dead.
[EF] your mother: The fact that she had died in Chap. 35does not detract from the symbol of the dream.
[RA] and your mother. This particular episode seems to assume, in flat contradiction of the preceding narrative, that Rachel is still alive, though Benjamin has already been born (there are eleven brothers in the dream bowing to Joseph). Attempts to rescue consistency on the ground that dreams may contain incoherent elements are unconvincing, because it is a perfect lucid Jacob who assumes here that Rachel is still alive.
11 His brothers envied him, while his father kept the matter in mind.envied. The repetition of the dream was a sign to them that it was more than a dream. They envied him his assured greatness. And now that envy was added to hatred, they were in a mental state to do him violence. One of the hardest things to learn is to recognize without envy the superiority of a younger brother.
kept the saying in mind. He noted with satisfaction that his designation of Joseph as the future ruler of the family seemed to have the Divine approval.
[EF] remembered: Or “kept in mind.”
12 His brothers went to tend their father’s sheep in Shekhem.
in Shechem. Meaning in the region of Shechem, which was a fertile plain. It would appear hazardous for Jacob’s sons to venture thither after what is narrated in Chap. XXXIV. But we are expressly told in XXXV,5, that God inspired fear in the peoples, which caused Jacob to be unmolested.
[EF] Shekhem: In our text this city’s name (three times here) reminds the reader of the disastrous events of Chapter 34.
[RA] Shechem. As several medieval commentators note, Shechem has already been linked with disaster in these stories.
13 Yisrael said to Yosef: Are not your brothers tending sheep in Shekhem? Come, I will send you to them! He said to him: Here I am.[EF] Come: Repeated in vv. 20 and 27; it is ironically Yaakov’s decision to send Yosef to his brothers that sets this part of the plot into action.
14 And he said to him: Come, pray, look into the well-being of your brothers and into the well-being of the sheep, and bring me back word. So he sent him out from the valley of Hevron, and he came to Shekhem.Hebron. The residence of Jacob, XXXV,27. The city lies low down on the sloping sides of a narrow valley of its mountainous setting.
[EF] well-being: Heb. shalom, itranslated as “peace” in v. 4 and elsewhere.
[RA] the valley of Hebron. The validity of this designation can be defended only through ingenious explanation because Hebron stands on a height.
15 And a man came upon him-here, he was roaming in the field; the man asked him, saying:What do you seek?
[EF] a man: Possibly another divine messenger (like the “man” in 32:25). See also the note to “roming” in 20:13.
[RA] And a man found him. The specificity of this exchange with an unnamed stranger is enigmatic. Efforts to see the “man” as an angel or messenger of fate have little textual warrant. What is safe to say is that the question and answer in a field outside Shechem reinforce the sense that Joseph is being directed, unwitting, to a disastrous encounter.
16 He said: I seek my brothers, pray tell me where they are tending-sheep.17 The man said: They have moved on from here, indeed, I heard them say: Let us go to Dotan.
Yosef went after his brothers and came upon them in Dotan.
Dothan. The modern name is Tel-Dothan. It has a rich pasturage.
[RA] that dream-master! Although time-honored tradition renders this in English simply as “dreamer,” the Hebrew term ba’al haalomot is stronger, and thus in context more sarcastic. The ba’al component suggests someone who has a special proprietary relation to, or mastery of, the noun that follows it.
18 They saw him from afar, and before he had gotten near them, they plotted-cunningly against him to cause his death. 19 They said each man to his brother: Here comes the master dreamer!dreamer. lit. ‘master of dreams’; this is only the Heb. idiom for ‘dreamer’. The brothers speak of him with a bitter derision which bodes ill for him.
20 So now, come, let us kill him and throw him into one of these pits and say: An ill-tempered beast has devoured him! Then we will see what becomes of his dreams!pits. Or, ‘cisterns,’ where water was stored; these are still in common use in the East. The opening is narrow, so that any one imprisoned in them could not get out unassisted.
and we shall see. The Midrash regards these words as the comment of God upon the brother’s declaration, ‘let us slay him.’ The Divine reply is to the effect: We shall see whose counsel will stand, Mine or theirs. The Midrash furthermore states that it was Simeon who first made the fratricidal proposal. This explains Joseph’s procedure later in XLII,24.
[EF] ill-tempered: Others, “wild.”
[RA] let us kill him and fling him into one of the pits. The flinging after the killing underscores the naked brutality of the brothers’ intentions. The denial of proper burial was among the Hebrews as among the Greeks deeply felt as an atrocity.
21 When Re’uven heard it he tried to rescue him from their hand, he said: Let us not take his life![EF] take his life; Lit. “strike him mortally.”
[RA] 21-22. We must not take his life . . . shed no blood! Reuben eschews the two verbs for killing used respectively by the narrator and the brothers and instead invokes language echoing the primal taboo against taking–literally, “striking down”–life and spilling human blood (compare the powerful prohibition in 9:6). In the event, the substitute blood of the slaughtered kid will figure prominently in the brothers’ course of action.
