Genesis 42:27-38

Hey,
welcome back, everybody.
Thanks for joining us on this Tuesday as we continue through the book of Genesis.
We are into, well into chapter 42 as Joseph and his brothers have,
I won’t say reunited,
but as they have been in the same space,
they have, the brothers have come to ask for food.
Joseph recognizing them,
but not being recognized by them,
has messed with them a little bit,
held them captive long enough to come up with a plan to force their hand and get his younger
brother in front of him,
who he seems desperate to see.
At this point, we don’t know much more
than that in the story.
As it is now,
the brothers have been sent.
One of them, Simeon, has been kept by Joseph in Egypt,
and the others return home to decide what to do.
So,
verse 26 of chapter 42,
“They loaded their donkeys and their grain and departed.
When one of them opened the sack to give his donkey fodder at the lodging place,
he saw his money on the top of the sack.
He said to his brothers,
‘My money has been put back.
Here it is in my sack.’ At this,
they lost heart,
and they turned trembling to one another, saying,
‘What is this thing God has done
to us?’ Then they came to their father Jacob in the land of Canaan.
They told him all that happened
to them, saying, ‘The man,
the Lord of the land,
spoke harshly to us,
charged us with spying.’
We said to him,
‘We are honest men.
We are not spies.
Twelve brothers, the sons of our father,
ones no more, and the youngest is now with our father.’ Then the man,
the Lord of the land,
said to us, ‘By this I would know that you are honest.
Leave one of your brothers,
take grain for the famine of your households,
and go on your way.
Bring the youngest brother back to me,
and I shall know that you’re not spies, but honest men.
Then I will release your brother to you,
and you may trade in the land.’
As they were emptying their sacks,
there in each one was the bag of money.
When they and their father saw the bundles of money,
they were dismayed, and the father
Jacob said to them,
‘I’m the one you have bereaved of children.
Joseph is no more.
Simeon is no more.
Now you would take Benjamin.
All this has happened to me.’
Then Reuben said to his father,
‘You may kill two of my sons if I do not bring him back to you.
Put him in my hands,
and I will bring him
back.’ But he said,
‘My son shall not go down with you,
for his brother is dead,
and he alone is left.
If harm should come to him on the journey that you are to make,
you would bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to Sheol.'”
So,
I look at the other side of the family drama here as these brothers return home,
as Jacob hears the story,
and as he mourns,
as he grieves this new threat that he sees,
this potential harm that could befall Benjamin.
His favorite son, remember that Joseph and Benjamin
share kind of the space of the favorite because they are the
children of his favorite wife.
This sounds, Michael,
probably the weirdest thing about this text is that we have Reuben here who
steps up and says,
“You may kill two of my sons.” Now,
whether that’s a literal thing,
it’s unthinkable that a grandfather would do that as punishment.
It is very unlikely that
that’s the meaning, and more so that he is saying,
“That’s how much you can take
my word.
That’s how much
you can put your faith in me.
That’s how much you can trust me.” But it’s a jarring statement
to run into in the story.
Yeah, so Joseph is clearly calculating,
maybe even you would say
Wiley in this story because what he’s successfully done in putting the money back in the bags
is strike a great amount of fear for everyone that’s come to know it.
So first, the brothers,
and then, of course, his father Jacob.
What is at stake here is going back and it being known
that that payment wasn’t made.
So there’s a kind of risk in this.
Yeah, in fact, Michael, they don’t even see Joseph as the possibility.
They say, “What has God done to us?”
They can’t even imagine that it’s a thing Joseph would have done.
No, right, because once again, they keep calling him the Lord of the land.
The text is making it
clear to us that this
thing that Joseph knows is unknown to them.
And this is actually an
interesting way to rephrase.
We’ve talked about dreams and interpretations of them,
but, of course, the need for a dream to be interpreted is fundamentally the need for something to be
explained or knowledge that needs to be had.
And here,
once again,
Joseph is the one who has all
of the knowledge and his brothers and now father are the ones who do not have the knowledge.
And so in this,
Joseph is not only Lord of the land,
of the food, the one who is able to conduct this
trade, he’s actually the one in control because he knows what’s going on while no one else does.
So there’s a really interesting power dynamic that happens when he puts the money in the sex.
