Biblion Bible Commentary
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Yahweh was with Joseph in Potiphar's house
Genesis 39:1-10
1 Joseph was brought down to Egypt. Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh’s, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him from the hand of the Ishmaelites that had brought him down there. · WEB
A slave prospers because God is with him, and the reason he refuses his master's wife is not about his master.
The chapter returns to Joseph with a sentence that governs everything in it: Yahweh was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man. The phrase occurs four times in twenty-three verses, twice in the house and twice in the prison, and it is the writer's whole explanation for a life that looks from the outside like a series of disasters.
What is striking is where the prospering happens. He is a slave — bought, foreign, with no rights and no prospect of any — and the text calls him prosperous in that condition. Nothing about his circumstances has improved.
The effect is visible to a pagan employer: His master saw that Yahweh was with him, and that Yahweh made all that he did prosper in his hand. Potiphar cannot have known much about the God in question, and he could read the results. Joseph is promoted to run the household, and Yahweh blessed the Egyptian's house for Joseph's sake — a blessing that spills onto a man who has no claim to it, which is what the promise to Abraham said would happen through his offspring.
The trust becomes total: He left all that he had in Joseph's hand. He didn't concern himself with anything, except for the food which he ate. One clause of that is a matter of custom — an Egyptian would not eat with a Hebrew Genesis 43:32 — and the rest is a man who has stopped checking the accounts.
Then the last clause of the verse, dropped in without comment, which sets up everything that follows: Joseph was well-built and handsome. The same description is used of his mother Genesis 29:17, and in this book it is never simply decorative.
The proposition is two words in the Hebrew and needs no elaboration: Lie with me.
His refusal is a speech, and its structure is worth following because it moves outward rather than inward. He begins with what he owes his master — the trust, the authority, the fact that nothing has been kept back from him except this. That is the argument from loyalty, and it is a good one.
But he does not end there, and the ending is why the passage matters. How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?
The injury would be to Potiphar; the sin is against God. That distinction is made by a seventeen-year-old slave in a country where nobody knows his God, in a household where he would almost certainly not have been caught, against a woman with the power to destroy him for refusing. There is no community watching him, no father to disappoint, and no prospect that anyone will ever know.
And the pressure is not a single moment. As she spoke to Joseph day by day, he didn't listen to her, to lie by her, or to be with her. Three refusals in one verse — not to lie with her, not to lie by her, not even to be in her company. He is managing the situation as well as it can be managed, and it will not be enough.
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