Genesis/Bereshith 44
The chapter sets forth Joseph’s device to test still further the sincerity and loyalty of his brethren.
1-17. THE DIVINING CUP
1 Now he commanded the steward of his house, saying: Fill the men’s packs with food, as much as they are able to carry, and put each man’s silver in the mouth of his pack.as much as they can carry. More than they were entitled to by their purchase. This act of kindness on Joseph’s part was intentional, so as to increase the apparent baseness of their conduct; see v. 4.
put every man’s money. This was done to prevent the brethren from suspecting Benjamin of having really stolen the goblet. When they again found their money returned, they could not but believe that the goblet had in the selfsame unaccountable manner come into Benjamin’s sack (Abarbanel).
[RA] put each man’s silver in the mouth of his bag. This detail is a small puzzle because nothing is made of the discovery of silver when the majordomo searches through the bags. This seeming indiscrepancy has led critics to write off the return of the silver as a later addition to harmonize this episode with the one in Chapter 42, but that is by no means a necessary conclusion. Joseph’s scheme after all, is to make the brothers feel they are trapped in a network of uncanny circumstances they can neither control nor explain. A repetition of the device of returning the silver would nicely serve this purpose. The majordomo, however, is exclusively focused on the retrieval of a particular silver object, the divining goblet, and so does not even deign to mention the weights of silver in the bags, as though their appearance there were a matter of course, whatever consternation it might cause the brothers. Meanwhile, as in dream logic–or perhaps one should say, guilt logic–the brothers, who once took silver when they sold Joseph down into Egypt, seem helpless to “return” the silver to Egypt, as much as they try. the returned silve, moreover, makes the purported stealing of the silver goblet look all the more heinous.
2 And my goblet, the silver goblet, put in the mouth of the youngest’s pack, along with the silver for his rations. He did according to
Yosef’s word which he had spoken.the silver goblet. Divining goblets were much used in Egypt. Pieces of gold or silver were thrown into the water or liquid in the goblet and caused movements, which were supposed to represent coming events.
[EF] my goblet: The ensuing scene is somewhat parallel to Rahel’s theft of the terafim (compare v. 9 with 31;32).
[RA] And my goblet, the silver goblet. The double formulation highlights both the fact that the goblet is Joseph’s special possession and that it is made of silver.
3 At the light of daybreak, the men were sent off, they and their donkeys;[RA] they and their donkeys. Again the donkeys are tacked onto the end of the sentence, perhaps because the donkeys are carrying the packs, which will have to be set down on the ground and then reloaded (verses 11 and 12), in one of which the goblet has been secreted.
4 they were just outside the city-they had not yet gone far-when Yosef said to the steward of his house: Up, pursue the men, and when you have caught up with them, say to them: Why have you paid back ill for good?rewarded evil for good. Joseph’s steward assumes that they are aware of the theft of this valuable and wonderful goblet.
5 Is not this (goblet) the one that my lord drinks with? And he also divines, yes, divines with it! You have wrought ill in what you have done!whereby he indeed divineth. The cup os a sacred one, by which their host obtains oracles.
EF] divines: Cups were used in predicting the future in the ancient Near Eat; see note to 40:11. The diviner would examine the shapes made by insoluble liquids, such as oil in water. You have wrought ill: Resembling Laban’s accusation against Yaakov, “You have done foolishly” (31:28).
[RA] Is not this the one from which my lord drinks, and in which he always divines? The fact that the goblet is referred to only by a demonstrative pronoun (“the one from which”) may reflect a flaunting of the assumption that, as all concerned should recognize, the only thing at issue here is the goblet. The brothers may well have seen Joseph drinking from the goblet at the dinner the day before, whereas its use for divination would have been news to them. The probably mechanism of divination in a goblet would be to interpret patterns on the surface of the liquid it contained or in drops running down its sides. Divination would have been a plausible activity on the part of a member of the high Egyptian bureaucracy, with its technology of soothsaying, but the emphasis it is given here is also linked with Joseph’s demonstrated ability to predict the future and his superiority of knowledge in relation to his brothers.
6 When he caught up with them, he spoke those words to them. 7 They said to him: Why does my lord speak such words as these? Heaven forbid for your servants to do such a thing! 8 Here, the silver that we found in the mouth of our packs, we returned to you from the land of Canaan; so how could we steal silver or gold from the house of your lord?how then should we steal? Their argument is sound. They had brought back from Canaan the money which they had found in their sacks. Would they then think of robbing the Egyptian lord, who had treated them with so much consideration?
