Genesis 39

So welcome back.
Thanks for being with us on a beautiful Monday as we continue through
Genesis and as we circle back to Joseph’s story.
Joseph again goes center stage and we concentrate
on him really for the most part through the rest of the book here.
We are in chapter 39 today.
Just if you haven’t been with us or if you’re just keeping score,
Joseph has been sold into slavery by his brothers.
He ends up
being taken to Egypt where he is sold
into the service of a man named Potiphar who is a high-ranking official in Pharaoh’s court.
And so Joseph, it looks on the surface probably because again, he is capable,
he’s young, he’s sharp.
He is put into employment if we could say it that way,
to slavery.
He is at least put into service
by this man who has a pretty high standing position.
So actually probably things are not bad
for Joseph initially.
And he does well,
which we’ll see in the story this afternoon.
Chapter 39,
Joseph was taken down to Egypt and Potiphar,
an officer of the Pharaoh,
the captain of the guard, an Egyptian,
bought him from the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there.
The Lord was with Joseph and he became a successful man.
He was in the house of the Egyptian master.
His master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord caused all that he did to prosper.
So Joseph found favor in his sight and attended him.
He made him an overseer of his house and put
him in charge of all he had.
From that time,
he made him overseer in his house over all he had
and then Lord blessed the Egyptians house for Joseph’s sake.
The blessing of the Lord was on
all that he had in the house and in the field.
So he left all that he had in Joseph’s charge
and with him there and had no concern for anything but the food that he ate.
So a little bit of a repetitive way to tell the story,
but the short version is Joseph did well.
God shows up in the story again.
Remember in Genesis, as you’ve seen throughout,
there are times where we get explicitly told the Lord is up to something.
There are other times the Lord seems to be in the background.
For instance, when Joseph is being sold,
when he’s being captured by his brothers and given to slavery.
But now we read that the Lord blesses him and whatever he does has success and Potiphar
quickly becomes trusting of Joseph,
puts him in charge of the whole household and what a great compliment,
he had no concern for anything except the food he ate.
That’s how well Joseph did his
job.
So a couple notes here.
First of all, this obviously has reminiscences of Jacob.
You remember when he was working with Laban,
everything that he touched was also blessed.
And so we had in this
story, this idea that Laban wanted to hold on to Jacob because he was so blessed by his time being
there.
We see that kind of theme here again,
that because Joseph has this blessing,
because Joseph has cared for by God,
then here Potiphar’s house is blessed because of it and not a little.
It’s notable that that blessing is so substantial that it was recognizable that Potiphar was able to
actually attribute that blessing to Joseph himself.
And so yes, it is a compliment to say
here that Potiphar doesn’t really have any concern for anything in his house.
I think it’s even more
of a compliment to say that he was able to identify Joseph as the very source of that blessing.
And so the text is making it clear.
Here we have the Ishmaelites who are certainly no close friend of
the Hebrews, right?
We have the Ishmaelites who sell Joseph into the hands of the, sorry, the Egyptians,
which by the way,
there’s not a strong national relationship there either as the story is
going to go on into Exodus.
So neither of these people groups are particularly blessed or favored
on their own within the story of Genesis itself.
And yet it is because of God’s blessing on these
particular individuals that we see that blessing being attributed or given even to Potiphar who’s an Egyptian.
So Clint, this is substantial and it does in a way begin to show us
that while
Joseph was the dreamer,
not particularly loved by his brothers,
we’re already beginning to see in
the text that there is more beneath the surface,
that this isn’t just a story of vanity.
He’s not just a young kid who had,
you know, a chip on his shoulder.
There is something substantial.
God is really at work in the life of this young man.
And we’re only going to see that progress through
both trial and also through success.
Yeah, I think Michael, there’s a couple of things that
are interesting about that to me.
The first is that we really had no prior indication that
Joseph has this level of skills.
There was nothing early in the story that pointed out that he was
unusually gifted in any area,
that he was unusually intelligent, that he was
industrious.
