Joseph and his Brothers

The Bible was never as good, a wit once remarked, after all those religious people got to it. An invidious comment, no doubt, which far too lazily assumes that faith is inimical to enjoyment. Yet perhaps it gets at an uncomfortable sense that, for many, the Bible has been spoiled by ownership. Those who don’t profess to its divinity tend to enter it warily, like trespassers on some great lord’s estate. That feeling breeds alienation and resentment—moods that aren’t likely to yield to reading pleasure, much less enlightenment.But the Bible is like all literature—is, in this sense, first among literary equals—in that it was written to give both pleasure and guidance. And from its vastitudes, I have always been especially struck by the story of Joseph and his brothers. It stands out for the perfection of its design, the mastery of its techniques, and the power of its climax. But what is additionally remarkable is the way it seems to anticipate the reader’s doubts by weaving those doubts into fabric of its narrative. How it manages that feat, and what that says about the craft of fiction, are things I’ve long hoped to explore.The story of Joseph begins in chapter 37 of the Book of Genesis, and there already we’re presented with challenges to what should be the straightforward task of reading it. Properly speaking, this is not a story so much as a turning-point episode in the ancient history of a people—its events flow naturally from the events that precede it and organically set the stage for the narrative that continues in the Book of Exodus. (And for Christians, it presages the New Testament.) Every plot movement and character portrayal has, or can be interpreted to have, some kind of theological underpinning. The tale’s age can make it seem gnomic and elusive to present-day readers in ways its authors would not likely have intended. And even its sources complicate transmission: for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to refer to the author in the singular, but textual scholars think the Joseph story is a composite of two versions—commonly given the labels J and E—and various inconsistencies can make it unclear whether seams in the narrative were accidental or intended.This is a lot of context to try to clear from the air. Often, separating the Bible from the glittering riches of thousands of years of learned commentary seems like a pointless handicap. Many of its episodes—Noah’s denunciation of Ham, for instance, or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—are so obscure and telegraphic that you can get no traction at all without the footnoted assistance of exegetes and Hebraists.But this is not the case with the last chapters of Genesis, and anyone who is able to achieve a bit of stillness with the Joseph story will see that, whatever the author’s religious mission in recording it, paramount are its dramatic disclosures and emotional releases. It works beautifully as a self-contained tale, and that is how I’ll read it here. Robert Alter, who is usually compartmentalized as a Bible scholar but is in fact also one of our best living literary critics, has argued that there is nothing incongruous in believing that the Bible’s writers enjoyed the chance to display their technical virtuosity in prose fiction. The gaudy efflorescence of Biblical narrative, with its sheer delight in sound and spectacle, make it clear that the authors felt no compulsion to tamp down their stylistic flourishes in the name of piety. But as Alter suggests, it takes some mental reorientation to accept that the Book of Genesis is closer in genre and rhetorical technique to Fielding and de Maupassant than Maimonides and St. Thomas of Aquinas. (I discovered as I began this essay that Alter has beautifully articulated a number of my more inchoate thoughts, so I’ll be using his bracingly idiosyncratic translation of Genesis as well as quoting frequently from his great 1981 study The Art of Biblical Narrative.)Perhaps what most stands out on the first reading of the Joseph story is the restrained use of the fantastical devices that haunt the rest of Genesis. God is here, but only tacitly, and the exact extent of His involvement is unclear to the characters and the audience alike. The story begins with a supernatural occurrence that is handled with such irreverence that it seems almost ironically deployed. Joseph is 17 and the most beloved son of Jacob, who has ostentatiously advertised his favoritism by giving Joseph the iconic coat of many colors. Joseph has become, as a result, a coddled brat—the very first thing we see him do is tattle to Jacob about some talk he overheard while tending to his sheep. The next thing we see him do is announce to his father and his steamingly resentful older brothers the prophecies revealed to him in dreams:

And Joseph dreamed a dream and told it to his brothers and they hated him all the more. And he said to them, “Listen, pray, to this dream that I dreamed. And, look, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, look, my sheaf arose and actually stood up, and, look, your sheaves drew round and bowed to my sheaf.” And his brothers said to him, “Do you mean to reign over us, do you mean to rule us?” And they hated him all the more, for his dreams and for his words. And he dreamed yet another dream and recounted it to his brothers, and he said, “Look, I dreamed a dream again, and, look, the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing to me.”

