Genesis 44:18-34

Hey, everybody.
Happy Tuesday.
Welcome back.
Thanks for joining us again as we work our
way through Genesis and the sort of ongoing saga.
We’ve been several chapters now in the
book really focuses on
Joseph and the transition from
Jacob through Joseph to essentially the move
toward Exodus and Egypt.
And
Egypt is where our story has been taking place and we are there again
today as Joseph has been with his brothers.
He set up his younger brother first by forcing their
hand and making them bring the younger brother Benjamin to Egypt.
And now by framing them for
theft, framing Benjamin specifically for theft and demanding that he be left in Egypt while the
other brothers return home.
And we saw a little bit yesterday the brothers begin to plead their case.
Today we focus on the rest of that story as these brothers try to then convince Joseph who
they don’t know to be their brother that they cannot leave the youngest brother because of the
promises they’ve made.
So really we’ve seen these two storylines running side by side and today I
think in many ways for the first time they actually intersect.
So let me read this.
I’ll read it quickly and then we’ll begin unpacking some of it.
“Then Judah stepped up
and said to him,
‘Lord, let your servant please speak a word in my Lord’s ears and do not be angry with me for you are like Pharaoh himself.
My Lord asked his servants saying,
‘Have you a father or a brother?’ And we said,
‘We have a father,
an old man, and a young brother,
the child of his old age.
His brother is dead and
he alone is left of his mother’s children and the father loves him.'” By the way that’s Joseph just
to make sure we make the connection there.
“Then you said to your servants,
‘Bring him down to me so I
may see him.’ We said to you,
‘The boy cannot leave his father for if he should leave his father,
his father would die.’
Then you said to the servants,
‘Unless your younger brother comes with you,
you shall see my face no more.’
When we went back to my father and told him the words of my Lord,
our father said, ‘Go again and buy food.’ And we said,
‘We can’t only if the younger brother goes with
us can we go down for we cannot see the man’s face unless he is with us.’
Then your servant, my father said to us,
‘You know that my wife bore me two sons.
One left me.’ And I said,
‘Surely he has been torn to pieces and I’ve never seen him since.
If you take also this one from me and harm comes to him,
you will bring my gray hairs down to sorrow in Sheol.
Now,
when I come to your servant,
my father and the boy is not with us.
Then as his life is bound up in the boy’s life,
when he sees the boy not with us,
he will die.
And your servants will bring down the gray hairs of him,
our father,
with sorrow to Sheol the dead place.
For your servant
became surety for the boy,
to my father saying, ‘If I do not bring him back to you,
then I will bear the blame in the sight of my father.’
Therefore,
please let your servant remain as a slave to my Lord in place of the boy,
and let the boy go back with his brothers.
For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me?
I fear to see the suffering that would come upon my father.” So this is a speech that Judah
makes and it’s very heartfelt,
it’s very impassioned.
He just simply goes through the story.
He explains the backstory to Joseph,
which he assumes Joseph doesn’t know,
and ends by saying,
‘So if you have any mercy,
keep me.
Don’t keep Benjamin.
Don’t keep this youngest because in doing so,
it will kill our father.
It will be the death of him.
So please let me stay in his place.’ And the irony of this
for Joseph, and we’ll see this more explicitly I think tomorrow,
but the irony of this for Joseph
is what does he have here?
He has one brother standing up and taking the place,
willing to offer himself to deliver another brother,
and what did Joseph not have?
That exact experience
with these exact men, these same brothers.
Now he’s the only one that knows that,
and so he’s probably the only one that feels that,
but he now finds himself in the place, Michael, of knowing
that if he follows through with his plan,
he is likely going to cause harm to come to his father.
He has no reason to doubt these words.
He knows Jacob’s age.
He knows the situation,
and whether he finds himself kind of in a position he didn’t anticipate,
whether he’s moved by Judah’s appeal,
or whether he’s just played out what he hoped to accomplish is not clear,
but we find out more clearly tomorrow,
but this is, it turns out, a turning point in the story.
It’s a turning point for so many reasons, too.
If you really reflect back here for just a moment
on the story that we’ve had before,
this is a little tricky because of how long an in-depth
Joseph’s story has been.
Many of the other characters,
especially someone like Isaac,
was unbelievably short if you look at the sheer number of chapters devoted to them.
So when you look back, you see that Judah has been at these critical points in this story thus far.
Judah was the one all the way back in Genesis chapter 37,
who in verse 26 here is making the case,
“What profit is it if we kill our brother,
this being Joseph?” He’s standing up and saying, you know,
not we should rescue him or we should stop this plan entirely,
but he is the one,
to his credit, who stands up and says that there is another way.