In fact, he was hanging around when his brothers were in the field.
We weren’t told that he was a hard worker.
We weren’t told that he had a sharp mind.
That all comes to us now as we see him make his way in Egypt,
which I think heightens the idea
that the Lord is with him blessing his efforts and that he is not doing that
on his own.
The second thing that’s interesting about that is,
remember that Joseph is not,
he’s no longer the youngest child,
but he is eleventh in line.
And so the fact that the Lord
is blessing him is irrespective of
his position.
In Jacob’s own story,
we saw Jacob assumed the
blessing because he took the role of the oldest.
That’s not the case here.
God is blessing Joseph
for his own reasons,
which we will learn something about later in the story.
But here,
there have been none of the other brothers that we’ve used this language.
There’s no,
we haven’t seen Judah or Simeon or Levi or any of those brothers blessed who are all equally
Jacob’s children.
But for God’s purposes,
he is,
in this instance,
actively working on Joseph’s behalf, and it’s going well.
Yeah, I think, Clint, that we,
I don’t want to hold us down here because we want to keep
going with the story.
I just think it’s worth noting that the family connection and hierarchy
has been so important throughout this story.
Here, what’s really interesting is we have the
youngest giving priority, which is a departure from what we would expect.
But Clint, what I think is fascinating is that’s not the theme that seems to dominate Joseph’s story.
It’s not the reversal like you had with Jacob and Esau.
That was not supposed to be that way.
Here, the story’s not really caught up in Joseph taking what doesn’t belong to him,
though that is present here.
I mean,
we can’t deny that that doesn’t exist in the background,
but that’s not foreground to the text.
Rather, it is something to do with these dreams,
something to do with this
kid who spoke out of turn and wasn’t well-liked in the family.
And it’s that kind of family stuff
that’s now front and center.
And that does make Joseph’s story a little different from the stories we’ve seen before.
Then we move on to the next thing we learned about Joseph in the next verse here.
Joseph was handsome and good-looking.
And after a time,
his master’s wife cast her eyes on
Joseph and said, “Lie with me.”
But he refused,
saying to her,
“Look, with me here, my master has no concern about anything in the house.
He’s put everything he had in my hand.
He is not greater
in this house than I am,
nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself because you’re his wife.
How could I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” And although she spoke to
Joseph day after day,
he would not consent to be beside her or be with her.
Why don’t we stop there, Michael?
So here we learn that Joseph is also a good-looking young man.
Potiphar has a wife whose eye wanders,
and she makes Joseph a conquest,
but he refuses.
And this is interesting language.
I think this says something about Joseph.
He says, “Look,
your master’s been good to me.
He trusts me within the house.
I’m almost on equal standing with him when it comes to decisions,
when it comes to authority.
The only thing in this house that is off limits to me is you.” And then he says,
“How could I do this wickedness and sin against God?” Which is very interesting that he,
that whole time, frames his relationship to Potiphar and his responsibilities to Potiphar,
but ultimately, that his actions are accountable to God and that he takes from that
his direction of what is good,
what is right, and what is wrong,
and that this is clearly on the other side of the
thing.
Yeah, Clint, this is, I think, an example par excellence of what happens
when scripture does something out of its ordinary,
and you see that it’s significant.
So I just want
to point this out to you here.
This is the middle of verse six.
“Now Joseph was handsome and good
looking.” We have had almost no character descriptions this entire book.
In fact, that’s one of the staples of the narrative of scripture.
We don’t get a lot of
he was short and stocky,
or she had a mousy face,
or these kinds of things that we expect from literature that sort of paints
a character for us.
The scripture is really not interested often in the physical attributes of the people involved.
And here, when it lands that heavy,
“Joseph was handsome and good looking,”
you already know that is going to be part of the story.
There’s something substantial that it’s
gone out of its way to tell us this,
and we’re about to run headlong into it.