Fling him into this pit. At the same time, Reuben tries not to contradict the violence of his brothers’ feelings toward Joseph and uses the same phrase, to fling him into a pit, with the crucial difference that in his proposal it is a live Joseph who will be cast into the pit. This is precisely the verb used for Hagar (21;15) when she flings Ishmael under a bush in the wilderness.
22 And Re’uven said to them: Do not shed blood! Cast him into this pit that is in the wilderness, but do not lay a hand upon him! —in order that he might save him from their hand, to return him to his father.shed no blood. Reuben’s first appeal of ‘No murder” fell on deaf ears (see XLII,220; he then hopes to outwit them by a stratagem. He appeals to them that at least they need not shed any blood, hoping later to rescue Joseph and bring him back to Jacob, against whom he had previously so grievously sinned (Nachmanides, Abarbanel).
23 So it was, when Yosef came to his brothers, that they stripped Yosef of his coat, the ornamented coat that he had on,stripped. Tore off with violence. What Joseph’s words were in connection with this unnatural conduct of his brethren, we only indirectly know from XLII,21; just as we were left to gather Jacob’s feelings at the death of Rachel from the pathetic references in XLVIII,7. The reserve of the Scripture narrative in this chapter, as in XXII, represents the acme of literary art (Steinthal).
[RA] his tunic, the ornamented tunic that he had on him. Only now do we learn that Joseph has the bad judgment to wear on his errand the garment that was the extravagant token of his father’s favoritism. Thus he provokes the brothers’ anger, and they strip him—not part of their original plan—and thus take hold of what will be made into the false evidence of his death as their plan changes.
24 and took him and cast him into the pit. Now the pit was empty-no water in it.no water in it. But it did contain serpents and scorpions (Rashi).
[RA] they…flung him into the pit. Contrary to the original plan, they do not kill him straight away. Perhaps they have decided instead to let him perish trapped in the pit.
the pit was empty, there was no water in it. Deep cisterns of this sort—too deep to climb out of—were commonly used for water storage.
25 And they sat down to eat bread. They lifted up their eyes and saw: there was a caravan of Yishmaelites coming from Gil’ad, their camels carrying balm, balsam, and ladanum, traveling to take them down to Egypt.to eat bread. While the piercing cries of their doomed brother were still ringing in their ears. Nothing can more forcibly paint the callousness to all human feeling which comes from slavery to hate.
caravan. Such a caravan would be in the clear air of Palestine be seen many miles away. It might take two or three hours before it came up to the brothers. Dothan lay in the trade-route from Gilead, the country east of the Jordan, across the Valley of Jezreel, along the Philistine coast to Egypt.
balm. For which Gilead was proverbially famous.
[EF] bread: Or “food.”
[RA] Ishmaelites. This is a generic term for the seminomadic traders of Arab stock whose homeland was east of the Jordan, but it is also an anachronism, since at the time of the story, the eponymous Ishmael, the great-uncle of the twelve brothers, was still alive (though he would be near the end of his 127-year life span), and the only “Ishmaelites” would be their second cousins.
gum and balm and ladanum. The precise identity of these plant extracts used for medicinal purposes and as perfume is doubt, but it is clear that they are costly export items.
26 Now Yehuda said to his brothers: What gain is there if we kill our brother and cover up his blood?[RA] What gain is there if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Judah’s argument for sparing Joseph’s life—which most scholars regard as the manifestation of an originally different version of the story from the one in which the firstborn Reuben tries to save Joseph—is based on the consideration of gain, not on the horror of the taboo against shedding blood that Reuben invokes. To cover up blood means to conceal bloodguilt.
27 Come, let us sell him to the Yishmaelites— but let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother, our flesh! And his brothers listened to him.hearkened unto him. The horror of their contemplated murder by starvation dawns upon them; they agree to a less violent scheme. Reuben keeps his counsel.
[RA] for he is our brother, our own flesh. It is, of course, a dubious expression of brotherhood to sell someone into the ignominy and perilously uncertain future of slavery.
28 Meanwhile, some Midyanite men, merchants, passed by; they hauled up Yosef from the pitand sold Yosef to the Yishmaelites, for twenty pieces-of-silver. They brought Yosef to Egypt.
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Midianites. In the meantime, while the brethren were at the meal, some Midianite merchants, casually passing by and hearing human cries from the pit near the roadside, carry off Joseph and sell him to the caravan going to Egypt. The brothers did not thus actually sell Joseph. He was ‘stolen away’ as he himself says in XL,15 (Rashbam, Luzzatto).
[RA] And Midianite merchantmen … pulled Joseph out of the pit and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites. This is the one single moment when the two literary strands out of which the story is woven seem awkwardly spliced. Up to this point, no Midianites have been mentioned. Elsewhere, Midianites and Ishmaelites appear to be terms from different periods designating the selfsame people (compare Judges 89:22 and 24), so the selling of Joseph to the Ishmaelites looks like a strained attempt to blend two versions that respectively used the two different terms. And the Midianite intervention contradicts the just stated intention of the brothers to pull Joseph out of the pit themselves and sell Joseph to the Ishmaelites for profit.
