Joseph Part 14: Reconciliation of the Brothers

Reconciliation of the Brothers

The long speech of Judah that we just read is going to be matched by a long speech of his brother Yoseph. 

And that speech is gonna begin the final third of the second act. 

In Joseph's speech, he's going to talk about how, "Hey, I think Elohim was, like, behind all of this to save everybody's life. So by the way, go get dad so I can save everybody's life." And that's basically the shape of this section. It's mostly Joseph's speech, and then him making a plan with Pharaoh to get everybody down. 

Genesis 45:1–25 CSB

1 Joseph could no longer keep his composure in front of all his attendants, so he called out, “Send everyone away from me!” No one was with him when he revealed his identity to his brothers. 2 But he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and also Pharaoh’s household heard it. 3 Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph! Is my father still living?” But they could not answer him because they were terrified in his presence. 4 Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Please, come near me,” and they came near. “I am Joseph, your brother,” he said, “the one you sold into Egypt. 5 And now don’t be grieved or angry with yourselves for selling me here, because God sent me ahead of you to preserve life. 6 For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there will be five more years without plowing or harvesting. 7 God sent me ahead of you to establish you as a remnant within the land and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. 8 Therefore it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household, and ruler over all the land of Egypt. 9 “Return quickly to my father and say to him, ‘This is what your son Joseph says: “God has made me lord of all Egypt. Come down to me without delay. 10 You can settle in the land of Goshen and be near me—you, your children, and your grandchildren, your flocks, your herds, and all you have. 11 There I will sustain you, for there will be five more years of famine. Otherwise, you, your household, and everything you have will become destitute.” ’ 12 Look! Your eyes and the eyes of my brother Benjamin can see that I’m the one speaking to you. 13 Tell my father about all my glory in Egypt and about all you have seen. And bring my father here quickly.” 14 Then Joseph threw his arms around his brother Benjamin and wept, and Benjamin wept on his shoulder. 15 Joseph kissed each of his brothers as he wept, and afterward his brothers talked with him. 16 When the news reached Pharaoh’s palace, “Joseph’s brothers have come,” Pharaoh and his servants were pleased. 17 Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Tell your brothers, ‘Do this: Load your animals and go on back to the land of Canaan. 18 Get your father and your families, and come back to me. I will give you the best of the land of Egypt, and you can eat from the richness of the land.’ 19 You are also commanded to tell them, ‘Do this: Take wagons from the land of Egypt for your dependents and your wives and bring your father here. 20 Do not be concerned about your belongings, for the best of all the land of Egypt is yours.’ ” 21 The sons of Israel did this. Joseph gave them wagons as Pharaoh had commanded, and he gave them provisions for the journey. 22 He gave each of the brothers changes of clothes, but he gave Benjamin three hundred pieces of silver and five changes of clothes. 23 He sent his father the following: ten donkeys carrying the best products of Egypt and ten female donkeys carrying grain, food, and provisions for his father on the journey. 24 So Joseph sent his brothers on their way, and as they were leaving, he said to them, “Don’t argue on the way.” 25 So they went up from Egypt and came to their father Jacob in the land of Canaan.

"And Yoseph was not able to restrain himself." Do you remember when he saw Benjamin? You had, same word. He had to restrain himself, hold it in. And then he just, he can't hold it in anymore. "So he called out, 'Everyone go out for me.' So no man stood with him when Yoseph made himself known to his brothers. And he gave his voice in weeping.

Egypt heard. The whole house of Pharaoh heard.

And Yoseph said to his brothers," just imagine the moment, "I'm Yoseph!

Is Dad really alive? Like, you're not lying to me, are you? Is Dad really alive?" "And his brothers could not answer him. They were stunned."

Over a decade has gone buy at this point

"Yoseph said to his brothers," verse 4, "'Draw near to me please.' And they drew near." Again, this is temple language.

"And he said, 'I am Yoseph your brother, the one you sold to Egypt.

Now, don't let your heart be grieved with pain.

Don't let there be hot anger in your eyes because you sold me here. Because listen, Elohim sent me here before all of you, for the preservation of life, the saving of life.

These two years of famine have been in the midst of the land. And listen, there's five more years in which there's gonna be no farming.

Elohim sent me here before y'all to set up a remnant in the land, a remnant for the preservation of life to preserve you all alive, a great escaped remnant.'"

This escaped remnant is what was used to describe the survivors of when the king of Babylon got all the armies together back in Abraham's day. And he attacked Sodom, and he took Lot captive.

And a refugee ran to Abraham to tell him, "Hey, like, your nephew has been captured." So that's this word, the refugee from the great war.

Yoseph as an Image of Elohim and a New Noah

In parallelism with a remnant. And this is what Noah and his wife and his family were called in the boat. They were the ones that remained alive.