But this is just
one of those fascinating sort of reading scripture,
studying scripture kind of,
I think, tools, quite frankly, is when you stumble across a thing because you’ve been reading a book consistently,
as you run into something and that thing just hits you as strange.
You think, “Wow,
you know, this book hasn’t done that before.
I don’t know that I’ve heard many other character
descriptions.” That’s a point where you slow down and you say,
“I wonder if there’s something more
that,” and you start digging into the surface.
And, Clint,
if you do that at all here,
if you sort of let this set your expectations,
you’re not going to be disappointed because Potiphar’s wife
is clearly being set up to instigate the next sort of major transition in Joseph’s story.
In the first transition,
Joseph was sent by his father to do a task,
and then his brothers really
are the ones who took his agency.
We’re now going to see that there’s another individual
that’s going to take his agency as well.
Yeah, I can only think,
Michael, there’s been a couple instances it’s told us that women were attractive.
Really,
off the top of my head,
the only other reference I can think of to a man in
scripture with that kind of language would be David.
And there may be others,
but that is a
fairly rare occurrence to describe a male character that way.
So, Joseph,
really, I think throughout the story, maybe more so than anyone else in Genesis,
he’s presented as a man of very high integrity,
very high standards.
Here, he refuses to be with this woman,
though she works on him
day after day after day.
So then, verse 11 here, we continue,
“One day he went into the house to
do his work, and while no one else was in the house,
she caught hold of his garment and said,
‘Lie with me.’ But he left his garment in her hand,
and he fled and ran outside.
When she saw that
he’d left his garment and had fled outside,
she called to the members of the household.
And she said to them,
‘See, my husband has brought among us a Hebrew to insult us.
He came with me to
lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice.
And when he heard me raise my voice and cry,
he left the garment beside me and ran outside.’ Then she kept the garment by her until the master
came home.
And she told him the same story,
saying, ‘The Hebrew servant whom you brought among us
came in to lie with me.
But as soon as I raised my voice and cried out,
he left his garment beside
me and fled.'” So,
the reward for Joseph’s integrity
is that he’s accused of trying to rape
Potiphar’s wife, who, by the way, is never named in here,
and sometimes not always.
But sometimes when the Bible doesn’t name someone,
that is a reflection on their character,
as if it’s not
worth knowing their name.
She will forever be known to Scripture readers as Potiphar’s wife
and as a woman who is both deceitful and dishonest and disloyal to her husband.
She is not a sort of…
She’s not a character that the Bible seems to be very impressed with.
But
the short version for Joseph is he really has no voice here.
And the wonderful
hook in this story is,
remember that it was a robe in some sense that got him into all this
trouble in the first place.
And now here it is again,
a robe being the cause of him again.
We don’t know this yet in the story,
but the short version is again being imprisoned,
being captured, being held.
Yeah.
And if this wasn’t explicit enough,
the overtones of the Egyptian slavery,
here we have this named explicitly when she says to her husband,
when she says to Potiphar,
the Hebrew servant.
So, one of the characteristics here of Genesis,
especially as we get towards the end,
is the text assumes that we know the story that follows,
because this is a people’s story.
So, Exodus, though we’ve not read Exodus and we’ve not
talked about Moses and Egyptian captivity and ultimately crossing the Red Sea,
all of these pivotal Israel stories.
Here,
this is an assumed kind of tapestry.
It’s a setting up
of the thing that is going to be.
So, Potiphar’s wife, who’s not only asking Joseph to do an
immoral thing, represents a people whose morality is questioned by the Israelites.
So, there’s a little bit of this larger kind of backstory
that’s already hanging over this,
that the moral one,
the Hebrew, as he’s named, is the one who’s falsely accused in this place,
as will be the people of Israel who will be falsely held.
They’ll be made subject in a way
that not even Joseph is.
And so,
I’m not saying that this story is somehow,
you know, the same as those stories, but we do have a longer tale here that is, I think,
generally assumed by the
writer here that the reader’s going to have some awareness of it.