Here, at the outset, is the first signaling of a narrative complexity that will become more and more enfolding as the story progresses. Joseph is the hero of this tale, his dream is divinely inspired, and in time events will vindicate his visions. But the story is only passingly interested in the predictive accuracy of his dreams—its emphasis is instead on Joseph’s boastfulness, his spoiled naiveté, and the contempt he blithely incites among his brothers. The story is prioritizing the conflict of familial envy over the more grandiose problem of divine revelation.That is a momentous decision for a storyteller to make, and attentive readers will feel its reverberations. Joseph’s vision, after all, comes from God; it is a revealed truth. Yet no book understands better than the Bible how much disgust truth-tellers (especially cocksure, pretty-boy teen prophets like Joseph) can inspire when they pronounce their insights. By focusing on Joseph’s arrogance, Jacob’s geriatric pigheadedness, and the brothers’ obsessive jealousy, the story quietly acknowledges—and then exploits—the skeptical relationship the audience has with prophecies. Readers are not in the position of, say, wandering Jews who gawp up stupidly at Moses on Mt. Sinai as he presents them with the Ten Commandments within a nimbus of heavenly light. They are instead being subtly recruited into the story.That story, the intimate and small-bore dynamics of a fractured clan, continues by relating the consequences of the brothers’ envy. Joseph belatedly joins his brothers as they tend their flocks in a distant field. As they watch him approach they decide to kill him. But at the last minute, Reuben, the eldest, persuades them to instead throw Joseph into a hole in the field, so that they won’t risk God’s wrath by committing fratricide. Thus they strip him of his clothing (here we learn that Joseph has cluelessly worn his coat of many colors; Alter points out that seeing him flaunting the garment may have been the last straw for the brothers) and cast him into a pit.It turns out that Reuben’s plan is rather elaborate. He actually intends to rescue Joseph when his brothers aren’t looking and then acquire some overdue credit from his father when he delivers the boy safe and intact. But after he foolishly leaves the scene, Judah, the fourth oldest, hatches on the more serviceable scheme of selling Joseph to a passing band of traders. Reuben returns to find the pit empty and he forlornly joins his brothers in staining Joseph’s coat in the blood of a slaughtered goat. They show the coat to their credulous and histrionic old father, who seems almost eager to believe that his worst nightmare has come true and that Joseph has been killed by a wild beast. Meanwhile, Joseph is conveyed to Egypt and sold into the service of Potiphar, one of the Pharaoh’s chief administrators.Where is God in all this? The question isn’t sophistry—it’s expressly what the story is about. Unlike elsewhere in Genesis, God is not tangibly depicted but appears more abstractly as a mechanism of Fate, His will understated to the point of guesswork. We are witnessing a paradox of rhetorical dazzle joined with a kind of studied relinquishing of control: as God’s involvement becomes obscure, the god-like author will find ways to loosen his own grip upon events. Fate must have its way, but we will reach it through a chaos of clashing personalities, free will unchecked.Joseph’s personality is that of a kiss-up, so Potiphar takes him as a favorite and trusts him above all people in the household. With almost winking deliberateness, the story has begun to play with the technique of repetition. Once again Joseph incurs the jealousy of a familiar, when he spurns Potiphar’s wife. She shows her husband a garment of his, claiming he had forced himself on her, and he is cast into another pit, this time an Egyptian dungeon. And again the pattern restarts: the warden takes him as a favorite and makes him the unofficial “captain” of the prison. This brings him into contact with high-ranking men who had fallen on the wrong side of the Pharaoh, the head cupbearer and the head baker. Returning to his role as, in his brother’s sarcastic phrasing, the “dream-master,” Joseph interprets the dreams of each man.Two years pass (a remarkably long time to wait for deliverance, another sign of the remote role that God plays in these proceedings). Finally Pharaoh himself is vexed by an inscrutable dream and his cupbearer, who had managed to forget about Joseph since being returned to the court, tells his master of a certain incarcerated, dream-interpreting Hebrew. Joseph explains that Pharaoh’s dream foretells God’s plan for Egypt: there will be seven years of full harvests, which will be followed by seven years of famine. He goes on to describe a course of action (a new wrinkle bespeaking his maturation and diplomatic savvy) amounting to the heavy-handed consolidation of all of the kingdom’s crops during the years of plenty followed by a carefully regulated—and presumably highly lucrative—system of rationing and welfare during the years of affliction. Pharaoh is gobsmacked by the wisdom of the answer and he appoints Joseph to carry out his suggested plan. He adorns his new second-in-command in “fine linen clothes and placed the golden collar round his neck.” He gives Joseph a new name and marries him to the daughter of a powerful cleric. And he chariots Joseph through the streets of the capital, demanding that the people bow before him, harking back, though in unpredictable ways, to Joseph’s adolescent dream of the deferential sheaves. The first of his prophecies has now been carried out, and the chapter closes by driving home the extraordinary scope of Joseph’s power and dominion:

