Ten Brothers and Three Days
The Lion and the Ass: Reading Genesis after Babylon, by Robert D. Sacks (ISBN 9781888009521) is my go-to commentary. I have been studying it (and its earlier versions) for more than a decade, with the result that I have grown ever fonder of the first book of the Bible. I recommend it heartily to everyone: from first-time Bible readers to Hebrew scholars. And here is an example of why.
Earlier this week, our morning lesson was Genesis 42:1-17. The scene: It’s a decade or so after Joseph has been sold into slavery by his brothers. There is famine in the land, and Jacob, the father of twelve sons, tells them they should go down to Egypt and get food. In verse 3, we read: “So ten of Joseph’s brothers went down to buy grain in Egypt.” The next verse will tell us that Jacob held back Joseph’s full brother, Benjamin, from going with the others—for fear that harm would come to him also, as (he thinks) had come to Joseph earlier.
But Sacks notes that verse 3 could be saying “ten” not in comparison with “eleven” but with “nine.” That is to say, verse 3 is silently telling us that Judah had rejoined his brothers.
Judah, earlier, had tried to save Joseph from his brothers’ evil intentions, and was unsuccessful. In the next chapter (Gen. 38) we are told how Judah left his brothers and had an independent life. (This is the chapter left out of the daily office lectionary!) Judah married and had three sons. The oldest son married a woman named Tamar, but he died before children were born. The next son took his sister-in-law to wife, and died also. Judah tried to save his third son from death and sent back his daughter-in-law to her father’s home. She dresses as a harlot, Judah (not knowing who she is) goes into her, and she becomes pregnant. When all is revealed, Judah repents of his sin. It is the son of Judah by Tamar—Perez, the first of the twins to be born—who becomes the ancestor of David.
What we didn’t know at the end of chapter 38 is what Judah would do. Would he stay away from his brothers, or somehow return to the obligations of transmission? He seems to have learned from personal experience that the obligations of transmission of the “new way” of the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are what he must take on. He is not Jacob’s eldest son, but he does seem to be the natural leader, and also to have been wise enough to learn leadership. And as it were silently, the text lets us see that he has done just that, when it says in Genesis 42:3 that “ten” of Joseph’s brothers went down to Egypt.
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At verse 17, the ten brothers have appeared before Joseph (not knowing who he is) and asked for grain. Joseph affects indignation and puts them all in jail for three days.
Sacks asks us to consider the meaning of "three days" in the Bible. “This is not the first time the reader has sweated through a period of three days,” he says. It took Abraham three days to go with Isaac to the place where he would have sacrificed him. Joseph (in ch. 40) had interpreted dreams that involved three days, and the men who dreamed had to wait three days for their rescue or death. Later, Moses asks Pharaoh to allow the people to go on a three-day journey; there will be a three-day journey for water; Samson will give the Philistines three days to solve his riddle; and so on. "Three days," Sacks notes, is always, in these scriptures, “a period of doubt and wonder.” From which observation it is not far for us to recall another three-day period, begun with an execution outside Jerusalem.