Dreamer, Schemer, Slave and Prince

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Dreams in the Joseph story—both those he dreamed himself and those he interpreted for others—have long mesmerized us. His arrogant boasting of his dreams to his brothers almost cost him his life. His gifts as a dream interpreter won his release from prison and slavery and allowed him to become a prince in Egypt.

Joseph languished in Pharaoh’s dungeon for more than two years after Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce him. When she failed, the spurned woman falsely claimed that Joseph, overseer of her husband’s household, had “come to dally with” her (Genesis 39:17). Potiphar, Joseph’s master and one of Pharaoh’s chief officials, threw Joseph into prison. There Joseph met Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer and chief baker, each of whom dreamed baffling dreams, which Joseph interpreted. Joseph correctly understood their dreams as portents of their fates (see the sidebar to this article).

News of Joseph’s successful interpretation reached Pharaoh years later through the cupbearer, who had been restored to his position as Joseph had predicted. Pharaoh was seeking someone to interpret his imperial nightmares of seven gaunt cows devouring seven fat ones and seven thin ears of grain swallowing seven full ears (Genesis 41:17–24). He summoned Joseph, who predicted a long famine after seven years of prosperity and offered a master plan to save Egypt. As a result of his magisterial and visionary proposals, Joseph was released from prison and elevated to the position of Egyptian viceroy, second only to Pharaoh himself.

But these were not Joseph’s first experiences with dreams. He had dreamed dreams as a 17-year-old shepherd whose brothers hated him because their father, Jacob, favored him. He told his brothers, “We were binding sheaves in the field, when suddenly my sheaf stood up and remained upright; then your sheaves gathered around and bowed low to my sheaf” (Genesis 37:7). In a second dream, which he described to his father and brothers, he saw “the sun, the moon, and eleven stars…bowing down to me” (Genesis 37:9).

Young Joseph’s effrontery astonishes us. His older brothers clearly understood Joseph’s unsubtle prediction of his eventual ascendancy over them. They were driven to 048paroxysms of anger by his impertinence. After he related his first dream, they confronted him, outraged: “‘Do you mean to reign over us? Do you mean to rule over us?’ And they hated him even more for his talk about his dreams” (Genesis 37:8). After he related his second dream, even his father rebuked him, saying, “Are we to come, I and your mother and your brothers, and bow low to you to the ground?” (Genesis 37:10).

Why did Joseph dream these dreams? Sheaves of wheat and celestial bodies are part of the shepherd’s experience (although farmers have more to do with sheaves than shepherds), but the transforming vision that Joseph confers upon them seems extravagant for a simple, untutored tender of sheep. Especially dramatic is Joseph’s use of the Hebrew words vatishtachavena and mishtachavim—“bowed to [mine]” and “bowed to [me]”—in his description of the genuflecting sheaves, sun, moon and stars. This is a strong image.

The eminent Bible scholar Robert Alter, exploring Joseph’s early dreams, explains that the young shepherd had much to learn about the meaning of dreams. He cautions us not to be deceived into thinking that the projections of sheaves and celestial spheres were “the reflex of the spoiled adolescent’s grandiosity, quite of a piece with the nasty habit of tale-bearing against his brothers and with his insensitivity to their feelings, obviously encouraged by his father’s flagrant indulgence.”¹

Victor P. Hamilton, who teaches religion at Asbury College in Kentucky, observes that Joseph’s adolescent dreams are the first “recorded in Genesis in which the voice of God does not speak, thus removing [them] from the category of a theophany. The absence of any specific divine speech or revelation…accentuates [their] ambiguity.”² Hamilton also points out that sheaves, which represent food, play an important role in the later Joseph story, when Joseph prepares Egypt for impending famine.

It has also been suggested by Sandor Goodhart, University of Michigan English professor, that an upright sheaf might represent Joseph as a potential olah, or sacrifice, that was offered “up.”³ In this scenario, Joseph’s dream is not merely a forecast of 049earthly greatness but a prediction of even greater glory. He will become his brothers’ savior and thus preserve their unique monotheistic form of worship. In this reading, when the brothers share a meal after casting Joseph into a dry cistern (Genesis 37:24), the food they devour is a symbolic substitute for the flesh of their victim. When they sell him to the passing caravan of Ishmaelites (Genesis 37:28), the 20 silver shekels they accept are a substitute for his ritual murder. And when they dip his clothes in the blood of a slaughtered goat (Genesis 37:31), they complete this substitutionary sacrifice of Joseph incited by his dreams. The brothers will learn, however, that this type of symbolic sacrifice is not acceptable. Just when they think they are confounding Joseph’s dreams by selling him into slavery in a foreign land, they are really making possible those dreams’ fulfillment.

We still have not explained, however, what it was in Joseph’s personality that prompted the contours of his dreams. The Bible does not indicate that the brothers mistreated Joseph or lorded over him. The exact opposite is true: If anyone had cause to dream of better treatment, it was the brothers. They must have yearned to revenge themselves on Joseph for the way he treated them. If dreams are wish fulfillments, why does Joseph dream of holding sway over his brothers? He was already doing that, thanks to the morally corrupting partiality of his father, Jacob.

The famous medieval Jewish commentator, Rashi, suggests a partial answer to this puzzle in the death of Joseph’s mother, Rachel, when he was still a boy. Rachel had died giving birth to his brother Benjamin. Although Rashi points out that Jacob’s concubine Bilhah raised Joseph, in our interpretation, Joseph was deprived of the security that comes from the all-embracing care of a mother; therefore he had to compensate by building a protective wall around himself.⁴ All his brothers (except Benjamin) had different mothers,⁵ and this contributed to his estrangement from them. Dreaming of his own ascendancy, then, was Joseph’s way of attempting to remedy his isolation.

