Trials and transcendence: Joseph’s divine evolution beyond envy (Genesis 41–44)

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Yosef’s experiences, from his older brothers’ jealousy to his time as a slave and prisoner in Egypt, evoke normal feelings of distrust and anger. Despite the challenges, he emerged as a messianic figure, demonstrating patience, supernatural wisdom and a commitment to giving credit to God for every good turn in his life.

The narrative of Torah reading מִקֵּץ Miketz (“he settled,” Gen. 41:1–44:17) also delves into Yosef’s role in interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams, emphasizing the importance of God’s messages reaching those with authority. His 14-year wait showcases the patience inherent in messianic figures.

Yosef’s ability to interpret dreams also underscores his wisdom and reliance on divine guidance. he teaches us the importance of giving glory to God, even when success seems self-driven.

In advising Pharaoh on famine preparedness, Yosef’s voluntary, unsolicited wisdom reveals his leadership qualities.

Human greedy nature exposed

One interesting theme in the life of Yosef is how his life was affected by other people’s greed. The American Heritage dictionary defines greed as, “An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.” In Miketz, Yosef tests his brothers through the mechanism of greed.

Cultures in which most people’s material needs are met, they tend to be less motivated by corruption and greed, while cultures where the people’s basic material needs are not adequately met tend to be more motivated by greed and corruption.

The theme of greed, of who has something I don’t have, and I want more, or should desire more is a repeated narrative in Yosef’s story.

From the very beginning of Yosef’s narrative, his older brothers were jealous of what Yosef had, but they were more jealous of how their father treated Yosef. They were jealous and irritated that they weren’t being treated the same way. They were upset when Yosef reported their misdeeds back to their father.

Jealousy is a very close sibling to greed and Yosef’s brothers were very jealous of him. All of this history is the backdrop of Yosef’s testing of his brothers.

What kind of feelings did Yosef have towards his brothers because of his experience with them from them casting him into the pit, threatening to kill him outright, and then selling him off to the Ishmaelites into slavery and then through all the travails he suffered as a slave in Potiphar’s house and in prison?

It is perfectly normal that he would have felt distrust, hatred, and anger towards his brothers. If I were Yosef, I would have carried a heavy grudge against my siblings if they did this to me.

I would want to know if they had matured and grown up or were they stagnant, still the same people from 20+ years before?

God reveals His mission to those who can put forth the effort

This is the backdrop of Yosef’s overall story, but let’s get into where we are in Miketz, where Yosef is introduced to Pharaoh to interpret his dreams. The fact that God gave these dreams to Pharaoh and not to Yosef is of particular interest to me.

Why would God send Pharaoh the dream and not one of his prophets? Joseph of course, was already a prophet in his own right. He was one who had received dreams from God, yet here, God sends the dream to Pharaoh because Pharaoh is the only one with the authority to act upon the warnings in the dreams.

Beware of false prophets. If you believe you have been giving a dream or a vision from God, test it and verify it because it may just be from you and not from Him. I have actually experienced this personally where someone claiming to be a prophet said something to me that in a very short manner of time turned out to be dead wrong, very wrong. Such people frustrate me. I determined that, that makes no sense for God to send a message to a modern day prophet, if that “prophet” can’t do anything. Clearly, it’s absurd.

We also see this again in the Book of Daniel that God revealed a dream to Nebuchadnezzar because the message was for him and for his people, not for Daniel’s people. God sends His visions, dreams, messages to those vessels who act on the warnings.

Yosef’s patience as a messianic figure

Yosef is a Messianic figure. This statement is not remotely controversial in Christian circles. In his life story, he fulfills various tasks and roles and symbols that Messiah Himself does later on. This pretty straightforward, nothing terribly unusual about that as far as a typical Christian viewpoint.

A messianic figure is someone who performs an assigned task that results in the saving of one or more other people. That’s a messianic figure, it’s his job to save.

We study such figures because if we love God, we want to discover and apply their positive traits to our own lives and spiritual practice.

