Four Readings from Genesis 37–41

I’m trying to think more carefully about how I encounter the Bible. I am by nature an intellectual magpie. I’m always on the lookout for some beautiful thing that I can pick up and take back to my nest of a brain. When it comes to the Bible, this eclectic approach is built into my biography. I was raised as a Latter-day Saint. I have an undergraduate degree in Jewish History, a master’s in Syriac studies, and a PhD in theology. My spiritual worldview is informed by this intellectual journey. What’s more, I feel like I belong to a religious tradition that is intrinsically additive. As Joseph Smith wrote from Liberty Jail in 1839, “the first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation.”[1] This approach has merits. My mind is filled with lovely things!

But I’ve started to think more about the integrity of these lovely things, and how interconnected they are with their historical context and the intellectual and spiritual worlds that produced them. If I am to pursue truth without limitation, I also need to consider the next step that Joseph Smith suggested and embrace the truth of something “when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.”[2] The approach that I’m adopting involves reading the Bible less eclectically and more deliberately. I still want to benefit from the insights of a variety of readers inside and outside my Latter-day Saint tradition, but I want to try to understand ideas that I find compelling within the worlds that produced them. For me, this increasingly looks like reading four different Bibles. Let me try and show you, however imperfectly and provisionally, what I mean by this.

I. The Bible of Ancient Jews

Ancient Jews accepted the traditional Mosaic authorship of Genesis (and the rest of the Pentateuch). Scripture was inspired, but it also invited interpretation. Ancient Jews often interpreted the Bible by retelling its stories, but with additions. These additions, called narrative expansions, have an exegetical core. They start from a desire to resolve a specific problem in, or a question raised by, a close reading of the text of the Bible.

An engaging entry point into the world of ancient Jewish reading practices is James Kugel’s In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretative Life of Biblical Texts (Harvard, 1990). In this book, Kugel reverse-engineers the exegetical processes at play in several Jewish narrative expansions. A compelling example is “The Assembly of Ladies” motif discussed in chapter 2. This motif describes a gathering of Egyptian ladies at the home of Mrs. Potiphar. The ladies are given food (citrus or bread) and knives to eat with, and as they begin to use the knives, Mrs. Potiphar invites Joseph into the room, and when the ladies see him, they cut themselves because they are so stunned by his good looks.

This evocative motif is introduced by later Rabbinic exegetes to explain two subtle textual problems in Genesis 39. Some used it to resolve a tension in the opening words of Genesis 39:7, “And it came to pass after these things.…” The Rabbis asked what “things” were being referred to. The contents of the preceding verse did not offer an answer to that question. So, they inserted a narrative expansion showing that this meeting of ladies was the “things” being referred to in verse 7. The addition of this motif solves the textual problem and moves the narrative forward—now that Mrs. Potiphar’s friends have acknowledged the irresistibility of her new slave, she was free to pursue him without shame. In other sources, however, the assembly of ladies is used to reinterpret Genesis 39:14. In this verse, Mrs. Potiphar calls out to her servants and says, “Look, he had to bring us a Hebrew to dally with us!” (Revised JPS). This seems to be a non sequitur, so in a clever move, the Rabbis added temporal space between verse 13 and verse 14, and in that space, Mrs. Potiphar shows her friends just how dangerous it was to have such a man in the household. It is when they see Joseph and cut their hands that Mrs. Potiphar speaks the words of verse 14. Notice in both examples how the Rabbis read the Bible carefully and creatively. They noticed narrative gaps and expanded the narrative to fill them.

II. The Bible of Ancient Christians

The Hebrew Bible was sacred scripture for ancient Jewish readers, including Jesus and his earliest followers. It eventually (in translation) became the Old Testament of the Christians, with the New Testament writings providing the key to understanding the Old. That key is Jesus, as Jesus himself taught on the road to Emmaus: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:25 NIV). This key transformed the text for Christian readers. Over centuries, they developed an intricate matrix of typological connections between Jesus and Old Testament figures and stories, a process evident already in the Gospel of Matthew.

Early Christians celebrated Joseph as a glorious type of Christ, especially those Christians writing in Syriac (the subject of my first published article). The life of Joseph typified the persecution, death, resurrection, and return of Jesus. Joseph’s brothers and Potiphar’s wife typify those who wrongly persecuted Joseph. The pit in the desert and the prison in Egypt typify the grave, and Joseph’s ascension to the position of Regent typifies the resurrection of Jesus and his glorious return. The judgment is typified by the brothers coming before Joseph. The typology is much more granular than I’ve suggested here, with dozens of connections being made between the life of Joseph and the life and mission of Jesus. Early Syriac Christians reveled in this kind of exegetical work. The Old Testament thus becomes for Christians an extended prophecy of Christ, with careful reading over centuries being devoted to elucidating those prophetic foreshadowings.

