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1. 1. Rabbinic discourse about the extra years Joseph spent in prison [as a victim of a phony sexual harassment charge made by the unsuspecting and rather naive Mr. Potiphar] pivots on two years he did “hard time” after Pharaoh’s amnesiac butler had been released. The rabbis demonstrate two competing strains of thought a propos this matter - one involving criticism and the other, exoneration. Why the tension?
2. When we first encounter Joseph he is the arrogant ba’al hachalomot,” - “the master of the dream.” But we notice that when he told his dreams to his brothers and father, he merely recited it without editorial comment or interpretation. With Pharaoh, however, he reaches a new stage as a powerful dream interpreter. Pharaoh is duly impressed with Joseph’s Freudian skills but there is one un-Freudian moment in the text when Pharaoh says, “Have you ever seen anyone like this in whom there is the spirit of HaShem?” Aside from the rejection of his councilors and magicians implicit in this statement, there is here a surprising admission by Pharaoh that perhaps he himself is not divine. What drove Pharaoh to this extravagant praise of Joseph?
3. Joseph is no innocent in explaining Pharaoh’s dream. Otherwise, he would have turned around, after solving the double dream, and said to the courtiers: “Put the handcuffs back on, I am ready to go back to prison.” Instead, he proceeds immediately to a magisterial diagnosis of the problem and offers a managerial solution to it. One wonders whether Joseph might not have seen the cupbearer among those assembled in Pharaoh’s presence and realized that you cannot leave your fate in the hands of others. Accordingly, he could not stop after interpreting the dream; he had to show politely and subtly that there was a way to prevent the oncoming disaster and without explicitly saying so nominating himself for the job. How exactly did Joseph get this self-promotion across to Pharaoh?
4. For the last three decades much has been written about the multiple personality syndrome, a condition in which the individual seems to harbor simultaneously completely different and sometimes contradictory character traits - and even voices to back them up. Is there anything in this view of troubled human beings that might help explain Joseph’s deployment of a cat and mouse game theory that he employs in torturing his brothers - before the great revelation scene.
5 Joseph is both the great dream merchant and interpreter of dreams. But one question remains to be offered and deciphered. Without any preparation for the reader, Joseph is introduced as a simple shepherd who dreams dreams with grandiose scenarios, one involving sheaves and the other heavenly constellations. This is not the kind of dream sequence that would normally attach itself to a 17-year-old shepherd boy. How are we to account for this sudden intervention of the dream world into the consciousness of Joseph?
Why didn’t Joseph, Pharaoh’s viceroy, make a quick helicopter flight back to Canaan to see his family? |
OBSERVATIONS
*Joseph’s solid recommendations to Pharaoh on how to prepare for the calamity to befall Egypt were evidence of chutzpah and wiliness because they were unsolicited. Joseph took a tremendous risk and might have ended up like the baker whose he dream he also interpreted.
**The Hebrew word for dungeon fond in 41:14 - bor - is precisely the same word used to describe the pit into which his brothers tossed him. From the first pit, he is propelled into the Ishmaelite -Midianite caravan and thence to Potiphar’s house. From the second he is seconded to the great ruler of the greatest empire in the world!
***It is to be noted that Joseph act in saving Egypt from a devastating famine is directed at the well-being of his adopted country. But this act also enables Joseph eventually and after much travail, to heal the rift that has separated him from his father and brothers. There are unanticipated consequences in state policies.
****The rabbis, ostensibly embarrassed by Joseph’s marriage to the daughter of an Egyptian High Priest, manufactured some rather extravagant tales to explain that she was actually a prototypical convert to Judaism. There is a even a novella from the Hellenistic period in Jewish history, Joseph and Asenath, which attempts to elaborate on this theory.
*****Despite the ingenuity of traditional commentators to create beautiful homilies on the word avrech [41:43] - “father of mercy,” this simply appears to be an Egyptian loan word that means something like “make way.”
******Joseph calls his second son Ephraim, from a Hebrew root that means “fruitful.” The name is connected to the fruitfulness of the land of Egypt during the first seven years of plenty when the produce was piled up in such quantities that it could not be counted - like the future numbers of the people of Israel in HaShem’s promise to Abraham.
*******The Hebrew word for provisions that Jacob says are available in Egypt is shever which literally means to “break” as in “to break bread” here it means to break an imposed fast, a famine.
********The Torah says of Joseph when he saw his brothers in Egypt Vayakrem otam - “He recognized them.” This is the same verb that Jacob encounters when he is asked to “recognize” Joseph’s kutonet passim and when Tamar invites Judah to “recognize” the tokens he had left with her.
*********There is incredible irony in the brothers’ assertion that they are twelve in number, except for one “who is no more”[42:13] That absent one is seated before them as they bow down to him in fulfillment of Joseph’s dream. |
