Joseph in Charge

 Genesis 41:41-57

            Joseph becomes Pharaoh’s prime minister, and part of the story is Joseph receiving new clothes. Like his father had given him a royal robe in his youth, so now Pharaoh gives him royal clothes in his adulthood. The fair linen means that Joseph will be no manual laborer. (Who wears white to work in the dirt?) The signet ring gives Joseph the power to issue orders with the authority of Pharaoh. The gold chain is a sign of his position. Unlike the robe his father had given, Joseph will wear this one the rest of his life. Pharaoh also gives him a new name. (You can’t have some dirty Hebrew running Egypt, now can you? ‘Hebrew’ was actually a pejorative name for any nomadic people, and we’ll read later that Egyptians had little use for shepherds—which is what Joseph’s whole family was.) And Pharaoh gives Joseph a wife, indicative of giving him a future, a promise which bore fruit in the births of Manasseh and Ephraim.

            One thing we might worry about is whether Joseph will assimilate to Egyptian culture and religion and forget the God of his fathers. After all, he’s dressing in their style, adopting their names (although interestingly Joseph gives his sons Hebrew names), and intermarrying with one of their women—and not just any woman, but the daughter of a priest at one of their more prominent shrines! It reminds me of the challenge that Daniel and his friends will feel in Daniel one, where they are taken into imperial service, given a Babylonian education, and renamed with Babylonian names. In both cases, we find the rare example of an Israelite who maintains his identity as an Israelite, while living in a hostile world. Because Peter describes us as aliens and foreigners in this age of the world (1 Peter 2:11), it is good ponder these stories and to consider how we can live as God’s faithful people in fallen age, how we are to maintain our identity as God’s new people and yet to work for the good of an age in which we don’t really belong (Jeremiah 29). I don’t have time to write about this morning, but it is a topic the Scriptures will lead us to time and again.