Yeah, there’s some foreshadowing here for sure.
Then, let’s just push on here.
Verse 19,
“When the master heard the words that his wife spoke to him,
saying, ‘This is the way your
servant treated me,’ he became enraged.
And Joseph’s master took him and put him in the prison,
the place where all the king’s prisoners were confined,
and he remained there in prison.
But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love.
He gave him favor in the side
of the chief jailer.
The chief jailer committed to Joseph’s care all the prisoners who were in the prison.
And whatever was done to them,
he was the one who did it.
The chief jailer paid no heed
to anything that was in Joseph’s care,
because the Lord was with him.
And whatever he did,
the Lord made it prosper.” So he,
as a slave, really has no recourse.
He’s going to jail.
He is at the mercy of Potiphar,
who doesn’t have him executed,
which,
as the chief of the guard,
there are those who have suggested maybe he’s suspicious of his wife.
That seems unlikely the way the story is told,
at least that it is the Lord’s intervention and
no one else’s.
But the reality is,
and the result is,
that Joseph ends up in prison.
And while he is there,
even God’s favor is visible.
He impresses the chief jailer,
and soon, just as he did in Potiphar’s house,
he is running all the affairs of the jail.
And the jailer didn’t have to worry about anything,
not because Joseph took care of it,
but because the Lord was with him.
And so here again,
we have very explicit,
very explicitly telling us that it is the Lord working through Joseph to bring about these results.
Yeah, and that work that the Lord is doing is, in this moment,
really foreshadowing the ultimate
work that Joseph will do on behalf of not only the Egyptian people,
but also ultimately his own family.
So we know that this story is building.
What’s interesting about the building
of this story is how much it has to go down in order to build up.
And you know, Clint, I think that’s one of the things that makes Joseph’s story so interesting to me is that
largely,
and I want to be careful here,
correct me if you disagree,
some characters like Abraham,
we certainly have the story with the binding of Isaac,
and that is a very tumultuous moment in his story.
But Abraham consistently comes out of his troubles.
He comes out with more flocks and
more herds.
He’s a richer man.
Same with Jacob,
same with Isaac.
Both of them continue to prosper
and do well, though they do have some challenges, of course.
But what’s interesting about Joseph is
his road just, it’s stair steps down,
and God’s with him at every step of that journey.
I mean, wherever he is, he’s prospering.
But certainly, he would rather be running Potiphar’s house than the
jailer’s house, right?
He would rather be free in a prestigious place than he would be enslaved in
a place where all of the king’s captives are.
So here we have this really interesting kind of
movement in Genesis.
I’m not sure we’ve seen in this way that goes down and down and down,
and that’s only to see,
as we get to the end of Genesis, Clint,
the extent to which the Lord’s
blessing will be.
I think we’re emphasizing this difficult season,
and it’s only going to be more difficult,
but as we emphasize it,
it’s reaching as a narrative to bring us to a point where we
can understand how big the transformation is.
Yeah, and I think what we’ve seen,
Michael, is that in two instances, Joseph has
undergone undeserved suffering, and it is that very
undeserved suffering that becomes the path to a greater position,
greater achievement, and ultimately to saving the people.
We’re a ways from that yet.
But I can’t think of another character
with the possible exception of Job who has the path to moving forward run the depths of undeserved suffering first.
Most of the time when characters suffer in the Bible,
they deserve it,
with rare exceptions.
And so here we have a man going up by first going down, and that’s
not,
in my opinion, that’s not a typical way that the Bible tells character stories.
And so we’ll be able to have more of that conversation when we see where this imprisonment ultimately
leads Joseph tomorrow, but it’s not an easy path for him.
No, and that all the more emphasizes
who’s the main character of the story,
which we’ve said a thousand times,
which isn’t Joseph, but it is God.
So we hope you’ll track with us.
Enjoy us tomorrow as we continue on
with Joseph’s part of God’s story.
Have a good day.