Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Set over all the land of Egypt
Genesis 41:37-57
37 The thing was good in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of all his servants. · WEB
In one day a foreign slave becomes second in the empire, and he names his sons for what God has done with his memory and his grief.
Pharaoh's assessment is the most remarkable thing said by an outsider in Genesis: Can we find such a one as this, a man in whom is the Spirit of God?
An Egyptian monarch, surrounded by his own religious establishment, identifies the source of what he has just heard and identifies it correctly. He is not converted and he is not confused; he has watched his professionals fail and a prisoner succeed, and he draws the obvious conclusion about where the difference came from.
The elevation is instantaneous and total. The signet ring — the authority to seal documents in the king's name — fine linen, a gold chain, the second chariot, and men crying before him in the streets. Only in the throne I will be greater than you.
He is thirty years old. He was seventeen when his brothers stripped him, so thirteen years have passed: a slave, then a convict, then in a single morning the administrator of the wealthiest state in the world.
The Egyptianizing is thorough and the text does not flinch from it. A new name, Zaphenath-Paneah, and a wife — Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera priest of On — the daughter of a priest of the sun cult at On , the great temple city. Joseph is married into the Egyptian religious aristocracy, and Genesis records it without a word of comment either way.
What it does record is how he names his children, and the two names are the only window the book gives into what he had been carrying.
Manasseh, which sounds like making to forget: God has made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house. The first is a mercy and the second is startling. He is glad to have been released from the memory of a home where he was hated, and he says so out loud in a child's name.
Ephraim, which sounds like fruitful: God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction.
The last phrase is the one to hold. He is prime minister of Egypt, married, wealthy, and with two sons — and he still calls the country the land of my affliction. The promotion has not rewritten what was done to him. Both names credit God, and neither pretends the years were anything other than toil and affliction.
The seven good years come exactly as described, and Joseph stores grain as the sand of the sea, very much, until he stopped counting — a phrase used elsewhere in this book only of the promise of offspring to Abraham.
Then the famine, and it is worldwide: there was famine in all lands, but in all the land of Egypt there was bread. Pharaoh's instruction to his own starving people is four words that put a Hebrew slave between an empire and its food: Go to Joseph.
And the chapter's last verse opens the door the rest of the book walks through: All countries came into Egypt, to Joseph, to buy grain, because the famine was severe in all the earth. One of those countries is Canaan, where an old man has ten sons standing around looking at each other.
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