And all the land of Egypt was hungry and the people cried out to Pharaoh for bread, and Pharaoh said to all of Egypt, “Go to Joseph. What he says, you must do.” And the famine was over the land. And Joseph laid open whatever had grain within and sold provisions to Egypt. And the famine grew harsh in the land of Egypt. And all the earth came to Egypt, to Joseph, to get provisions, for the famine had grown harsh in all the earth.

Repetition in prose fiction can have a number of functions. It can be used for emphasis and it can be used to call attention to small but significant discrepancies. More intangibly, it gives readers a sense of familiarity and inclusivity. An emphasized rhetorical effect is a way of acknowledging the audience, and in the case of the Joseph story, readers have been gently ushered into the confident position of knowing how to interpret, and therefore accept, a rather enormous turn of events. In three successive episodes, Joseph has faced a setback through some betrayal and each time the obstacle has proven to work in his favor. Each time there has been an article of clothing with both dramatic and symbolic resonance. Each time there have been dreams that Joseph has learned to decipher with increasing sophistication. An extraordinary evolution has been traced so smoothly that the reader hardly remarks on it. The first episode is a savage, backwater tribal feud; the second is a tale of palace intrigue; the third places the same protagonist at the flashpoint of a global crisis. By repeating a recognizable structure the story has been able to widen in breadth, enveloping the fortunes of the entire known world through a narrative progress that feels completely natural and inevitable.The story has brilliantly broadened its scope. It has raised its stakes to concern nations as well as individuals. And it has fluidly adjusted to its cosmopolitan setting by way of fittingly sophisticated rhetorical devices that were much less in evidence in early Genesis tales located in the desert hinterlands. There are dangers, however. One is in succumbing to a facile linearity. Stories are always at risk of confusing movement with morality—in seeming to connect narrative development too plainly with a character’s failures or improvements. Then there is the problem of excessive refinement. A story that is too much about its own perfect architecture becomes contrived and artificial.The Joseph story avoids these dangers by staging a potent convergence. Joseph’s family will leave Canaan for Egypt. The primitive, full-throated storytelling of the wilderness will meet the sleek rhetorical designs of the metropolis. Earlier I elided chapter 38, but in many ways it throws the Joseph story into instructive relief. This chapter is the bizarre recounting of Judah’s crude efforts to marry off his widowed daughter-in-law, Tamar, and it is full of incest and divine smitings and other stereotypical cult arcana that can make the Bible seem so estranged from the present-day. (This is also the chapter where we find the incomprehensible story of Onan, struck down by God for, apparently, spilling his seed on the ground instead of properly impregnating his sister-in-law.) Yet these folk legends are charged with an emotional immediacy that makes them as hard to forget as they are to understand. It’s here that the patriarchs rend their garments, burst into tears, and scream toward the heavens. Beginning in chapter 42, those unaccountable and ungovernable emotions make their way back into the fabric of the story, giving it a glowing sense of mystery that lights up its profound depths. That mystery is the secret to its timelessness.Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt at the start of the famine to buy food. They are not unique, as Pharaoh’s storehouses have the only saved supply in the land, and Joseph’s main business as governor is meeting with desperate tribal envoys and negotiating terms. But when his brothers arrive (as perhaps he must have suspected they would), he conceals his identity and grows antagonistic—a terrifying thing for his brothers to encounter, since Joseph holds their lives in his hands:

And the sons of Joseph came to buy provisions among those who came, for there was famine in the land of Canaan. As for Joseph, he was the regent of the land, he was the provider to all the people of the land. And Joseph’s brothers came and bowed to him, their faces to the ground. And Joseph saw his brothers and recognized them, and he played the stranger to them and spoke harshly to them, and said to them, “Where have you come from?” And they said, “From the land of Canaan, to buy food.” And Joseph recognized his brothers but they did not recognize him. And Joseph remembered the dreams he had dreamed about them, and he said to them, “You are spies! To see the land’s nakedness you have come.” And they said to him, “No, my lord, for your servants have come to buy food. We are all the sons of one man. We are honest. Your servants would never be spies.” And he said to them, “No! For the land’s nakedness you have come to see."