Yosef was about 17 years old when he was cast off by his brothers into slavery. He spent a certain number of years in Potiphar’s house and also years of time in prison. And then Pharaoh releases him from prison and Yosef enters Pharaoh’s service. He was around 30 years old when he was released from prison, so his sojourn in slavery and prison lasted approximately 14 years.

One trait that Yosef seems to exhibit in this time is patience. We see this as well in the lives of Moses who waited 40 years before he was called to lead the Israelites from slavery. We see patience in Isaac and Rebecca praying for 20 years for children. So, patience is an important trait for a messianic figure.

He waited 14 years for God to change the course of his life, from slavery to something much greater. He didn’t know that he would end up as second in command of all Egypt but he certainly wanted to live a life of more significance than being a slave or a prisoner.

The patience Yosef exercises here is patience towards God, waiting for Him to do something.

Yosef was not patient for the sake of being patient. He was not exercising patience in the safety and comfort of his father’s house. He was having to exercise patience and waiting on God while suffering as a slave in Potiphar’s house and later as a prisoner.

Yosef’s supernatural wisdom

Remember that before he was sent off into slavery Yosef had a couple of dreams. There was a dream with bundles of wheat and another dream with the sun, moon and stars. He may have had other dreams but these were the dreams recorded for us earlier in Genesis.

We also read about the dreams from the Pharaoh’s baker and wine steward that were brought to Yosef for interpretation.

I want to draw your attention to the pattern of these dreams. Yosef clearly tells the baker, the wine steward and Pharaoh that the interpretation of dreams comes from God. It’s also clear that these dreams are more complicated than the dreams Yosef himself received as a child. Yosef had no knowledge of the backstory of the baker, the wine steward or Pharaoh to be able to give an interpretation on his own. Those dreams clearly needed divine wisdom to interpret accurately.

This is not what happened when he was a young man. When he revealed the dreams of the wheat, the sun, moon and stars, Yosef never gave an interpretation of those dreams, other people put their own interpretation on those dreams. But those dreams are also more simple dreams and not hard to figure out.

Give all glory to God

The point is that Yosef gave credit to God, although the wine steward gave the credit to Yosef when he recommended Yosef’s services of interpreting dreams to Pharaoh. As far as the baker, the wine steward and even Pharaoh were concerned, the secret things that God revealed to them came from a man, a Hebrew man named Yosef. Pharaoh somewhat gets it after Yosef corrects him because Pharaoh says that the gods of Egypt could not have revealed the meaning of his dreams to him. Although Yosef had given credit to God when he revealed the wine stewards dream, the wine steward didn’t understand or accept Yosef’s attribution of the interpretation to God.

Yosef consistently directed credit to God despite appearing to be the source of the interpretations. A real life lesson in this is that we should give glory to God even when it appears we are acting in our own power. We need to recognize, and help others to understand, that God is the source of all power and influence, and that even when we achieve success, it is ultimately God’s doing.

It’s not easy to give God the glory, because sometimes you did in fact work hard for something, but at the end of it all, we are the tool, God is the one who wields the tool.

Joseph’s advice reveals his thought process and leadership abilities

After Yosef reviewed the facts of Pharaoh’s dream, he adds something to the dreams that were not originally there. Pharaoh did not ask Yosef for his opinion about how to act in response to the dreams. Pharaoh never says to Yosef, “Yosef, what’s your opinion? How should I fix this problem? What should I do about it?” Yosef voluntarily gave Pharaoh additional information.

What did Yosef tell Pharaoh to do?

