Joseph (Old Testament)

Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Jewish Mythology, Christian Mythology, Islamic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A divinely favoured dreamer and reader of dreams whose visions foretell his own rise and whose foresight saves nations from famine.
Role in Mythos: The favoured son of Jacob, sold into Egyptian slavery by his brothers, who climbs from a prison cell to become vizier of Egypt and preserves his whole family through a seven-year famine.
Relation to Humans: Joseph is a mortal man, a patriarch of the Israelites and the forefather of the tribes named for his sons Ephraim and Manasseh. He is held up across Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition as a model of integrity, chastity, and forgiveness, a man who answers betrayal with mercy.

The coat is where the trouble starts. It was long and finely made, sleeved to the wrist in the style of a man who would never be sent to work a field, and Jacob draped it over the shoulders of his eleventh son in full view of the ten older brothers who owned nothing half so fine. They read the message in the cloth. Here was the boy their father loved best, the firstborn of Rachel, the wife Jacob had laboured fourteen years to marry, and the coat announced out loud what the household already knew in silence. His brothers hated him. After the coat they could not manage a civil word to him.

Joseph did not help himself. He was seventeen, and he could not keep his dreams behind his teeth. In one, the brothers’ sheaves of cut grain rose and bowed low to his sheaf. In another the sun and the moon and eleven stars bent down to him, which folded his father and mother into the insult. He recounted them plainly, as though describing weather. Even Jacob, who adored him, winced at the second telling and asked whether his son truly expected the whole family to grovel in the dust.

The dust came for Joseph first. Jacob sent him north to check on his brothers grazing the flocks near Dothan, and they saw the bright coat moving across the plain long before they could make out the face inside it. By the time he reached them they had already decided. They stripped the coat away and threw him into a dry cistern, then sat down to eat within earshot of him. A caravan of Ishmaelite traders happened along the Egypt road, camels heavy with gum and balm and myrrh, and Judah did the cold arithmetic aloud: a dead brother pays nothing, a sold brother pays twenty pieces of silver. They hauled him up and sold him. Then they soaked the coat in goat’s blood and carried it home, and Jacob recognised it, tore his clothes, and refused every comfort offered him.

Egypt broke Joseph and then remade him, twice over. Sold to Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh’s guard, he ran the household so ably that his master stopped keeping track of anything but the food on his own plate. Then Potiphar’s wife noticed how well the young Hebrew was built, and pressed herself on him day after day, and day after day he refused her. She caught his cloak in her fist as he fled and used the empty garment as proof against him. A coat had ruined him once already. Now a second one sent him to prison for a crime he had gone out of his way not to commit.

Even in the cell the pattern held. He read the dreams of two fellow prisoners, Pharaoh’s cupbearer and his baker, and both readings came true to the day, one man restored and one man hanged. The cupbearer walked free and forgot him for two years. Only when Pharaoh dreamed of seven fat cows swallowed by seven gaunt ones, and seven full ears of grain devoured by seven blighted ones, and every wise man in Egypt stood mute, did the cupbearer finally remember the Hebrew who read dreams. They shaved Joseph, changed his clothes, and brought him up out of the ground. Seven years of plenty, he told the king, then seven years of famine so severe they will swallow the memory of the plenty; store a fifth of every harvest while there is still time. Pharaoh pressed his own signet ring onto Joseph’s hand, dressed him in fine linen, hung a gold chain around his neck, and set him over the whole land.

The famine arrived exactly as he had said, and it reached Canaan. Jacob sent his sons down to buy grain, and they bowed to the governor of Egypt without recognising the brother they had sold, a clean-shaven official speaking to them through an interpreter. The sheaves had bowed after all. Joseph did not announce himself. He tested them instead, holding one brother back, hiding his silver divining cup in Benjamin’s sack, watching to see whether they would abandon the youngest the way they had once abandoned him. When Judah stepped forward and offered his own body in Benjamin’s place, something in Joseph gave way. He sent the servants out and wept so loudly the whole house heard it through the walls, and he said the only thing left to say. I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?

He forgave them. He settled the family in the green pasture of Goshen and fed them through the years still to come, and when Jacob died and the brothers feared he would finally collect his revenge, he only wept again and told them that what they had meant for harm, a greater hand had bent toward the saving of many lives. His strength was never in his arm. It lay in the dreams that came to him unbidden and in the discipline to act on what they showed, and in an administrator’s patience that could turn a warning into full granaries. His weakness was that he was only a man, with no armour against a father’s favouritism that painted a target on his back, or a woman’s spite, or the long forgetting of a cell. He lived to a hundred and ten and saw his great-grandchildren on his knees. Before he died he made the sons of Israel swear that when God brought them out of Egypt they would carry his bones with them, and so his body was embalmed and laid in a coffin to wait. Generations later Moses lifted that coffin on the night of the Exodus, and the bones went home at last to be buried at Shechem.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Joseph in the Old Testament?

Joseph is the eleventh son of the patriarch Jacob and the first son of Rachel, a central figure in the Book of Genesis. Sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers, he rose to become vizier of Egypt and saved his family and the region from a devastating famine.

Why did Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery?

Joseph’s brothers sold him because they were consumed by jealousy over their father Jacob’s obvious favouritism, symbolised by the ornate coat Jacob gave him. Their resentment deepened when Joseph told them of dreams in which they bowed down to him, and they seized the chance to be rid of him when he came to check on them in the fields near Dothan.

How did Joseph rise to power in Egypt?

Joseph rose to power by correctly interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams of seven fat and seven gaunt cows as a warning of seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Impressed by his wisdom and his plan to store surplus grain, Pharaoh appointed Joseph vizier and placed him in charge of all of Egypt.

Did Joseph forgive his brothers?

Yes. When his brothers came to Egypt to buy grain during the famine and failed to recognise him, Joseph eventually revealed his identity, wept, and forgave them completely. He told them that although they had intended to harm him, God had used their actions to save many lives, and he settled the whole family safely in Egypt.

What happened to Joseph’s body after he died?

Joseph died in Egypt at the age of 110 and made the Israelites swear to carry his bones out of the country when God delivered them. His body was embalmed and placed in a coffin, and centuries later Moses took the bones during the Exodus; they were finally buried at Shechem in the land of Canaan.