He really puts down this kind of ultimatum that not only do you need to bring my brother back with you,
but he really injects into this whole situation the fear of what happens when we do go back.
There’s a sense in which
the idea of maybe just going back and bringing the brother and it all
working out may seem a little bit more dangerous than it would have otherwise.
So once again, when we talk about Joseph and his intentions,
what’s going on here?
The text doesn’t go out
of its way to say,
but clearly this complicates the story.
And I don’t know if it’s on purpose,
but if we can step back and put ourselves in the shoes of the brothers,
I mean,
imagine what their journey has taken.
And it does, I think, connect us
to reflecting on Joseph’s own story.
These brothers just thought they were going to check for food.
They went to Egypt.
They saw the person they needed to see.
They had money.
They thought they’d buy food or at least see if they
could buy food and return home.
Instead, they find themselves in front of a man who has authority over them.
He accuses them of being spies.
He forces them to leave one of the brothers behind
on the threat of punishment.
They find themselves having the money returned or somehow they end up
still with the money.
So they’ve kept grain and money,
which makes them look like thieves.
They’ve already been accused of being spies.
And all of this turns so unexpectedly when they thought
all they were doing was going to try and secure food.
And imagine now that we overlay that on
Joseph’s story as he thought he was going out to check with his brothers and ends up instead
thrown in a pit,
sold to slavers,
relocated in Egypt,
accused of a crime, put in prison.
We can allow ourselves to enter into this story a little bit.
There is deep fear here.
There’s uncertainty.
There’s lots of confusion.
And sometimes it’s easy for us to kind of read
past that because we know the story.
But if you stop and think about it,
this is an amazingly complex and disturbing situation that these brothers are in.
Yeah, let’s not miss here.
I’m looking at 1st 36,
what Jacob literally says.
He says, “Joseph is no more.” We know that,
of course, he believes that his son is dead.
Simeon is no more because he’s in prison.
That’s where Joseph put him.
He’s back in Egypt in prison.
So they came back with one less child.
Let’s not forget that,
right?
It’s not as if they came back
with this concerning news.
No, they came back with one less of his sons and whose son is now
essentially sitting in this holding pattern and no one knowing what is going to happen to him,
especially if they don’t go back.
They’ve lost him.
And then once again,
this idea, and you’re not going to take Benjamin,
you’re not going to take my other favorite son,
the last vestige of my relationship with my favorite wife.
We maybe come to a text like
this and we find in the confusing turns in it kind of a,
maybe it’s just hard to read,
hard to understand the subtleties of it.
But fundamentally,
here we have pain upon pain
upon pain added to this family.
And
the text doesn’t go out of its way to say that this is
the direct cause of actions that’s been taken.
It’s not like this is their just desserts though.
They do attribute, the brothers attribute the fact that the money got put in to God as if to say,
this is what we have coming to us.
But fundamentally, friends, I mean, this is the complexity of human life.
This is how things often get far darker before they get lighter.
And
some of being a person of faith is just trusting and walking through those seasons.
Here,
it seems like the text is leaving open far more questions than it has any interest in giving us answers.
And as difficult as it would have been to be one of the brothers experiencing that firsthand,
imagine Jacob who’s hearing about it.
What?
You have the money,
you have the grain,
you didn’t come home with your brother and now you want to take the youngest,
you want to take
your youngest brother, my favorite son.
He doesn’t come out that explicitly,
but you get that sense.
Imagine him hearing this and trying to make this decision and trying to determine is it
worth risking another child to potentially salvage or save the other.
And this is a very,
is a very tough situation.
Again,
this is one of those places in Genesis where it’s just narrative,
that there’s no, there’s no commentary on is it good?
Is it bad?
It’s just the story being told as the story.
The interpretation stuff tends to happen a little bit later in the Joseph story.
At this point, we’re just getting the details.
So that’s where we leave it today.
Tomorrow, we pick up that story in the aftermath of what they decide to do and what happens.
We’ll continue.
It’s interesting, Michael,
as we’ve seen Genesis move over some people’s stories in
large chunks at a time,
the Bible dedicates several long chapters to just this one incident.
And that tells us something about the significance of these stories.
It absolutely does.
If you’re at all peaked in your interest as to what happens with Benjamin,
be sure to tune in tomorrow because this story really in many ways only gets more interesting.
So thanks for being with us today.
Thanks, everybody.