9 He with whom it is found among your servants, he shall die,let him die. Convinced of their absolute innocence, they propose the penalty of death as the punishment to be inflicted on the thief. They add to this, slavery for all the other brothers.
[RA] He of your servants with whom it be found shall die. This pronouncement of a death sentence for stealing may be excessive in relation to the standards of ancient Near Eastern law, though Gerhard von Rad has proposed that stealing a sacred object would have been deemed a capital crime. The brothers’ words are quite similar to those spoken by their father to Laban (31:32) before he rummaged through the belongings of Jacob’s wives in search of his missing household gods. It is a teasing parallel with crucial differences: Laban does not find what he is looking for, but the death sentence pronounced on the actually guilty party—Benjamin’s mother, Rachel—appears to be carried out later when she dies bearing him.
and . . . we shall become slaves to our lord. This gratuitous additional condition, a reflex of their perfect confidence in their innocence of the theft, carries forward the great theme of moral restitution: the brothers who sold Joseph into slavery now offer themselves as slaves. The term ‘eved means both servant and slave, and the speeches in this episode pointedly play the two meanings against each other. When the brothers refer to themselves as “your servants,” they are clearly using courtly language of self-abasement; when they, or Judah, offer to be slaves, they are proposing to surrender their freedom and enter into a condition of actual servitude.
10 He said: Now as well, according to your words, so be it: he with whom it is found shall become my servant, but you shall be clear.The steward asks only for hte guilty one to be his bondman. According to Rashi the verse means; ‘Verily it should be as ye have said (for ye are all accessories, and, therefore, al guilty; but I will be more lenient) he alone with whom it is found shall be my bondman.’
[EF] clear: Of punishment.
[RA] Even so, as by your words, let it be. These first words of response by the majordomo modifies the sentence to make it more reasonable—the guilty brother will be made a slave and the others allowed to go free.
11 With haste each-man let down his pack to the ground, each-man opened his pack.Then they hastened. This agitated zeal wonderfully depicts their confident innocence (Procksch).
12 and then he searched: with the eldest he started and with the youngest he finished- and the goblet was found in Binyamin’s pack!beginning at the eldest. To prevent suspicion of his knowledge of the affair. It is also a dramatic touch adding to the excitement of the scene described.
13 They rent their clothes, each-man loaded up his donkey, and they returned to the city.then they rent their clothes. In their grief at the thought of the loss of Benjamin, molurning him as if he were dead.
14 Yehuda and his brothers came into Yosef’s house -he was still there- and flung themselves down before him to the ground.and Judah. Who assumes the leadership, having undertaken the responsibility of bringing Benjamin home again.
and they fell. The Heb. word denotes a prostration in utter despair.
[RA] And Judah with his brothers came. The Hebrew says, “Judah and his brothers” but uses a characteristic grammatical device, a verb conjugated in the singular instead of the plural, to indicate that the first-stated noun (Judah) is the principal agent, the thematically focused subject of the verb. In a moment, Judah will step forward and become the spokesman for all the brothers, the ringing voice of their collective conscience.
15 Yosef said to them: What kind of deed is this that you have done! Do you not know that a man like me can divine, yes, divine?will indeed divine. And thereby discover the thief.
[RA] Did you not know that a man like me would surely divine? Like much else in this story, Joseph’s words are contrived to yield a double meaning. He is saying they should have known that a person of his standing would practice divination and so the goblet they purloined was no mere silver cup but a dedicated instrument of divination. But, in keeping with the sustained theme of his knowledge and his brothers’ ignorance, he is also suggesting that a man of his powers would be able to divine such a theft, and its perpetrator.
16 Yehuda said: What can we say to my lord? What can we speak, by what can we show ourselves innocent? God has found out your servants’ crime! Here we are, servants to my lord, so we, so the one in whose hand the goblet was found.or how shall we clear ourselves? i.e. prove our innocence; the goblet condemns us.
God hath found out the iniquity. The exclamation does not imply admission of that particular sin: it is the wrong done to their father and to Joseph in the olden days which is behind Judah’s confession. the work of the moral regeneration of the brothers is complete.
[EF] your servant’s crime: Of seeing Yosef?