“Now let Pharaoh look for a man discerning and wise, and set him over the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh take action to appoint overseers in charge of the land, and let him exact a fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt in the seven years of abundance. Then let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming, and store up the grain for food in the cities under Pharaoh’s authority, and let them guard it. Let the food become as a reserve for the land for the seven years of famine which will occur in the land of Egypt, so that the land will not perish during the famine.”
Genesis 41:33–36 NASB 1995

This was not part of Pharaoh’s dream, but it is voluntary information that Yosef gave to Pharaoh. However, on the surface, Yosef’s math makes no sense as he tells Pharaoh that he should reserve 20% of each of the seven years of abundance to carry through the next seven years of scarcity. But it turns out that 20% of the seven good years was sufficient to cover all seven years of famine, not just for Egypt, but for Canaan also. That’s two countries, and possibly even more than that, the surplus that was gathered up covered all their years that they desperately needed the food.

This was unsolicited advice, but this shows us that a messianic figure is going to be wise, or at least possess more wisdom than those around him.

Yosef did not merely give God the glory in lip-service. Yosef’s conduct gave God the glory, too. He did not seek any material benefit or gain from his services to Pharaoh. Yosef didn’t ask Pharaoh to appoint him to prepare Egypt for the famine.

Yosef did not spend much time wallowing in self-pity during all this time in slavery and prison. We have recording of him complaining about his brothers, but not much about him complaining about how he was treated by Potiphar or by the headmaster of the prison. He also doesn’t complain to God about what he is going through.

The reason God gave the dreams to Pharaoh was to save Egypt. The wise instruction Yosef gave to Pharaoh was to save Egypt.

Most of the messianic figures act in a way that is completely opposite of how a king would act. A king’s main function is to exercise power and control over a group of people. If there are no people, there’s no king. One can’t be a king without a nation of people to rule. But a messianic figure acts in service to others, not to exercise power over others.

Putting Yosef’s brothers to the test: Will they abandon the weaker brother?

The 10 older brothers journey into Egypt with one goal in mind: get food to save their families from starvation and death. They brought money with them to buy the food, they didn’t expect Egyptian charity to save them.

However, they got their food, which is what they came to Egypt to get but they also got their money back. What did their salvation cost them? Nothing. All they did was go to Egypt and beg for food and they received it.

When they returned a second time, this time with Benjamin in tow, they did the same thing. They brought back the money they originally gave as well as additional money to get more food.

Again, they are given more food and all the money is returned into their sacks. They were willing to pay twice as much money for the food as they were willing to pay the last time, yet at the end of it, the food still cost them nothing. Yosef covered all of it.

When Yosef turns his testing of his brothers towards Benjamin, let’s recall that when Yosef was just 17 years old, his brothers sold him into slavery and abandoned him. They didn’t go to Egypt to try to find him, get him, rescue him nothing of the sort. They abandoned him. They were motivated by an intense jealousy and greed against Yosef.

So he wants to know if his brothers have grown up, have they changed since he last saw them and he sets up scenarios to try to provoke jealousy of Benjamin in the brothers.

He gave Benjamin five times the amount of food that he gave the other brothers and he got all of them drunk. Drinking to excess reduces one’s self control. That’s the idea. So if any of the brothers has animosity toward Benjamin and you get them plastered, that animosity is more likely to reveal itself when they are drunk than when they are sober. By inhibiting their self control, Yosef is trying to get the brothers to show their true colors. Yosef needs the brothers to lose their self control to find out what is inside of them. It’s a very smart test.

So the first test was to test their jealousy of Benjamin. The second test, the test with the “stolen cup of divination” was a test of whether they would abandon Benjamin, given the opportunity, as they had abandoned him?

The cup is planted in Benjamin’s bag and Benjamin is arrested and he appears guilty. The porter exonerates the other brothers saying they are free to go, only Benjamin will be taken into custody. They could have easily left him behind. They had their food, they had their money, they could have walked away.

But instead they all come and testify to Yosef that Benjamin’s life matters to them, that they are willing to be Yosef’s slaves as long as Benjamin is allowed to return safely back to his father. Benjamin is not a young boy at this point, he is a grown man, and they had the legal justification to leave him behind in Egypt but they didn’t do it.

The way the brothers act towards Benjamin is the complete opposite of how they treated Yosef. This tells Yosef that his brothers have changed for the better.