The favored son who is betrayed, exalted, and forgives
Joseph occupies thirteen chapters at the end of Genesis. After the dense, episodic narratives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the book slows down to tell one continuous story. The reason becomes obvious as the story develops. Joseph is being narrated as a type.
He is the beloved son of his father. He is given a robe that marks his favor. His brothers hate him for it. They throw him into a pit. They sell him into slavery for twenty pieces of silver — the same monetary register Judas will inherit a millennium later. The brothers tell the father the son is dead. They take the robe and dip it in blood as evidence.
The father grieves. The favored son enters a foreign land. He is falsely accused, condemned without proper trial, and put in a place of the dead — Pharaoh's prison. He emerges from the prison to be exalted to the right hand of Pharaoh, the highest place in the kingdom besides the king himself. He is given a new name, a Gentile bride, and the authority to dispense bread to a starving world. The brothers who betrayed him come to him for bread. They do not recognize him. He recognizes them. He weeps. He forgives. He gives them the bread that saves their household.
The Christian Fathers — Caesarius of Arles, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria — saw the typology with a directness that is hard to argue with. Almost every element of the Joseph narrative is a foreshadowing of Christ. Beloved son. Stripped of the robe. Sold for silver. Placed in the pit. Believed dead by the father. Vindicated through suffering. Exalted to the right hand. Source of the bread that saves the world. Forgiving the very brothers whose betrayal sent him there. The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence.
The single line that holds it all together is Joseph's own. After the reconciliation, when the brothers fear that with their father dead Joseph will turn on them, he answers: "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today." (Genesis 50:20) The verse is the deepest articulation of providence in the Hebrew Scriptures. The brothers' evil is not denied. The brothers' agency is not absolved. And the LORD's good purpose moves through it anyway, unstopped. The cross is the same sentence in its final form.
The Egyptian section of Joseph's life is also where Israel becomes Israel. The family of seventy descends to Goshen. Four hundred years later they emerge as a nation of slaves needing a deliverer. The Joseph narrative is the bridge from the patriarchs to the Exodus — and the figure who builds the bridge prefigures the deliverer the Exodus itself will only partially deliver.
Related entries: The Exodus, Abraham, Bread of the Presence