[RA] God has found out your servants’ crime. In this case, the double meaning expresses a buried psychological dimentsion in Judah’s plea to Joseph. On the surface, he is simply conceding guilt as his only recourse because one of his brothers had been caught with the evidence and he has no counterarguments to offer. But he speaks out of the consciousness of a real guilt incurred by him and his brothers more than two decades earlier—compare their response at their first detention, 42:21—and thus expresses a real sense that God has at last exacted retribution for that act of fraternal betrayal. He of course cannot guess that the man whom he is addressing perfectly understands both references. One should note that guilt is assumed by Judah in the first-person plural and is not restricted to “the one in whose hand the goblet was found.”
Here we are, slaves to my lord. Again, an unconscious principle of retribution asserts itself: the ten who condemned Joseph to slavery offer themselves as slaves to him, together with Benjamin.
in whose hand the goblet was found. In fact, it was found in the mouth of his bag. But the reiterated image of the hand holding the goblet links up with all the previous focusing on hands in the story and stresses the idea of agency and responsibility.
17 But he said: Heaven forbid that I should do this! The man in whose hand the goblet was found-he shall become my servant, but you-go up in peace to your father![EF] But he said: “He” is Yosef. this: Enslaving all of the brothers.
[RA] he shall become my slave. This is, of course, the last turn of the screw in Joseph’s testing of his brothers: will they allow Rachel’s other son to be enslaved, as they did with her elder son?
18-34. The pathos and beauty of Judah’s plea on behalf of Benjamin have retained their appeal to man’s heart throughout the ages. Sir Walter Scott called it ‘the almost complete pattern of genuine natural eloquence extant in any language. When we read this generous speech, we forgive Judah all the past, and cannot refuse to say “Thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise”. The spirit of self-sacrifice which Judah’s speech reveals, offering to remain as a slave in Benjamin’s place, has its parallel in the life-story of Moses, who besought God to blot out his name from the Book of Life, unless his people, Israel, is saved with him (Exod. XXXII,32).
18 Now Yehuda came closer to him and said: Please, my lord, pray let your servant speak a word in the ears of my lord, and do not let your anger flare up against your servant, for you are like Pharaoh!come near. Not in fear but conscious of the vital issues at stake. Benjamin’s servitude would involve the death of Jacob and the shame of Judah.
speak a word. He asks pardon for venturing to continue the conversation after Joseph had decided their case. Just because Joseph is like Pharaoh in authority, it behoves him to listen to the appeal which Judah is about to make.
[EF] Now Yehuda . . . said. . . .” Yehuda’s great speech, masterful in its rhetoric, is chiefly aimed at stirring up sympathy for the fahter; it contains the word “father” fourteen times.Binyamin, whose appearance actually causes Yosef great anguish, is hardly treated as a personality at all. you are like Pharaoh: Lit. “like you is like Pharaoh.”
19 My lord asked his servants, saying: Do you have a father or (another) brother?
my lord asked. See XLIII,7. Judah wishes to divert the sympathy of Joseph towards the unhappy position of the old father bereft of his youngest son, whom Judah refers to as a ‘child of his old age, a little one’.
20 And we said to my lord: We have an old father and a young child of his old age, whose brother is dead,
so that he alone is left of his mother, and his father loves him.his brother is dead. Joseph is now spoken of before his eleven brethren as dead. Dead, but stilil remembered by their father and brothers.
[RA] an aged father and a young child of his old age. The phrase suggests the intimate connection between father and child (“aged,” “old age”) as well as Benjamin’s vulnerability as youngest (the Hebrew for “young” also means “little).
his brother being dead, he alone is left of his mother, and his father loves him. Either Judah assumes that after more than twenty years of slavery in a foreign land Joseph is likely to be dead or he states Joseph’s absence as death for the sake of rhetorical simplicity, to make clear that the son is irrevocably lost to his doting father. What is remarkable is that now Judah can bring himself, out of concern for his old father, to accept the painful fact of paternal favoritism (“and his father loves him”) that was the root of the brothers’ hostility to Joseph.
21 And you said to your servants: Bring him down to me, I wish to set my eyes upon him.[RA] that I may set my eyes on him. This phrase, which in other contexts can mean something like showing royal favor toward someone, and which for Joseph has the personal meaning of wanting to behold his full brother, momentarily seems to have been given a sinister twist by the course of events
22 But we said to my lord: The lad cannot leave his father, were he to leave his father, he would die.[EF] he would die: “He” refers to Yaakov, although the Hebrew is somewhat ambiguous.