29 When Re’uven returned to the pit: here, Yosef was no more in the pit! He rent his garmentsReuben, who, it seems, did not participate in the meal, v. 25, had intended to remove Joseph from the pit and bring him back to his father. He finds the pit empty and no trace of Joseph. Soem wild beast, he thinks, has carried him off.
[EF] rent his garments: The tearing of clothing was a customary sign of mourning.
[RA] And Reuben came back to the pit. The contradiction between the two version continues, since one is driven to presume that Reuven was not present at the fraternal meal during which the selling of Joseph was discussed, though there is no textual indication of his absence.
30 and returned to his brothers and said: The child is no more! And I—where am I to go?whither shall I go? As the first-born, the father would hold him morally responsible. ‘Whither shall I flee from my father’s grief?’ (Rashi).
[EF] And . . . : Heb. va-ani, ana ani va. The sound expresses the emotions. where am I to go: I.e., what will become of me?
[RA] The boys is gone. The Hebrew says literally, the boy is not.” The phrase could be a euphemism for death or could merely indicate disappearance. It is a crucial ambiguity the brothers themselves will exploit much later in the story.
31 But they took Yosef’s coat, they slew a hairy goat and dipped the coat in the blood.they took. The brothers, however, were not displeased to be rid of Joseph.
[RA] slaughtered a kid and dipped the tunic in blood. Jacob had used both a slaughtered kid and a garment in the deception he perpetrated on his own father.
32 They had the ornamented coat sent out and had it brought to their father and said: We found this; pray recognize whether it is your son’s coat or not!they sent. Through others; i.e. they arranged taht people should bring the coat to Jacob (Rashbam).
they said. Those who brought the coat.
[EF] pray recognize: See 27:23, where Yitzhak did not “recognize” Yaakov. Yaakov’s youth returns to haunt him, in a sense.
[RA] they sent…and had it brought. The brothers operate indirectly, through the agency of a messenger, letting the doctored evidence of the blood-soaked tunic speak for itself.
Recognize. When the disguised Jacob deceived his father, we were told, “he did not recognize him.”
33 He recognized it and said: My son’s coat! An ill-tempered beast has devoured him! Yosef is torn, torn-to-pieces!The lit. translation of the Heb. is ‘My son’s coat! a wild beast hath eaten him! torn, torn is Joseph!’—a reproduction of the father’s anguish that is as natural as nature.
[EF] My son’s coat: With the omission of “It is,” the shock is conveyed more dramatically. Some ancient versions, however, include the phrase. An ill-tempered beast …torn-to-pieces: The Hebrew breaks into verse structure, with three word-beats per line: haya va’a akhalat’hu/ tarof toraf Yosef (Alter 1981).
[RA] And he recognized it, and he said…”A vicious beast has devoured him.” Jacob’s paternal anxiety turns him into the puppet of his sons’ plotting. Not only does he at once draw the intended false conclusion, but he uses the very words of their original plan, “a vicious beast has devoured him.” It is noteworthy that his cry of grief takes the form of a line of formal verse, a kind of compact elegy that jibes with the mourning rituals which follow it.
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rent his garments. The traditional mourning rite on the loss of a near relative, Keriah.
many days. A long time; two and twenty years.
35 All his sons and daughters arose to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. He said: No,I will go down to my son in mourning, to Sheol! Thus his father wept for him.
daughters. Includes granddaughters and daughters-in-law, as ‘sons’ may include grandsons.
grave. Heb. ‘Sheol’, the name of the abode of the dead. Jacob’s words mean either that he will mourn his son all his life, or that even in the grave he will continue to mourn him.
[EF] Sheol: The biblical underworld: others (and B-R) use “the grave.”
[RA] 33-35. All this language of mourning and grieving suggests a certain extravagance, perhaps something histrionic. As the next verse tersely indicates, at the very moment Jacob is bewailing his purportedly dead son, Joseph is sold into the household of a high Egyptian official.
36 Meanwhile, the Midyanites had sold him into Egypt to Potifar, Pharaoh’s court-official, Chief of the (palace) Guard.into Egypt. Through the Ishmaelite caravan.
Potiphar. The name means, ‘The gift of Ra,’ the sun-god.
officer. The Heb. word came to have the general significance of ‘court official’.
Pharaoh. The title of the Egyptian Sovereign.
captain of the guard. Or, ‘chief of the executioners’.
[EF] Midyanites: The Hebrew has “Medianites.” court-official: Lit. “eunuch,” a common ancient Near Eastern title for such a position. Originally the term was applied literally, although alter on the person was not necessarily a eunuch.
[RA] Pharaoh’s courtier, the high chamberlain. The word for “courtier” in other contexts can also mean “eunuch,” but the evidence suggests that the original use was as the title of a court official and that the sense of “eunuch” became associated with the term secondarily because of an occasional Mesopotamian practice of placing eunuchs in court positions. (The Hebrew saris is a loanword from the Akkadian sa resi, “royal official.”) The second title attached to Potiphar is associated with a root involving slaughter and in consequence sometimes with cooking (hence the “chief steward” or, alternately, “chief executioner” of various English versions). The actual responsibilities of this high imperial post remain unclear.
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