NOTES for Gen 44:1-34
Today, as in ancient times, there is an understanding, not always clearly expressed but common to all peoples, that like is redeemed by like. Kill a person and be ready to die. Steal and be ready to repay what was stolen many times over. So how could the sale of one’s own brother into slavery be redeemed now? In a perfectly obvious way: by freeing one’s brother from slavery and becoming a slave in his place. Something like this happens after the brothers’ “theft” of Joseph’s cup, staged on Joseph’s orders.
It is quite clear that this staging is part of the work Joseph is doing with his brothers. He has to let them feel what it is like to be blamed when innocent, in circumstances where it is utterly impossible to defend oneself, no matter how right one may be. Perhaps then they will better understand what Joseph felt when his brothers sold him to the merchants of a passing caravan.
Feeling it is important, but it is not enough. This is spiritual work. Joseph needs to understand what choice his brothers will make when they have to decide what to do now that their youngest brother is to remain a slave in Egypt. The situation mirrors his own, for he too was destined for slavery in Egypt without any guilt.
One might say that the brothers were even fortunate: their youngest brother faced the death penalty for the “theft,” and only by Joseph’s mercy did he remain alive, though enslaved. The same had once been true of Joseph himself: for him, too, slavery in Egypt became a mercy, a substitute for the death that had seemed almost inevitable. It was at this point that Judah offered himself as a slave in Benjamin’s place.
This offer settles the matter: in only a little while, Joseph will reveal himself to his brothers; the test is over. Why precisely now? It is not hard to understand: among the brothers there was at least one who was ready to redeem what had been done to Joseph. Of course, to redeem it in the most familiar, traditional sense, but even here there was already what is present in every redemption and without which no redemption is possible by definition: the readiness to take upon oneself the consequences of another person’s actions and sins. To take them solely out of love, without any compulsion. The sin against Joseph had now been redeemed, and Joseph could reveal himself to his brothers.