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Money in their sacks—Genesis 42:25-35

What would you do if you found money in your wallet that you knew you hadn’t earned, especially if it looked like a mistake?

When Joseph sends his brothers home to Canaan, he sends them with an unexpected gift, still not having told them who he is. Joseph orders their vessels filled with grain (42:25), supplying the needs of their households, for whom Joseph had concern (cf. 42:19; 45:19). Yet Joseph also orders that their silver be returned to each of them clandestinely in their sacks, undoubtedly as part of testing them. He must know whether they are genuinely “honest” men as they claim (42:11, 19). They had sold Joseph for silver; now he needs to know if silver still matters more to them than integrity.

Joseph’s plan appears wise: surely, knowing that Simeon is in custody, they will return with Benjamin if he is well. If they return the silver, he will also need to see whether they will protect or relinquish Benjamin. What Joseph cannot know is the unwillingness of his father to part with Benjamin or the sheer terror the planting of money in their sacks will bring them. Thus for some time it may appear that they have both kept the silver and abandoned their brother Simeon.

Happily, God’s plan is even greater than Joseph’s; also happily, Jacob does not have a heart attack in parting with Benjamin, although the parting is delayed far longer than Joseph (or Simeon) would have hoped (cf. 43:10). (The delay may provoke Joseph’s special concern as to whether their father remains alive—43:27.)

The brothers had traveled alongside other travelers going down to Egypt for food (42:5), and undoubtedly the road was full of people traveling both directions. If the grain was to keep them very long, they would need much grain loaded on each of the donkeys (cf. 44:1), though they probably planned to make multiple trips (43:10). (Why workers and other animals are not mentioned is unclear, unless Genesis expects hearers to envision Jacob’s earlier camp as having disbanded, perhaps due to the famine; perhaps Genesis merely focuses on the activity of the immediate family—the way a scriptwriter today would—and deliberately leaves less relevant details untold. We learn of such spotlighting even in ancient biographies.)

I had often thought it risky for Joseph to have their money returned in the mouths of their sacks, where they would find it when opening the sacks. What if one opened a sack before leaving the area? But the risk of depositing the money deeper in the sack was greater, because some of their workers might be the ones to find the money when feeding animals and some of the money might disappear (perhaps along with some of the workers).

Joseph may ultimately plan for them to see the money as a gift from God in a kind way (43:23), but he may also want them thinking about their past greed (and may want to test them about their current greed). They recognize that God had returned the money to them (42:28), but they do not experience this recognition in a positive way. Their honesty was already in question with the vizier of Egypt, and now it might appear that they had not paid for the grain they took. Or worse yet, perhaps God was exposing the fruit of their past greed, when they sold a brother for money—a matter already on their minds (42:22). Their father allows that it may have been an oversight (43:12), but he is no less afraid (42:35). Such fear undoubtedly makes him more hesitant to send Benjamin (42:36, 38), the subject of the next installment on Genesis. In any case, we can be glad that even when our plans work less smoothly than we intend, God is still in charge to bring about his purposes.

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Miracles lecture at Oxford

The Special Divine Action Project has reposted my full lecture for the Ian Ramsey Centre at Oxford regarding miracles. The lecture is introduced by my good friend Lenn Goodman, philosophy professor at Vanderbilt. (Lenn and his wife also kindly welcomed me to spend an Orthodox Jewish Shabbat with them back in the US, which I greatly enjoyed.) The discussion afterward also included Tim McGrew, philosophy professor at Western Michigan.)

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Joseph meets his brothers—Genesis 42

God has turned the tables on Joseph’s brothers. Because they once harmed him to prevent the fulfillment of his God-sent dreams (37:20), they will now bow down to him, fulfilling those very dreams.

Years earlier, Joseph had journeyed from Canaan as a slave; now Joseph’s brothers make the same journey because of hunger (42:1-5). For silver, they sold Joseph to merchants traveling toward Egypt; now they have come to Egypt to buy grain with silver. Those who plotted to kill him now are sent to buy food so they themselves “might not die” (42:3). In the process, they end up bowing before him (42:6), unwittingly fulfilling his dreams (37:7, 11; 42:9) that they once wished to silence (37:20)!

That Joseph’s brothers do not recognize him is not surprising; they could hardly expect the likely well-fed Egyptian overseer standing before them to be the seventeen-year-old they had sold into slavery. Nor would Joseph now have recognized Benjamin, a boy the last time he had seen him, apart from his brothers (43:29). By contrast, Joseph could well recognize his ten older brothers who had come from Canaan as a group.

But what can Joseph do? If he reveals himself to his brothers, their fear and shame will prevent them from informing his father or Benjamin. Moreover, Benjamin’s absence provokes questions: have his brothers harmed him the way they harmed Joseph? He cannot trust his older brothers; but he may well wish to get Benjamin to himself, where he will be safe and cared for. As we learn later, Joseph inquires specifically about their father and siblings (43:7). That they respond that one sibling is no longer alive—referring to Joseph (42:13)—probably does not increase his confidence in their trustworthiness (cf. 42:14).

