Biblion Bible Commentary
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Judah becomes surety for the boy
Genesis 43:1-14
1 The famine was severe in the land. · WEB
Hunger finally forces the decision, and the brother who proposed selling Joseph offers to stand personally behind Benjamin.
The famine was severe in the land. Nothing has been resolved since the last chapter; the family has simply been eating, and now the grain is gone. Jacob's instruction is almost comic in its refusal to face the problem: Go again, buy us a little more food. As though the difficulty were the quantity.
Judah is the one who makes him face it, and he does it by quoting the Egyptian twice, in identical words, at the beginning and end of his speech: You shall not see my face, unless your brother is with you. There is no negotiation available. The condition is absolute and Jacob has been pretending otherwise for months.
Jacob's response is to look for someone to blame — Why did you treat me so badly, telling the man that you had another brother? — and the brothers' answer is the exasperated reasonableness of men who have explained this before. He asked directly. They answered. Is there any way we could know that he would say, "Bring your brother down"?
And then Judah speaks again, and something has changed in him.
Send the boy with me, and we'll get up and go, so that we may live, and not die, both we, and you, and also our little ones. He begins where his father cannot bear to look: the whole family, including the grandchildren, will starve.
Then the offer: I'll be collateral for him. From my hand will you require him. If I don't bring him to you, and set him before you, then let me bear the blame forever.
Set that beside what Reuben offered a chapter ago — Kill my two sons, if I don't bring him to you Genesis 42:37 — which was grotesque and cost Reuben nothing he valued more than himself. Judah pledges himself. He uses the language of a guarantor on a debt, and the security he posts is his own person and his own standing with his father, permanently.
And this is the man who once said What profit is it if we kill our brother? and proposed selling him for twenty pieces of silver Genesis 37:26–27. He is now offering to be permanently forfeit for the safety of the son who has taken Joseph's place as the favorite. Something happened to Judah between those two speeches, and the nearest thing the book gives to an account of it is a signet, a cord and a staff produced by a woman he had wronged.
Jacob yields with a sigh — If it must be so — and immediately starts managing what he can. A present of the choice fruits of the land: balm, honey, spices, myrrh, nuts, almonds. It is the produce of a starving country, sent as a gift to the man who has all the grain, and the list is nearly the same as the cargo of the caravan that carried Joseph to Egypt Genesis 37:25. Double money, and the returned silver, in case it was an oversight.
And then, at the end, the old man finally lets go: May God Almighty give you mercy before the man... If I am bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.
It is not faith exactly, and it is not despair. It is a man who has run out of arrangements, invoking the name God used when he promised Abraham a son at ninety-nine, and consenting to whatever comes.
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