Well, we then have, do you remember that strange kind of interlude story where Judah made this appearance with Tamar and you had this
whole kind of him getting bested?
Well, now we make it all the way to this critical turning point in the story.
And not only is he going to stand up to the person he believes is second in command of all of Egypt
to make a case for Benjamin,
he offers himself and he does so with this assumption.
You’ll notice that the text insinuates that the boy would go back with the other brothers.
So here we have this idea that Benjamin’s going to go,
the other brothers are going to go.
Judah is imagining he himself will be the slave left behind.
I mean, this is the kind of ultimate
ownership,
the ultimate responsibility taking.
We’ve not seen any of this kind of hardline black and white.
This is the way it’s going to be kind of a movement in the text.
And you can’t help but recognize that as Judah’s appear that set
different points in the story and we’ve seen different kind of levels of commitment here,
you’ve got to see how important this is.
When he stands up to Joseph in this moment,
it is clear that this is a different path and it will indeed create a different kind of ripple,
a different effect in the life of this family.
But it’s amazing as Joseph has pushed and pushed and pushed,
he’s literally pushed them to the limit.
I mean, that’s where we were yesterday.
This is the furthest extent that you could possibly push these brothers.
And now we see that this one is ready to stand up.
Yeah, it’s a good point,
Michael, and I think it’s helpful to insert.
It’s easy to read this
story and sort of think of a bunch of kids.
That was sort of the context.
We saw them born,
we saw them kind of growing up.
It’s easy to think of these as young men,
but your reminder, I think, is helpful.
Judah has three sons that are marrying age.
Judah has been married,
lost his wife.
We are talking by and large,
the possible exception of Benjamin,
who even himself must easily be in his twenties.
We are talking about men, in some cases,
men who are themselves getting older.
This is an adult story.
These are men considering
what they’ve done in their lives and feeling the weight of it in some cases,
and the burden in this
case of the promise that he made to his father.
Again,
it’s hard to limit yourself to where we
are in the story sometimes,
but keep in mind that Judah does not know where this is headed.
As he offers himself,
he has every reason to assume that that’s an offer to go to prison,
to be punished.
I suppose he’s not terribly—there’s no reason to think he’d be executed, but it’s possible.
He is making a genuine sacrifice in saying, “Look,
keep me, but be out of respect for my father.
Please let that younger boy go home.
Please let him return
to the father.” I think it’s a good moment for Judah.
I mean, we can read
ins and outs of all of these brothers’ stories,
but I do think it’s a faithful moment for Judah.
I think he’s doing what he promised.
He’s trying to keep his word.
He’s in a tough situation,
and he’s throwing himself on the mercy of this,
what he believes to be an Egyptian official.
I think we can read what he’s doing positively,
and now,
as that kind of always has been,
but now the ball is really in Joseph’s court.
Now Joseph has to make a decision,
“What do I do with this information,
and what do I do with this request?”
Once again, you’ve got to look at the past story to really make the connection to where we’re at in this story.
Remember what ends up happening with Joseph.
When Judah makes this case,
“We don’t need to kill him.
Let’s make some money off of him.” They sell him.
He’s sold into slavery.
Then Judah and the brothers go back to their father,
and if you remember,
they make this lie.
They put blood on the coat,
and they use that as evidence,
“Hey, look, he’s died.” The truth is,
he’s lived with that his entire life.
In fact, we know because of the response
at some of this adversity that the brothers have actually taken that to heart,
and they believe that this present adversity is the direct causation of those previous choices.
Well, look here.
Here he says, verse 32, “For your servant became surety to the boy,” and he says,
“If I don’t bring
it back to you,
I’ll bear blame for him my entire life.” We see literally named.
In exact words,
we see him naming the thing that he’s experienced every day since he did that thing to Joseph.
When this is in the presence of Joseph,
when we as the reader knows this and Judah clearly doesn’t, we’re intended
to look at a moment in a text like this and to recognize that there’s a kind of
retracing of the steps happening.
I just want to point out maybe we might miss it.
Clint, this is really sophisticated.
This is really the fact that we know this thing,
and Judah doesn’t, and Joseph is playing this trap,
and we’re sort of watching it unfold for Genesis,
and even really for just the Old Testament.
I mean, this is really a very sophisticated form of storytelling.
We don’t see this all the time,
and the fact that it’s been so fleshed out,
so many chapters now,
six plus chapters devoted to really getting this story fleshed out in this way.
I mean, I think that this is the reason I love Joseph’s story,
not because it’s easy.
In many ways, I think his story
may be the hardest to read,
but simply because of how beautifully woven
it is as a story.
I agree 100%, and if you’ve been with us from the beginning of Genesis,
I hope this will make some sense to you.
Think about the times that this book has jumped over massive plot lines in the
story.
