Why Didn’t Joseph Call Home? - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > August 1993

Why Didn’t Joseph Call Home?

By Arnold Ages

The Hebrew Bible contains many unanswered questions and questions for which the answers provided seem inadequate. This, however, is part of the charm of Torah; it challenges us to exercise our powers of conjecture and imagination to supply plausible responses. One of the most intriguing of these questions involves Joseph’s behavior after he has risen to such heights in the Egyptian bureaucracy that he is second only to Pharaoh himself. You will recall that Joseph’s brothers, jealous of Joseph’s special place in his father Jacob’s affections and incensed at the hubris reflected in his dreams, strip him of his […]

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Endnotes

1.

Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 36b.

2.

George W. Savran, Telling and Retelling Quotation in Biblical Narrative (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1988), p. 61.

3.

Elie Wiesel. Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits & Legends (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 165.

4.

As suggested by Gunther Plaut in The Torah (New York, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981), p. 271.

5.

The Talmud, Shabbat 10b, is critical of Jacob for the favoritism he showed towards Joseph.

6.

Adin Steinsaltz, Biblical Images: Man and Women of the Book (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 70.

7.

Steinsaltz, Biblical Images, p. 69.

8.

Meir Steinberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985), p. 286.

9.

The rabbis go out of their way to show that even the wagons that Joseph sent back to his father laden with gifts (Genesis 45:21) were signs of his fidelity to Judaism. The Hebrew word for wagons, agalot, say the rabbis, was Joseph’s way of telling Jacob that he, the Egyptian viceroy, was thinking of the eglah arufa, the sacrifice required when a dead body was found equidistant between two cities (Deuteronomy 21:1–9). Jacob had supposedly been studying that very concept when Joseph’s wagons arrived.