[RA] The lad cannot leave his father. Although Benjamin is considerably beyond adolescence, “lad” (na’ar), as in a number of other notable occurrences, is a designation that suggests tenderness, and perhaps the vulnerability of the person so designated, and Judah also uses it here because Benjamin is the youngest. Joseph, it should be noted, had coldly referred to the purportedly guilty Benjamin as “the man” (verse 17).
Should he leave his father, he would die. The translation reflects the ambiguity of the Hebrew, and one may be skeptical of the often-made claim that the second “he” must refer to Jacob. It seems more likely that this is a studied ambiguity on Judah’s part: he leaves it to Joseph to decide whether the old man would die if he were separated from Benjamin, or whether Benjamin could not survive without his father, or whether both dire posibilities might be probable.
23 But you said to your servants: If your youngest brother does not come down with you, you shall not see my face again. 24 Now it was, when we went up to your servant, my father, we told him my lord’s words, 25 and our father said: Return, buy us some food-rations.[RA] Go back, buy us some food. Judah quotes Jacob’s words to his sons (43:2) verbatim. The report of their response in the next verse is a more approximate quotation.
26 But we said: We cannot go down; if our youngest brother is with us, then we will go down, for we cannot see the man’s face if our youngest brother is not with us. 27 Now your servant, my father, said to us: You yourselves know that my wife bore two to me.[RA] two did my wife bear me. In Judah’s report, Jacob speaks characteristically as though Rachel were his only wife. Judah appears now to accept this outrageous favoritism as part of what his father is, part of the father he must still love.
28 One went away from me, I said: For sure he is torn, torn-to-pieces! And I have not seen him again thus far.torn in pieces; and I have not seen him since. Joseph now learns the manner of his supposed death. Do these last words imply a lurking disbelief in Jacob’s mind as to the story of Joseph’s death? Perhaps they give expression to Jacob’s unquenchable longing for his beloved Joseph. The words must have touched the very core of Joseph’s heart.
[EF] thus far: A hint that Yosef is still alive, or perhaps a tiny expression of hope.
[RA] he’s been torn to shreds, and I have not seen him since. In the first clause, Jacob is represented as quoting verbatim his actual response to Joseph’s supposed death, yet the second clause has the look of clinging to the hope that Jacob has merely disappeared but has not been killed.
29 Now should you take away this one as well from before my face, should harm befall him, you will bring down my gray hair in ill-fortune to Sheol! 30 So now, when I come back to your servant, my father, and the lad is not with us, -with whose life his own life is bound up!-his soul is bound up with the lad’s soul. The same phrase is used of the intertwine souls of David and Jonathan. I Sam. XVIII,1. The beauty and conciseness of the three Hebrew words cannot be reproduced in translation.
[EF] life: Heb. nefesh, also “emotions” or “feelings.”
31 it will be, that when he sees that the lad is no more, he will die, and your servant will have brought down the gray hair of your servant, our father, in grief to Sheol!with sorrow to the grave. The skillful repetition of the phrase by Judah is poignantly pathetic.
[EF] our father: Is Yehuda unknowingly including Yosef?
[RA] when he saw the lad was not with us. The Masoretic Text lacks “with us,” though it is reflected in the Septuagint and in one version of the Samaritan Bible.
32 For your servant pledged himself for the lad to my father, saying: If I do not bring him back to you, I will be culpable-for-sin against my father all the days (to come).[RA] For your servant became pledge. Judah then proceeds to quote the actual formula of his pledge of surety to Jacob. As many commentators have noted, his invocation of his pledge is a way of explaining why he should have put himself forward as spokesman for the brothers.
33 So now, pray let your servant stay instead of the lad, as servant to my lord, but let the lad go up with his brothers!abide instead of the lad a bondman. Judah became surety (v.32) and now offers himself as a substitute. He prefers bondage to freedom, so as to save his brother. He once saw the anguish of his old father when Joseph was gone.; he cannot endure to see a repetition.
[RA] let your servant, pray, stay instead of the lad as a slave. Judah, who conceived the plan of selling Joseph into slavery, now comes around 180 degrees by offering himself as a slave in place of Benjamin.
34 For how can I go up to my father, when the lad is not with me? Then would I see the ill-fortune that would come upon my father![RA] Let me see not the evil that would find out my father! This of course stands in stark contrast to his willingness years before to watch his father writhe in anguish over Joseph’s supposed death. The entire speech, as these concluding words suggest, is at once a moving piece of rhetoric and the expression of a profound inner change. Joseph’s “testing” of his brothers is thus also a process that induces the recognition of guilt and leads to psychological transformation.
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