Joseph accuses his brothers of coming to see (literally) the “nakedness” of the land of Egypt, which could apply figuratively to barren land. Throughout the Torah, however, the term especially refers to human nakedness, especially when it is shamefully exposed to others’ sight, especially close relatives’ sight. The term is used elsewhere in Genesis itself only for Ham seeing his father’s nakedness and his brothers covering that nakedness without seeing it (9:22-23).

Joseph’s accusation rests on these brothers’ past behavior; they were the sort of people who would come to see nakedness, for they had once stripped him of his special garment (37:23). This would explain why Joseph’s claim that they are spies (42:9, 12, 14) frames their informing him that there were originally twelve brothers, and one was no more (42:13). In contrast to his claim that they are spies—thus that they come under false pretext—they insist that they are “honest” men. Yet Joseph probably knows that his brothers had planned to lie to their father about his disappearance (cf. 37:20, 31-32). (Their claim that they are all brothers, sons of one man, in 42:11, might highlight again for Genesis’s first, family-oriented hearers the depravity of their treatment of their brother Joseph.)

It is not impossible that some of Joseph’s brothers had viewed him as a sort of spy as well, since he brought back a “bad report” about them to their father (37:2). This would also help explain Joseph’s choice of charge here (although he needs some charge that someone in his position could raise). Genesis’s early Israelite audiences might remember descendants of the twelve tribes who were sent as twelve spies into Canaan; most of them brought a “bad report,” however—a term the Pentateuch applies only to their report and to Joseph’s original bad report about his brothers (37:2; Num 13:32; 14:36-37). (The only two spies that returned a good report were a descendant of Joseph and a descendant of Judah.)

For proof that they are “honest,” Joseph demands to see their youngest brother, Benjamin; this matter is so central to their claim to be honest that the term “honest” appears repeatedly—and, in Genesis, exclusively—in this connection (42:11, 19, 31 33-34). In principle, genuine spies might have brought anyone and claimed that he was a brother; happily, Joseph’s brothers were now in fact more honest than that. Because Joseph knew them, he could have investigated and seen through their ruse had they attempted that, and the story could have gone very differently. But to know whether “truth” is with them, Joseph must see that Benjamin remains alive and well (42:16).

It is not difficult to see why the conversation turned in this direction. Although we first learn of the conversation later from the brothers, their report is undoubtedly correct, since it fits Joseph yet they would not have suspected it: Joseph specifically asks whether their father remains alive and if they still have another brother (43:7). This question is indeed certain since Judah later reminds Joseph himself about it (44:19). (Even after Joseph sees the brother, his first question after revealing himself to his brothers is to learn whether it is really true that their father remains alive—45:3. After all, Jacob is well over 100 by this point in the narrative—47:9.)

A further reason suggests that Joseph would have asked this question and designed this test. Benjamin is not with them, and knowing that these brothers have worded only delicately what really happened to Joseph, Joseph has reason to wonder how safe Benjamin is. He cannot know that his father kept Benjamin back to protect him, nor can his father know that his fear for Benjamin will set in motion the new demand for Benjamin to come. Joseph reasons that if he reveals himself to his brothers, they will never tell their father or Benjamin that he is in Egypt; unless his brothers have changed, the best he can do is get them to bring Benjamin, and reveal himself to Benjamin away from these brothers. Otherwise, to keep matters quiet, they might see to it that Benjamin could never return to tell their dark secret to their father.

They had cast Joseph into a pit (37:24); he now casts them into confinement. Because he fears God—probably the true reason, as he claims—he chooses to keep just one in custody, to guarantee the return of the others. He then allows the others to return with the needed food for their families (42:18-20). He binds Simeon “before their eyes” (42:24), just as they had “seen” Joseph’s distress years earlier (42:21). Because Simeon was one of the two brothers who led the slaughter of the Shechemites (34:25, 30), the narrator might invite us to imagine him as one of those who had proved harshest toward Joseph.

Joseph’s brothers reason that this “distress” (including the binding of one brother) has come on them because they ignored Joseph’s “distress” (the same Hebrew term) when he begged for their mercy (42:21). Joseph’s brothers think that their current predicament, including one of their brothers being imprisoned (42:19), is God repaying them for what they did to Joseph (42:21-22). And indeed, God’s rule, intended as a deterrent, was that those who shed other humans’ blood should have their own blood shed (9:6)! The brothers may not have shed Joseph’s blood directly (37:26), but they assumed that he had died and they were guilty for his blood (42:22). (In 42:22, Reuben calls their deed “sin”; this contrasts with Joseph’s refusal to “sin” in 39:9; sinning against God was deathworthy, as in 20:3, 6-7.) What they could not know was that on a higher level God actually was preparing for their deliverance from the coming famine. This short-term difficulty was a prelude to God’s long-term grace.

They had not listened to Joseph’s cries (42:21) or to Reuben’s warning (42:22), but unknown to them, Joseph was listening now to them (42:23; the same Hebrew word for “hear” in all three instances). Joseph’s weeping (42:24) is not likely from anger but from sorrow here (cf. 43:30; 45:2, 14-15). But as Joseph had said, they had to be tested (42:15); and at least Joseph could bring his brother Benjamin to safety. God has an even greater plan ahead.