So listen, you haven't have forgotten. We're in the middle of a de-creation event here. And remember, the famine is set on analogy to the flood. Remember all the language about life being cut off, the land coming to an end? And so listen, Elohim sent me to make the ark, and I made it, and we stored up all the food, and I've got everything ready. And this was all Elohim's doing. Verse 8. "So now you all did not send me here, Elohim did.

He set me up as a father to Pharaoh, as a master for all his house, one who rules over all the land of Egypt.

So hurry, go up to my father, say to him, 'This is what Yoseph, your son says. Elohim has set me up as the master of all Egypt. Come down.

Don't just stand there. Come down. And you will dwell in the land of,'" the first time it's mentioned, "'Goshen.'"

"So if you come down to Goshen, you'll be close to me.

You and your sons, and the sons of your sons and all your animals will all be a little happy remnant with our lives preserved with enough food here in Goshen."

This is the little ark floating in the famine. 

"There are five more years of famine, so that you're not dispossessed, you, your house and everything."

This little line in veres 10 of you, your sons, the sons of your sons, your animals. There's this refrain in the flood narrative of Noah and his wife, and his sons and their wives, and all of the animals. It's this little list of everybody who's in the ark. And it's matched right here.

"Look, your eyes are really seeing here. The eyes of my brother Benjamin. It's my mouth that's speaking to you. You have to go tell my father of my glory, my kavod, my honor. You have seen my glory."

Tell of the glory of the image of God ruling over the nations down here. "Say everything you've seen, you have to hurry. You have to bring Dad down here."

Yoseph as the Image of Elohim

Yoseph is presented as the ruling image of Elohim. And we've seen these echoes already back in the enthronement scene. And he's the second in charge. But now this is the matching part of it . So he's a ruler.

Genesis 1:14–26 CSB

14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night. They will serve as signs for seasons and for days and years. 15 They will be lights in the expanse of the sky to provide light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule (Mashal) over the day and the lesser light to rule over the night—as well as the stars. 17 God placed them in the expanse of the sky to provide light on the earth, 18 to rule the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 Evening came and then morning: the fourth day. 20 Then God said, “Let the water swarm with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” 21 So God created the large sea-creatures and every living creature that moves and swarms in the water, according to their kinds. He also created every winged creature according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them: “Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the waters of the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth.” 23 Evening came and then morning: the fifth day. 24 Then God said, “Let the earth produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that crawl, and the wildlife of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25 So God made the wildlife of the earth according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that crawl on the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule (Radah) the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.”

Elohim, in Genesis 1, creates humans to rule. And there the Hebrew word is "radah."Genesis 1:26

And they have the rulers on the land that correspond to the rulers in the sky. The sun, moon, and stars that are said to rule over the day and night. And there the Hebrew verb for "rule" is "mashal."

But now we have the guy who dreamed about ruling over the sun, moon, and stars. And right here in this chapter, he calls himself a mashal, the ruler. So he is ruling in the way that the sun, moon, and the stars are said to rule in Genesis 1. 

And when he tells his brothers to go down, it's a less than common form of the verb "go down." And it's spelled with the same three letters, redah, as the other word for rule in Genesis 1. 

It's a wordplay. So it's another homonym of the word "go down." You can say the word "go down" in a few ways, but one of them is the precisely the same letters and almost the same pronunciation as the verb "rule" of the humans ruling. 

So Joseph, and what he says, "Go down and tell Dad about my honor."

Eden narrative

Okay, so in the garden of Eden story, Yahweh Elohim creates the human outside the garden, out of the mud, and then elevates the human and rests them in the garden where they have access to life, everlasting life.

Elohim has elevated Yoseph to the place of rule, and now he's a source of life for others. He's becoming like a tree of life for others. 

So what Yoseph is, is he's both a new Noah and he's a new image of God, 'adam.

Creating the little Eden refuge for the remnant to preserve alive.

So if what Yoseph is being compared to is a new humanity or Noah that preserved the seed for a whole new humanity after the flood, then when Yoseph says this, that tells you the narrator wants you to see that this is about a rebirth for all humanity, but carried in the family of just these 70 descendants of Jacob. 

Somehow the whole of humanity's fate hangs in the balance of what happens with the seed of Jacob here. 

That with the calling of Abraham, the fate of the nations all gets concentrated in on this one lineage. And so what God does for them is what God is doing for all the nations. 

Goshen. It actually is a rural region out in Egypt. 

So there's three Hebrew letters in the word "Goshen." And what's interesting is the first and the last letter, do you see that? The G, the gimel.

And the nun, and the nun. So the first and the last letters of Goshen are the two letters that make up the Hebrew word "gan," which is the word "garden."

He brings them down into the Goshen, where the seed and the animals and the remnant is kept alive while the famine rages out. 

When you read Goshen, what you hear in Hebrew is a wordplay that has the effect of Garden.

And that becomes the little refuge down in Egypt.

Brothers Dwelling Together in Unity

This is verse, yeah, 14.