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Samson Raphael Hirsch, a pillar of Jewish orthodoxy in 19th-century Germany, buttressed this argument in his commentary on Genesis. He paraphrased Joseph’s dream:

In my dream we were in no manner divided as we are in real life. We worked together and wanted to pile up the small sheaves to form large heaps in the middle of the field. So, I too, was prepared to contribute my own small sheaf to the common heap, but my sheaf could not be moved. It stood erect and remained so; it refused to be carried to the common heap in the center. What is more, your sheaves formed a circle around my sheaf and bowed down before my sheaf.⁶

Hirsch suggested that Joseph’s dreams were triggered by his position as a victim, isolated within his family by his brothers’ hatred. He had been prepared to make his own small contribution to the family, but his brothers shut him out.

Gerald Janzen, Old Testament professor at Christian Theological Seminary in Indiana, speculates that the particular form of Joseph’s dreams might have come from the k’tonet passim, the “coat of many colors,” his father gave him. “Whatever [else] it is,” says Janzen, “a k’tonet passim is also what king’s daughters wear (2 Samuel 13:18). Joseph’s robe may give expression to Jacob’s half-conscious or unconscious intentions for him…The robe may [have] stir[red] Joseph’s imagination to dream along similar lines.”⁷

But would Joseph have been aware that his apparel was similar to that of royalty?

All of these critical views on the source of Joseph’s dreams overlook an incident in Joseph’s childhood, recorded in chapters 32 and 33 of Genesis, that may provide the key to understanding Joseph’s dreams.

When Joseph was a child, he saw his father, Jacob, filled with apprehension as he prepared to meet his estranged twin brother, Esau, whom he had not seen since he had cheated him out of his birthright 25 years before.^a Esau was approaching, 051“accompanied by 400 men” (Genesis 32:6). Thomas Mann describes the scene in his novel Joseph and His Brothers:

[Jacob’s] nearest and dearest, Rachel and her five-year-old son, he had hidden behind the laden camels, and laid Dinah, his daughter by Leah, as dead in a coffin, where she nearly smothered; the other children he had ranged with their mothers, the concubines and their offspring in the lead. He had the herdsmen draw up the present of cattle, the two hundred he-goats and she-goats, the same number of rams and ewes, the thirty camel mares in suck, the forty cows and ten bull-calves, the twenty she-asses with their foals; all these he arranged in echelon, and had them driven in single herds with space between each two, so that Esau might ask of each in turn and learn that they were for him, a present from his servant Jacob.

Jacob arrayed his wives and children (including Joseph) in a defensive perimeter for their protection should things go badly. As Esau approached, Jacob “bowed [vatishtachavena] low to the ground seven times [in total submission]…[Esau] embraced him and, falling on his neck, he kissed him” (Genesis 33:3–4). At this point, Esau sees all the women and children in Jacob’s camp and asks who they are. “Then [Jacob’s] handmaidens came near, they and their children, and they bowed [vayishtachavu] themselves. And Leah also with her children came near and bowed themselves; and after came Joseph near and Rachel, and they bowed themselves” (Genesis 33:6).

Rashi observed that the women are mentioned before the children when Leah, Jacob’s first wife, and the concubines come to kneel before Esau. Joseph, however, is described approaching Esau before Rachel. The reason, says Rashi, is so that “this evil man would not be able to gaze at his mother’s beauty.”⁸

We can perhaps carry Rashi’s point a little further. Joseph was only a child when his father encountered Esau, but maybe he remembered more 052than just his parents’ agitation. Yes, Joseph witnessed Jacob frantically rushing to arrange his household in a secure defensive position, praying and sending gifts to this reputed wild man. However, he must have sensed the tension easing when his whole family, including his brothers and their mothers and his own mother and himself, bowed down to Esau. Unlike the others, Joseph bowed before his mother did, a scriptural anticipation of the primacy he would exercise in his family’s life. In bowing obediently to his uncle, Joseph experienced firsthand the gesture that acknowledges power.

As Joseph matures into a young man, taunted by his siblings, the image of bowing to power, lodged firmly in his subconscious, finally erupts into the dreams he tells his brothers. Dreams, we know, are the mind’s mechanism for wish fulfillment. In Joseph’s dreams, his brothers are still bowing—as they did before Esau—but now the object of their obeisance has changed. Joseph is the new Esau, commanding their allegiance and respect.

Eventually all of Joseph’s brothers do bow down to him, nearly 20 years after they sold him into slavery. By then the boy they came so close to killing is in a position to save them from the famine that threatens their lives. As he saves the nucleus of the Israelite nation, Joseph fulfills his dreams, becoming a forerunner of Moses and a figure venerated by all his brothers’ descendants.

Dreams in the Joseph story—both those he dreamed himself and those he interpreted for others—have long mesmerized us. His arrogant boasting of his dreams to his brothers almost cost him his life. His gifts as a dream interpreter won his release from prison and slavery and allowed him to become a prince in Egypt. Joseph languished in Pharaoh’s dungeon for more than two years after Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce him. When she failed, the spurned woman falsely claimed that Joseph, overseer of her husband’s household, had “come to dally with” her (Genesis 39:17). Potiphar, Joseph’s master and one […]