Joseph’s accusation that his brothers are in Egypt as spies doesn’t make any particular sense—it alarms them partially because it seems like the whimsical paranoia of a mad tyrant. But it is on Joseph’s part a powerful involuntary irony, because by hiding his identity, he is in fact the one spying on them. The literality of his espionage is tensely driven home a few lines later, when the brothers begin to frantically confide to each other in Hebrew, not knowing that Joseph can understand them—the whole time, we learn, he has been speaking to them through an interpreter.Spying is, of course, one way of defining an audience’s relationship to a story. So it is by subtly differentiating and shifting the characters’ degrees of knowledge and ignorance (Robert Alter calls the entire story “a fictional experiment in knowledge”) that the reader is further enmeshed in the tale—indeed, is made to feel like an active character within it. The brothers know certain things about their ordeal, but at this moment a lot is happening that utterly eludes them. Joseph knows much more, but he is far from omniscient—not only is he, obscurely, an agent of God’s plans and, less obscurely, of Pharaoh’s, but he is a somewhat helpless subject to his own capricious feelings of anger, hatred, love, and forgiveness. And we the readers find ourselves on this spectrum of knowledge and ignorance as well: We know more than the characters but less than the author.Gaps of knowledge between characters create fertile conditions for irony, and the Joseph story uses those conditions to dazzling, if extremely tumultuous, effect. One simple example comes when the brothers arrive in Egypt and formally prostrate themselves before Joseph, “with their faces to the ground.” This is, we remember, the completion of the teenage Joseph’s dream, but it is a confusingly punctured vindication, since the brothers have no idea of what is going on. Joseph, in contrast, is aware of the irony—we’re told that he suddenly remembers those dreams—but it appears only to make him enraged. (Joseph would also angrily notice the irony of the brothers’ protest that because they are all the sons of one man, they must therefore be “honest.”) The reader knows what Joseph knows, and is also aware that a greater irony is simultaneously at work, since the seeming arrival of the prophetic vision is taking place in the middle of the story and offers no clear resolution or meaning. It is like a cruel parody of God’s will.With a heightening sense of tension and turmoil, Joseph tries to leverage his greater knowledge into power, only to see those attempts crash against the limits of his understanding. When Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dream, it was easy to know how to proceed in such a way as to vouchsafe wealth and influence. But now, crucially, Joseph is not sure what he wants. Does he want to exact revenge on his brothers? Does he want to reconcile with them? Vitally, this is a story about a divinely inspired seer, a “dream-master,” that unfolds from a place of bewilderment and blindness.Joseph’s torturous plan is to hold one of the brothers (Simeon) hostage while the others return to Canaan with their purchased grain. Then they will have to return with their youngest brother Benjamin, ostensibly to test the veracity of their story (this would somehow prove that they aren’t spies, although the test makes little sense), but really to confirm that Benjamin is still alive and, it seems, to explicitly terrorize his siblings, who fear explaining his demands to Jacob. Then, before they depart, in a gratuitous bit of authoritarian malice, Joseph returns his brothers’ money to their packs; they are horrified to discover it, since that is exactly the kind of frame-up an angry ruler would manufacture to justify their execution.There is actually a modicum of logic to Joseph’s thinking. Benjamin is the only other son of his mother, Rachel—the others are children of Jacob’s less-preferred wife, Leah. Before he considers extending the olive branch, Joseph likely wants to ensure that his brothers haven’t dealt with Benjamin as they did him. Yet his actions are so impulsive and extemporized that it seems clear he’s possessed by something other than reason. The reprehensible thing about his plan is that it most severely punishes Jacob, who is ancient and grieving and may not have the fortitude to survive having Benjamin taken from him.Perhaps Joseph knows that he is hurting his father and is filled with remorse. Perhaps he is motivated by a thirst for revenge. Perhaps he is overcome with love, or crippled by confusion, or even choked by fear before the men who once viciously ganged up against him. Or perhaps he is painfully compelled to carry out this rigmarole by some inscrutable divine directive. But in the chapter’s most remarkable moment, Joseph turns away from his brothers and begins to weep. It is the first time we have seen him lose his composure. Then he regains himself, returns to his brothers, and has Simeon bound “in fetter before their eyes.”It is one thing that the reader does not entirely understand the meaning of Joseph’s breakdown. But it is even more significant that the author does not claim full understanding either. In this moment, through this primal outburst of emotion, the writer has conceded the limits of his own knowledge, and thereby defined himself, like the characters and the readers, as someone who stands inside the framework of the story and watches it unfold rather than someone who manipulates it coolly from afar.Thus the shining lesson of the Joseph story: there is great power in sacrificing omniscience. As in real-life interactions, if readers sense that a writer is merely withholding information, they feel distanced from the