"Then he fell upon the neck of Benyamin his brother, and he wept." Does that ring bells? Yep, Jacob and Esau's reconciliation. "Benjamin wept on his neck, he kissed all his brothers, he wept over them, and afterwards his brothers spoke with him." This is exactly all the language of the reunion of Jacob and Esau

"And the voice was heard out in the house of Pharaoh saying, 'The brothers of Yoseph have come.' And it was good in the eyes of Pharaoh and in the eyes of all his servants.

And Pharaoh said this to Yoseph, 'Say to your brothers, "Do this. Load up your animals, leave, go to the land of Canaan and take your father and your households and come, and I will give you good here in the land of Egypt. Eat of the fat of the land.

You're commanded. Do this.

Take for yourselves from the land of Egypt carts."'" And the word "carts" is the word calves in the plural for, like, cow or oxen-drawn carts. So even the word "carts" is the name of an animal. Calf-drawn carts. This is all about loading the beasts, getting the animals. We're gonna stock the ark here.

So this is the equivalent of when God tells Noah, "Go get your wife, your sons, your sons' wives, all the animals will come to you, load up the ark with food."

And that was a command of God. God commanded Noah saying. So now here's Pharaoh, the God figure, commanding, "'Go get your family. Go get your animals. I will give you good to eat. Don't let your eyes pity your belongings, because listen, the good of all the land of Egypt is for you.'

So the sons of Israel did so. Yoseph gave them carts. He gave them food for the road."

"He gave to all of them a change of clothes. And to Benjamin, he gave 300 silver and five changes of clothes."

Do you remember the portions he got? He got five portions more. there, it was to activate their jealousy as a part of the test. these are matching parts that this is just the joy of being reunited to his other brother from his mother. 

"To his father, he sent like this, 10 donkeys carrying the good of the land of Egypt, 10 female donkeys, bread and provisions for the road. He sent his brothers and he said to them, 'Listen, don't start arguing with each other about who said this and that. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. It's done. Elohim sent me here. Go get Dad.'"

That's a wise move there. Like, don't rehash the history.

Cain was angry at his brother. That was the first response. So, like, we're done with that, at least for a while.

"And so they went up out of Egypt."

This whole section came, began in chapter 42 with Jacob saying, "Why are you looking at each other? Go down to Egypt to get food." And now here are two rounds of testing, two trips back and forth, and they go back up out of Egypt.

So we have the language of reconciliation between the brothers. 

After Yaaqov’s 20-year exile, caused by his deception of his father and brother, the brothers finally meet. Yaaqov discovers mercy, and there is a powerful embrace that brings the two brothers together.

Similarly, after Yoseph’s 13-year exile, caused by his brothers’ jealousy and after the deception of their father, the brothers finally meet and Yoseph shows them mercy.

However, Yoseph’s reconciliation with his brothers isn’t just a parallel with the Yaaqov and Esau story. Both stories of reconciled siblings bring to a climax the “conflict of seeds” and “sibling rivalry” themes in the book of Genesis.

Round 1: Humanity vs. the snake

Round 2: Abel vs. Cain

Round 3: Shem and Japheth vs. Ham

Round 4: Abraham vs. Lot

Round 5: Isaac vs. Ishmael

Round 6: Yaaqov vs. Esau

Round 7: Yoseph vs. his brothers

So if you're interested in all of the suffering servant messianic patterning in the Joseph story, Samuel Emadi has a public domain, his dissertation,

https://www.tyndalebulletin.org/article/27638-covenant-typology-and-the-story-of-joseph.pdf. 

He has a book version that is more readable for a general audience, called From Prisoner to Prince, but there's a free version online. (I don’t own that one yet)

And he has a great way of bringing all the threads together here. 

“Each of these sibling rivalries or ‘seed conflicts’ develops the paradigmatic conflict first announced in Genesis 3:15 and then portrayed in Cain’s murder of Abel. While only Genesis 4 ends in murder, the threat of fratricide (Brother against Brother) against the covenant seed looms throughout each of these conflicts. The seed conflict between Joseph and his brothers is, thus, climactic in Genesis, as the brothers’ intense animosity for Joseph evokes … Genesis 4. … The dramatic twist in the Joseph story is that Joseph’s wise plan to ‘test’ his brothers (42:15-16), coupled with Judah’s repentance (44:18-34), lead to a reversal of the Cain and Abel story. … The unresolved brotherly strife of previous generations is finally overcome by Yoseph’s ruse in chapters 42-45, and by his refusal to exact vengeance on his brothers after Jacob’s death (50:15-21). In this way, the Joseph story reverses one of the primary literary motifs in Genesis. Sibling conflict has racked the covenant family and endangered the seed since Adam and Eve’s first children. Joseph undoes the cycle of violence, but only by exercising forgiveness after his own humiliation and exaltation. In this way, Joseph is an anti-Cain. He is truly his brothers’ keeper.”

Emadi, Samuel (2018). “Covenant,Typology, and the Story of Joseph”. Tyndale Bulletin. 100-101.

Jacob’s Journey to Egypt

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