III. The Bible of the Latter-day Saints

Early Christians read the Old Testament through the lens of the New. Similarly, Latter-day Saints read the Old and New Testaments through the lens of restoration scripture and the words of living prophets. Thus, when Latter-day Saints read the story of Joseph in Genesis, they think both of Jesus and Joseph Smith; Jesus because of the New Testament and Joseph Smith because of the Book of Mormon. In the Book of Mormon, we learn that Joseph in Egypt was not simply a dreamer and interpreter of dreams, but a great prophet who prophesied concerning his posterity. And this posterity included both Lehi and Joseph Smith Jr. (2 Nephi 3). Thus, the Book of Mormon is both written and translated by and for the posterity of Joseph in Egypt (2 Ne. 3:11–12).

When I read Genesis 39 through this restoration lens, I get a richer sense of what was at stake in Joseph’s sojourn in Egypt, including his encounter with Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39:9. What kept him from that “great wickedness”? In Jewish tradition, Joseph is fortified by a vision of his father Jacob. For Christians, Joseph resisted and overcame Potiphar’s wife, like Jesus resisted and overcame death and Hades. For Latter-day Saints, the stakes are generational: Joseph was being true to the “great” covenants that God made with him and his posterity (2 Ne. 3:4), and he was strengthened by the revelations that he had of his posterity and their role in the salvation history of the world. For Latter-day Saints, the story of Joseph in Genesis is not simply an account of the salvation of Jacob’s family, or a foreshadowing of Christ, though it is both of those things—it is also the story of the great progenitor of the restoration, who foresaw the “marvelous work and a wonder” that is the Latter-day restored gospel.

IV. The Bible of the Scholars

Biblical studies is a scientific discipline that has developed over the last three centuries. Certain assumptions are accepted as axiomatic. For example, the Hebrew Bible is an Ancient Near Eastern text that is best understood in conversation with its literary and material context. The books of the Hebrew Bible, as we now have them, are also recognized to be the product of a complex literary and redactional process that extended from the late second millennium BC into the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Biblical scholars read the biblical text with every bit as much detail as their ancient Christian and Jewish predecessors, but the questions they ask, the answers they find, and the stakes of the project are quite different. Biblical studies is a thrilling intellectual endeavor, in no small part because of how it informs or challenges traditional ways of reading the Bible among Jews, Christians, and Latter-day Saints.

Though there is disagreement about the literary formation of the Joseph story, all scholars consider it a beautiful, sophisticated, and poignant work of ancient literature. But readers of the story can’t help wondering about chapter 38. Why would an editor interrupt such a compelling and coherent narrative with a tale that seems to be unrelated either temporally or thematically? Scholars are on high alert in the presence of such disruptions in the biblical narrative. Many have simply concluded that it is an odd interpolation. The tenor of this scholarship is captured in a much-quoted passage by Walter Brueggemann: “This peculiar chapter stands alone, without connection to its context. It is isolated in every way and is most enigmatic.”[3]

But scholars constantly circle back to such textual problems, bringing new tools and insights. Of note is the application of a literary approach to the text, best seen in the opening chapter of Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 2011). Through this lens, Alter shows that rather than being an odd interpolation, Genesis 38 is a sophisticated interlocutor with the story of Joseph, with thematic parallels, contrasts, and verbal links to the rest of the story. The clearest link is in the act of recognition, using the same Hebrew verb, in Gen. 38:25–26 and Gen. 37:32–33, and then again later in Gen. 42:7–8. The disruptions have not been erased; through careful reading of the text, scholars have also shown the splendid complexity and coherence of the narrative.

I feel so grateful to share the experience of studying the Bible with ancient Jews, early Christians, my fellow Latter-day Saints, and modern biblical scholars. I feel part of a common quest to slow down, read carefully, and seek understanding about the Bible, which for so many readers is really a quest to recognize God at work anciently and today. I find so much beauty and insight there. And I am excited to continue my quiet quest to understand my fellow readers in their own contexts and traditions of reading, hoping in the process to add to my store of truth and understanding.

Notes