performance. Overt rhetorical effects allow the audience and the writer to make eye contact, but they exclude the story’s characters, who are at risk of turning into puppets. But when there is something unknown that all three participants grope toward together,  a story comes to feel like a shared experience, which in time becomes inseparable from personalized memory. That is how a work of fiction is transmuted into a real event—you feel as though you have taken part in it.The Joseph story will climax with a desperate abandonment of control and an acceptance of the limits of perception. It enacts its own rhetorical breakdown. But it can only reach this point by struggling through an increasingly taut atmosphere of irony and misprision. In chapter 43 the famine has worsened and the brothers return to Egypt with Benjamin, their father’s doleful oath ringing in their ears (“should harm befall him on the way you are going, you would bring down my gray head in sorrow to Sheol”). The technique of repetition reappears in their supplications, but whereas repetition was first used to expand the story’s scope, here it contracts events to an almost unbearably narrow and pressurized focus. Joseph greets them, is again overwhelmed by tears, and again composes himself to carry out a plan that is even more agonizing than the first. That is to get his brothers drunk and send them off with packs loaded with food. Having disarmed them with his largesse, he sends a servant to stop their departure. In Benjamin’s bag has been planted a silver goblet. The brothers return to the city in dumbstruck horror, and Joseph demands that Benjamin be given to him as a slave. As Alter puts it, the story has gone through a “crescendo pattern,” in which the effects are continually notched up, bringing the story that much closer to its ultimate crisis.A palpable sense of unsustainability comes over the narrative; it seems on the verge of implosion. Importantly, the repetitions are no longer caused by the subtle mechanics of a god-like author; they are, in part, the result of Joseph’s schemes. But Joseph is a heavy-handed author of events. His repetitions are too overt and come too close after one another for the story to plausibly bear their weight for much longer. The brothers themselves, for so long defined by their ignorance, recognize that something uncanny and malevolent is happening to them. They are brought elliptically into knowledge. In their bewilderment they conclude that these freak accidents can only be the hand of God dealing them retribution for their crime against Joseph, and in the story’s masterstroke, Judah desperately confesses to the crime to Joseph without even knowing to whom he’s speaking.The ironies have by now become so seemingly bottomless that no one can be fairly said to control them—not even the author. When the brothers return to the city after having been found with the goblet, Joseph lays into them, saying, “What is this deed you have done? Did you not know that a man like me would surely divine?” The double meaning, accessible to the reader but not the brothers, is of course that Joseph is known for his gifts of divination. But the added irony, which Joseph in his arrogance and anger does not seem to notice, is that in this instance he has divined nothing at all—the goblet was planted; it was the trick of a mountebank. That fact that the turning point of this story comes from a bit of petty duplicity disguising itself as divine omniscience powerfully destabilizes everything that has come before it. One of the story’s few certitudes is that Joseph has access to prophetic visions. But if that is the case, why does he resort to such a crude forgery of divination? Why does he seem to be reacting entire from reflex, with little to no insight into what he’s trying to accomplish. By planting the goblet, he has succeeded in claiming Benjamin (whom he could have simply claimed without the fancy trick), but what is the point of that? Is it revenge, or a deep and unconsidered yearning to be with his one innocent brother? If he did have heightened perception, he would know that his brothers could never go back to Jacob without Benjamin as he has bid them to do.And yet Joseph’s inaugurating dreams do come true—we have already seen his brothers bow before him, and they will soon do so again with their father—so there must remain the lingering question of intentionality: could a fraudulent divination actually be the evidence for true prophetic powers? Has Joseph’s mercurial temper driven this story into a welter of confusion and despair, or has he always been an active executor of his visions of the future? The questions are clearly unanswerable; each one creates another level of questioning. The story has reached the untenable point where every line leads to a Mobius strip of interpretation, of meanings crushing in upon meanings, mirroring the torment of the characters.That torment is relieved only when Judah finally invokes the wrongdoing that set the story in motion, and by offering himself as a slave in Benjamin’s stead, forthrightly accepts the eye-for-an-eye punishment for his role in selling Joseph into servitude. Even more movingly, he appeals to Joseph’s sense of mercy not for his own sake, but for Jacob’s: “And so, let your servant, pray, stay instead of the lad as a slave to my lord, and let the lad go up with his brothers. For how shall I go to my father, if the lad be not with us? Let me see not the evil that would find out my father!” Joseph has finally been made to see the thing that should have been glaringly obvious from the moment his brothers first came to Egypt: that he has it in his power to end his father’s suffering.Chapter 45 then commences with the greatest recognition scene in all of literature:

And Joseph could no longer hold himself in check before all who stood attendance upon him, and he cried, “Clear out everyone around me!” And no man stood with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers. And he wept aloud and the Egyptians heard and the house of Pharaoh heard. And Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” But his brothers could not answer him, for they were dismayed before him. And Joseph said to his brothers, “Come close to me, pray,” and they came close, and he said, “I am Joseph your brother whom you sold into Egypt. And now, do not be pained and do not be incensed with yourselves that you sold me down here, because for sustenance God has sent me before you. Two years now there has been famine in the heart of the land, and there are yet five years without plowing and harvest. And God has sent me before you to make a remnant on earth and to preserve life, for you to be a great surviving group. And so, it is not you who sent me here but God, and He has made me father to Pharaoh and lord to all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.”

In the upheaval of revelation, the familiar storytelling techniques appear again, but sputteringly, as though wearing themselves out. Joseph must repeat himself when he tells his brothers his identity. They are so stunned that they are speechless and inert, men reluctant to free themselves of their habitual incomprehension. Joseph, too, is not in full possession of his faculties, since he has asked if his father is still alive after his brothers have told him so on numerous occasions—he remains as much a man of impulse as of insight. And again it brings to the fore the story’s most insoluble conflict, what Alter calls “the bible’s double system of causation, human and divine.” Joseph finds the means toward forgiveness by testifying to God’s fundamentally inexplicable part in his brothers’ crime. His forgiveness triggers an incredible convulsion of relief: “And he fell upon the neck of his brother Benjamin and he wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. And he kissed all his brothers and wept over them. And after that, his brothers spoke with him.”The spell has been broken. The brothers now return to Canaan with their packs filled, freed from the nightmare repetition of secretly planted treasure (now “three hundred pieces of silver and five changes of garments”—the story’s two repeated motifs—have been given to them in their full awareness). All that remains is to go to Jacob, the most venerable and most naïve of the characters, and bring him too into the peaceful stasis of knowledge. The story captures the scene with gorgeous finality:

And they went up from Egypt and they came to the land of Canaan to Jacob their father. And they told him, saying, “Joseph is still alive,” and that he was ruler in all the land of Egypt. And his heart stopped, for he did not believe them. And they spoke to him all the words of Joseph that he had spoken to them, and he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to convey him, and the spirit of Jacob their father revived. And Israel [Jacob] said, “Enough! Joseph my son is still alive. Let me go see him before I die.”

