Part 1
The Broader Context in Genesis
1
The Structure of Genesis
Complex lives have complex backgrounds, and Joseph’s is no exception, so, before we start to think about the detail of the Joseph narrative, we need to step back and set it in the context of the rest of the book of Genesis in order to give depth to our understanding. Since the narrative of Joseph’s life comes at the end of Genesis, that background is considerable. My view is that the Genesis background enriches the story considerably since the book is a unity. After all, the author of Genesis anticipates that you read all of the book and not just the last part.
As is the custom in that part of the world, Joseph would have grown up on a diet of stories of the great heroes of Israel’s tribal history. He would have been steeped in the fascinating narratives of his father, Jacob, his grandfather Isaac, and his great-grandfather Abraham. But not only that—he would have been acquainted with their prehistory right back to the beginning. In other words, he would have known a good deal of the plotline of the book of Genesis, so it is there that we must begin, for we need to know some of what Joseph knew.
Genesis is more than a narrative. It is a metanarrative giving us a grand framework for our understanding of the universe and life.
In order to grasp its story—Genesis is, after all, a large book—it is helpful to have some idea of its literary shape. It turns out that the author uses a simple literary device in order to structure his material, the repetition at intervals of the phrase: “These are the generations of . . .” (the phrase occurs at 2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10, 27; 25:12, 19; 36:1; 37:2). The six main sections the phrase indicates are: 1:1–2:4; 2:5–4:26; 5:1–9:29; 10:1–25:11; 25:12–35:29; and 36:1–50:26. Several of the sections have more than one instance of the repeated phrase in order to delineate subsections.
The first part of the book consists of three sections that record the creation of human beings in the image of God. The second part of the book consists of three sections that cover the lives of the patriarchs. The first section in the second part ends with the death of Abraham, the second section with the death of Isaac, and the third section with the deaths of Jacob and Joseph.
Above all, Genesis tells us about the God in whom Joseph believed, the God he learned to trust.
Section 1: Creation (Genesis 1:1–2:3)
The book begins with the origin of the universe in the mind and creative energy of God: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (1:1). This first majestic sentence undergirds and gives meaning to the developing saga that follows. It asserts that the universe we inhabit is a creation. The world did not generate itself. It did not spring into being spontaneously from nothing. God caused it to be.
By asserting the existence of a Creator, the opening words of Genesis constitute a frontal attack on the materialist atheist philosophy that dominates so much of the Western world today. That philosophy has a long history reaching back beyond the atomism of the ancient Greek thinkers Democritus and Leucippus to the essentially materialistic theogonies of the ancient Near East—the birthplace of the Genesis story.
The book of Genesis was penned long before the ancient Greek philosophers had begun to formulate the ideas that are typically taken to represent the beginnings of philosophy. The lofty monotheism of the ancient Hebrews predates the Greek philosophers by centuries, a fact that is often lost in the current attempt to validate naturalism or materialism as the only worldview that holds intellectual credibility. Furthermore, in contradistinction to the Greeks, the Hebrew thinkers did not have to purge their worldview of a pantheon of god-projections of the forces of nature for the simple reason that they never did believe in such gods in the first place. The God of the Hebrews was not a projection of any force of nature. He was the Creator without whom there would be no forces, or, indeed, any nature in the first place.
The current naive trend of dismissing the God of the Bible as just another of the ancient mythical gods completely fails to grasp this distinction. Werner Jaeger, an expert on the gods of the ancient Near East, makes the point that those gods were descended from the heavens and the earth whereas the God of the Bible created the heavens and the earth. This holds in particular for the gods of the land of Egypt, where Joseph spent most of his life.
This briefest of brief histories of time opens with an elegant and fast-flowing account of the creation of the universe and of life in all its marvelous variety. The creation and organization of the cosmos proceeds in a series of steps, each of which is initiated by God speaking: “And God said . . .” These creative speech acts are summed up in the opening statement of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things were made through him” (John 1:1, 3). This is the way things are. The Word is primary; the material universe is derivative and not the other way around, as popular secularism imagines.
The final step that climaxes the sequence is God’s creation of human beings in his own image. Though the heavens reflect the glory of God, human beings are made in God’s image. Only humans are. Humanity is unique.
Just what being made in the image of God means and how special human beings are is gradually revealed as an integral part of the biblical storyline. However, several very important aspects of that “image” are communicated in the early chapters of Genesis. The first is that after the sequence of repetitions of the phrase “And God said,” we read something strikingly different: “And God said to them: Be fruitful and multiply” (1:28). Human beings are the kind of creature that God can speak to. They can hear and understand his words—and respond to them. It is that verbal relationship that is central to the biblical storyline.
Section 2: Human Life and Death (Genesis 2:4–4:26)
In the second major section we are told much more about the nature of human life. Human beings have a material substrate—they are made of the dust of the ground. They possess an aesthetic sense; they live in a world whose trees have been created good to look upon. They inhabit an environment that they can both cultivate and explore. They can enjoy that special relationship between man and woman, a relationship of beings created with equal status but as complementary rather than identical.
With deft strokes the author builds up a picture of the various features that make human life remarkable. But there is one more feature yet to be mentioned. It is by far the most important and, once again, it has to do with the word of God. It is that God spoke to the humans about the nature of life in the garden. He gave them permission to eat of every tree in the garden except for one: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This tree was in the middle of the garden, along with another special tree, the tree of life, to which they also had free access. Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil God said: “In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (2:17).
There is much discussion among scholars as to the status and meaning of this portion of the story, and I must refer the reader to them for their comments. I wish to concentrate on what is often missed in such discussions: what the story is actually saying. For here we have a very clear, simple yet profound statement of the essence of morality—what it means to be a moral being. And morality is at the heart of the Joseph narrative.
First, the origin of morality, like the origin of the universe and of humanity, is to be found in God. This immediately brings to mind the famous statement of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: “If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” Dostoyevsky was not, of course, suggesting that atheists are incapable of moral behavior. That would be a slanderous lie. After all, from the biblical perspective, all human beings are made in the image of God and so are moral beings, whether they believe in God o...