Think of the times that this book has minimized enormous life-changing details with
hardly a word, and then look at how carefully these multiple chapters of Joseph’s story have been knit together.
Look at the amount of emotional material they’ve taken us through
in comparison to very little in most of the other stories.
For whatever reason,
the people who kept and treasured these stories felt very drawn to this moment of Jacob’s children
and what happens to them.
Maybe in retrospect,
it’s the idea that they become the tribes of
Israel, and in these sort of tumultuous relationships,
we see something of a nation’s history as well,
as the tribes will fight with one another,
as they’ll betray one another,
as they’ll harbor grudges against one another and come to reconciliation with one another.
Maybe in microcosm, this family story becomes a symbolic summary of the entire Israel story.
I don’t know if that’s it or not,
but if you’ve been with us through Genesis,
I think you can pretty
easily hear the case and see the evidence that this story really is treated differently.
It is told differently.
It has different content to it.
It’s not that we haven’t seen any of that,
but we see so much of it here in really such a narrow band of the story.
Again, we’ve had massive turns of previous stories without really getting many details,
and now we’re getting details
down to where they parked their donkeys and what’s in their sack and these emotional moments of,
“We’re going to see one tomorrow,” as Joseph,
again, has to make everyone leave so he can weep,
and then ultimately identifies himself to his brothers and what goes with that,
the aftermath of that.
But this is, I think, a unique part of the book of Genesis.
Yeah, if you want to see how impactful this speech is and how important it is to the story,
you need to join us tomorrow because the effect is immediate.
What we’re talking about here
is really kind of the setup for what is the proof,
and we’ll see the proof tomorrow.
But I just want to point out that Judah is also a little bit of an interesting character because
we’ve had tertiary characters before.
We’ve had people like Esau,
maybe you argue, that he wasn’t,
but clearly the story remained on Jacob throughout the whole breadth of that section.
We’ve had these characters who have come in and out of the story.
They’ve been important.
They moved the plot along.
They showed us maybe even some connection to other nations,
things like that.
What I think makes
Judah’s standing up here so interesting,
and Judah’s a character so interesting,
is because in some ways he is the one who stands apart from the other brothers,
all the other who essentially
remain nameless.
I mean, they are named, but their character and their choices really doesn’t get a lot of time.
This man is willing to,
at the critical moment,
stand up in front of the seed of power
and to say the thing for the sake of his youngest brother,
and ultimately he names for the sake of
his father.
And I think that also makes Judah an important character.
And if you know the history of Israel,
the tribe of Judah is also a very well-known,
notable tribe.
I think there’s a sense
in which we do see, Clint,
to your point, the family lineage, some of the courage,
some of that deep commitment to what is right and good is portrayed here in the fountainhead,
in the father, in the very beginning of those 12 tribes.
Now, that said,
it doesn’t really absolve the difficulties
that we’ve had thus far.
The brothers have still done what they’ve done.
They still sit in this position,
and at this moment where we leave the text today, Clint,
legitimately believing that they may have to go home without the youngest brother,
believing that this is the last-ditch
effort to save their father’s life.
And that is an unbelievably difficult moment.
I mean, if there’s a low that could be named in this story,
this has got to be it as Judah’s making this speech.
Yeah,
I think that ultimately I’d have to unpack this at the end of the book of Genesis,
but let me try to say this at this point.
From a literary perspective,
Joseph has not yet had a great deal of impact on his brothers.
Their lives are largely what they
would be without him.
Had he been with them in Israel,
somebody would still have to go to Egypt
and look for food,
or Egypt wouldn’t have food.
Their situation would likely not have been
different at this moment.
However,
because of the brothers,
Joseph’s situation is markedly,
unimaginably different, and that sets up a possibility that Joseph is going to be
a kind of savior figure to the nation of Israel,
to Jacob and his sons and their ultimate future,
that that future is procured by Joseph,
none other than the brother they tried to get rid of.
That comes around at the end of the story,
but it is a fascinating reality of the way this story
is told.
And again, maybe an explanation of why the ancient people of Israel found this story
so important and the detailed and depth of it worth holding onto and fleshing out,
because without Joseph,
there really is no future for Israel in the confines of the text.
Other things could have happened.
Yes, absolutely.
But in the way it’s told,
Joseph is the gate through which their future proceeds,
and we’ll see how that happens in the
next few sessions together.
Well, Clint, we’re a little nasty leaving the text here today,
so don’t miss tomorrow.
Tomorrow, I think there’s a really big turn and an important kind of payoff
in the story as we turn to chapter 45.
But we’re glad that you had spent time with us today,
really important part of the Joseph story,
and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Thanks for being with us.
Thanks, everybody.