NOTES for Gen 44:1-34
Today's passage completes the biblical story of how Joseph led his brothers to repentance. At first glance, the story with the cup planted on Benjamin by Joseph's direct order (v. 2) looks like outright provocation. But on the other hand, this episode turned out to be a very important stage in the peculiar spiritual education Joseph undertook with his brothers.
On the one hand, here again, as before, Joseph's brothers had to learn from their own experience what it is like to be guilty without being at fault. The experiment was extremely harsh, of course, but Joseph had the moral right to do it, since he himself had been in such a situation at least twice: first because of his brothers, when they sold him into slavery in Egypt, and second in the story with Potiphar's wife, when he was not only accused of something of which he was in no way guilty, but the accusation itself became possible precisely because Joseph unswervingly followed the moral norms he considered absolutely binding for himself, as given by God. The story with the cup is more reminiscent of the story with Potiphar's wife: just as Joseph himself in that story, his brothers in the story with the cup were guilty of absolutely nothing. And, like Joseph, they had to learn from their own experience what a person feels when he has been framed.
It would seem that such a situation has no direct relation to the brothers' guilt before Joseph. And yet this kind of experience was extremely important: it allowed the one who went through it to understand what it means for a person to be in a state of complete helplessness, not physical helplessness, but, so to speak, moral helplessness, when, being right, he has not the slightest possibility of proving his unquestionable innocence, so that he can only hope in God and in His intervention. And when in such a situation one of the brothers, Judah, offers to take upon himself the punishment assigned to Benjamin (the criminal law of some ancient peoples, including Semitic peoples, allowed such a substitution), Joseph understands that his brothers are truly ready to meet him.