Biblion Bible Commentary
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Wagons out of Egypt
Genesis 45:16-28
16 The report of it was heard in Pharaoh’s house, saying, “Joseph’s brothers have come.” It pleased Pharaoh well, and his servants. · WEB
Pharaoh himself invites the family down, and the old man who refused comfort for twenty years believes it when he sees the carts.
The news reaches the palace and the reaction is unexpected: It pleased Pharaoh well, and his servants. A court that might reasonably have been alarmed at a foreign administrator importing his entire clan is glad about it, which says something about Joseph's standing after seven years.
Pharaoh's own invitation goes beyond anything Joseph had proposed. I will give you the good of the land of Egypt, and you will eat the fat of the land, wagons for the women and children, and an instruction that is almost extravagant: don't concern yourselves about your belongings, for the good of all the land of Egypt is yours. Leave the furniture. There is better here.
Joseph provisions them for the journey, and then does something that shows he has thought about what he is sending them home to. He gives each brother a change of clothing — but to Benjamin he gave three hundred pieces of silver and five changes of clothing.
The favoritism is deliberate and it is a final, gentle version of the test. He is doing to them what their father did to him, and what he did at the banquet table with a portion five times too large. Ten men are watching Rachel's son receive five times what they get, and this time nobody minds. The thing that broke the family has been defused, and Joseph checks it once more before letting them go.
And then the driest line he speaks in the book: See that you don't quarrel on the way.
He knows them. Twelve men are about to travel several hundred miles with a story to explain to their father, and every one of them has a version in which he comes out better. Joseph, who has just forgiven them everything, sends them off with a warning about arguing in the desert, and it is affectionate and entirely practical.
The scene at home is the chapter's best. They told him, saying, "Joseph is still alive, and he is ruler over all the land of Egypt."
His heart fainted, for he didn't believe them. Twenty-two years of mourning, of refusing to be comforted, of saying he would go down to Sheol grieving — and the news does not land. It cannot. He has organized his entire inner life around a bloodied coat, and the men telling him otherwise are the men who brought him the coat.
What changes his mind is not the words. When he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of Jacob, their father, revived. Egyptian carts, standing in a Canaanite field, which nobody in that family could have obtained by any means. The evidence he could not argue with was parked outside.
And the last verse changes his name, which the writer does deliberately. It is Jacob whose spirit revives, and Israel who speaks: It is enough. Joseph my son is still alive. I will go and see him before I die.
No questions about how, no interrogation of the brothers, no reproach. He asks for nothing except to see him.
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