This is the story's dramatic conclusion. The next five chapters are the denouement, chronicling Jacob and his large clan’s settlement in Egypt and Jacob’s final cryptic blessings to his sons before his death at age 147. In the way of denouements, the tone is lovely and wistful—strangely melancholy in its happy ending as though nostalgic for its time of high tension. Just as the structure of the story has become lax and dismantled (whereas the story’s long arc was screwed into seven chapters, its aftermath extends across five), the characters seem curiously, even touchingly, diminished. They have ceased fighting against their fates.Yet if the characters seem largely emptied of their purpose, there persist a few remarkable light touches that call forth echoes of the story’s most potent themes and conclude the tale with a sense of hovering ambiguity. Chapter 47 contains an interlude devoted to Joseph’s work as regent of the empire. By now the famine has become truly desperate and everyone in Egypt and Canaan has come begging to the capital. Joseph’s behavior is fascinating, and not a little appalling. Having already taken all of his petitioners’ silver, he then demands their livestock. When their livestock is gone—“Nothing is left for our lord but our carcasses and farmland. Why should we die before your eyes?”—Joseph takes their land, making them “slaves to Pharaoh.” By the terms he ordains, farmers are required to yield up a fifth of their harvest in what is essentially rent. Joseph very specifically states that from then on they are to live in subsistence-level poverty (needless to say, these terms are not going to be revoked after the famine ends). The Pharaoh’s power has increased exponentially.It’s impossible not to notice that Joseph’s treatment of his supplicants is disconcertingly similar to the way he comported himself with his brothers. He seems to take a cruel enjoyment in keeping them in terrified suspense, in making them repeatedly come to him to plead for their survival, and in extorting them for progressively larger tributes. Joseph’s political conduct is only tenuously connected to the rest of the story, but briefly dwelling upon it slyly evokes the unanswerable questions that have loomed above the narrative. What portion, if any, of Joseph’s actions are we meant to interpret as God’s plan? Why would God desire Joseph to increase Pharaoh’s holdings and wealth? Or is the stringent, uncharitable treatment of his starving countrymen a measure of nothing but Joseph’s personality? It is a way of getting more and more of the world to bow down before him—but that is a strangely disreputable means of continuously securing his destiny.Then, in the final chapter of Genesis, is one last unforgettable moment. It occurs when Joseph returns to Egypt after burying his father:

And Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, and they said, “If Joseph bears resentment against us, he will surely pay us back for all the evil we have caused him.” And they charged Joseph, saying, “Your father left a charge before his death, saying, “Thus shall you say to Joseph, We beseech you, forgive, pray, the crime and the offense of your brothers, for evil they have caused you. And so now, forgive, pray, the crime of the servants of your father’s God.” And Joseph wept when they spoke to him. And his brothers then came and flung themselves before him and said, “Here we are, your slaves.” And Joseph said, “Fear not, for am I instead of God? While you were evil toward me, God meant it for good, so as to bring about this time keeping many people alive. And so fear not. I will sustain you and your little ones.” And he comforted them and spoke to their hearts.

This has taken place 17 years after the recognition scene. For that entire time, we now discover, the brothers have been harboring the anxiety (surely heightened by Joseph’s severe dealings with the farmers) that their brother will turn on them and at last exact his revenge. Alter rightly calls the scene a “recapitulation”—again the brothers bow before him and offer themselves as slaves; again he breaks down in tears; and again he comforts them by declaring that they were instruments of God’s will and so need not fear retaliation.But just as well, the scene provides a final, lingering ironic instance of shared uncertainty. Ostensibly the story is wrapping itself up in its neat, if rather ineffable, lesson: God has always been in control and his contrivances have been beneficent. Therefore our characters can live out their days in peace and happiness.Who, at this point, is going to believe it? If the brothers were nervous for 17 years, one more emotional reassurance is not going to dispel their doubts. Joseph himself has been shown to be a creature of extreme mood swings. The reader can’t possibly accept the pat explanation. And neither can the author, who has been purposefully equivocating on the boundary between free will and predetermination throughout the story. For a last low-simmering moment we are all are bound together within the story, united by a shortcoming of knowledge that, by now, seems more definite and true of life than any moral a prophet might supply. By questioning the authority of the creator, the story affirms the majesty of the creation.So for thousands of years readers have tried to analyze this great tale, compelled by its beauty and force, and by the quivering light of its heart’s mystery. For thousands of years it has lived in those readers while they have lived in it, and made it an aspect of themselves, and discovered it to be an enduring point of commonality between peoples alive and gone. All of that writing, like this, is commentary. The story is still there. Go and read it.___Sam Sacks writes the Fiction Chronicle for the Wall Street Journal and is a founding editor at Open Letters.