Biblion Bible Commentary
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I am Joseph: God sent me before you
Genesis 45:1-15
1 Then Joseph couldn’t control himself before all those who stood before him, and he called out, “Cause everyone to go out from me!” No one else stood with him, while Joseph made himself known to his brothers. · WEB
He clears the room, weeps so loudly the palace hears it, and tells his brothers that what they did and what God did are both true.
Then Joseph couldn't control himself. He has managed it three times — turning away, leaving the room, washing his face. Judah's speech ends it.
His first act is to clear the room, and it is a kindness. Cause everyone to go out from me! Whatever is about to be said about how he came to Egypt, no Egyptian official is going to hear it. He protects his brothers' reputation at the moment he identifies himself to them.
He wept aloud. The Egyptians heard, and the house of Pharaoh heard. The second most powerful man in Egypt is crying loudly enough to be heard through the walls and across the palace.
Then five words: I am Joseph! Does my father still live?
He has asked about his father twice already and been told he is well. He asks again, because being told by strangers is not the same as asking as a son.
His brothers couldn't answer him; for they were terrified at his presence. Of course they were. The man with absolute power over their lives has just told them he is the brother they sold.
What he does next is the most generous act in Genesis. Come near to me, please. He calls them closer — the terrified men who trafficked him — and repeats it: I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt.
He says it. He does not pretend it did not happen, does not soften it, does not use a euphemism. The sale is named to their faces by the man who was sold.
And then, immediately: Now don't be grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.
The two halves of that sentence have to be held together and neither may be dropped. You sold me is not withdrawn. God sent me is not a polite fiction. He says it three times in four verses — God sent me before you, God sent me to preserve a remnant, it wasn't you who sent me here, but God — and the last one sits in the same paragraph as the plain statement that they sold him.
This is not the claim that what they did was acceptable, and it is not the claim that they were instruments without wills. It is the claim that their crime was real and that God's purpose ran straight through it to an outcome they never intended and could not have produced. The same two facts are stated again, more sharply, at the end of the book: you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good Genesis 50:20.
What he asks them to stop doing is worth marking: don't be grieved, nor angry with yourselves. He is releasing them from self-reproach, which is not the same as telling them there was nothing to reproach.
The practical instructions come in a rush — hurry, go up, tell my father, come down, dwell in Goshen , I will provide — and the reason is stated twice: five more years of famine.
And then the embrace, and the order of it is right. He fell on his brother Benjamin's neck and wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. He kissed all his brothers, and wept on them. His mother's son first, then all of them.
After that his brothers talked with him. Not before. It took the weeping to make conversation possible.
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