Genesis 44: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Joseph has his steward fill his brothers' sacks with food, return their money, and hide his silver cup in Benjamin's sack. The steward overtakes them on the road, the cup is found with Benjamin, and the brothers go back to Joseph, who says only the man with the cup will be his slave and the rest may return to their father. Judah then retells the earlier talk about their father and the youngest brother, and asks to stay as a slave in the boy's place, and for the boy to go up with his brothers.

Claim by Claim

1. 44:1
   • Joseph commanded the man in charge of his house.
   • He ordered the men's sacks filled with food, as much as they could carry.
   • He ordered each man's silver to be put in the mouth of his sack.
2. 44:2
   • Joseph ordered his own cup, the silver cup, to be put in the mouth of the youngest one's sack.
   • He ordered the silver paid for that man's grain to be put there as well.
   • The steward did according to the word Joseph had spoken.
3. 44:3
   • As soon as the morning was light, the men were sent away.
   • They were sent away with their donkeys.
4. 44:4
   • The men had gone out of the city and were not yet far off.
   • Joseph said to the man in charge of his house to get up and pursue the men.
   • Joseph told him that when he overtook them he should say to them: Why have you repaid evil for good?
5. 44:5
   • Joseph's message asked whether this was not the cup from which his master drinks.
   • The message said that his master indeed practices divination with it.
   • The message said they had done evil in what they had done.
6. 44:6
   • The steward overtook them.
   • He spoke these words to them.
7. 44:7
   • They asked him why his lord spoke such words.
   • They said it was unthinkable that his servants should do such a thing.
8. 44:8
   • They said the silver they found in the mouths of their sacks they had brought back to him from the land of Canaan.
   • They asked how then they would steal silver or gold from his master's house.
9. 44:9
   • They said that whichever of his servants the cup was found with should die.
   • They said the rest of them would also become slaves to his lord.
10. 44:10
    • The steward said that it should be as they had said.
    • He said the one with whom the cup was found would be his slave.
    • He said the rest of them would be blameless.
11. 44:11
    • They hurried and each man lowered his sack to the ground.
    • Each man opened his sack.
12. 44:12
    • The steward searched.
    • He began with the eldest.
    • He ended with the youngest.
    • The cup was found in Benjamin's sack.
13. 44:13
    • They tore their clothes.
    • Each man loaded his donkey.
    • They returned to the city.
14. 44:14
    • Judah and his brothers came to Joseph's house.
    • Joseph was still there.
    • They fell to the ground before him.
15. 44:15
    • Joseph asked them what this deed was that they had done.
    • Joseph asked whether they did not know that a man like him can certainly practice divination.
16. 44:16
    • Judah asked what they could say to his lord.
    • Judah asked what they could speak.
    • Judah asked how they could clear themselves.
    • Judah said God had found out the iniquity of his servants.
    • Judah said they were now his lord's slaves.
    • Judah said this applied both to them and to the one in whose hand the cup was found.
17. 44:17
    • Joseph said it was unthinkable for him to do this.
    • Joseph said the man in whose hand the cup was found would be his slave.
    • Joseph told the rest of them to go up in peace to their father.
18. 44:18
    • Judah came near to Joseph.
    • Judah asked his lord's permission for his servant to speak a word in his lord's ears.
    • Judah asked that his lord's anger not burn against his servant.
    • Judah said that his lord was like Pharaoh.
19. 44:19
    • Judah said his lord had asked his servants whether they had a father or a brother.
20. 44:20
    • Judah said they had answered that they had an old father.
    • They said there was a young child of his father's old age.
    • They said that child's brother was dead.
    • They said he alone was left of his mother.
    • They said his father loved him.
21. 44:21
    • Judah said his lord had told his servants to bring the boy down to him.
    • Judah said his lord wanted to set his eyes on the boy.
22. 44:22
    • Judah said they had answered that the boy could not leave his father.
    • Judah said they had answered that if he left his father, his father would die.
23. 44:23
    • Judah said his lord had told his servants that unless their youngest brother came down with them, they would not see his face again.
24. 44:24
    • Judah said that when they went up to his lord's servant, his father, they told him the words of his lord.
25. 44:25
    • Judah said their father told them to go back and buy them a little food.
26. 44:26
    • Judah said they answered that they could not go down.
    • They said that if their youngest brother was with them, they would go down.
    • They said they could not see the man's face unless their youngest brother was with them.
27. 44:27
    • Judah said his father told them that they knew his wife bore him two sons.
28. 44:28
    • The father said one of them went out from him.
    • The father said he had concluded the son was surely torn to pieces.
    • The father said he had not seen him since.
29. 44:29
    • The father said that if they took this one also from him and harm befell him, they would bring his gray hair down to Sheol in misery.
30. 44:30
    • Judah said that he would be coming to his lord's servant, his father, without the boy.
    • Judah said his father's life was bound up in the boy's life.
31. 44:31
    • Judah said that when his father saw the boy was not there, he would die.
    • Judah said his lord's servants would bring the gray hair of his lord's servant, their father, down to Sheol in sorrow.
32. 44:32
    • Judah said he had become surety for the boy to his father.
    • Judah said he had pledged that if he did not bring the boy back, he would bear the guilt before his father forever.
33. 44:33
    • Judah asked that his servant remain as a slave to his lord in place of the boy.
    • Judah asked that the boy go up with his brothers.
34. 44:34
    • Judah asked how he could go up to his father without the boy.
    • Judah said he feared seeing the evil that would come upon his father.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

44:1

"Money" here is silver measured out by weight, not coins, coinage did not yet exist. The mouth of the sack is its open top, where a payment placed inside would be found first when it was untied.

44:2

"Corn" in the King James Version means grain of any kind, usually wheat or barley. It never means maize, which was unknown outside the Americas in 1611. A silver drinking cup from the household of Egypt's second in command would be a costly object and instantly recognizable as his.

44:3

The King James word "asses" means donkeys. Donkeys carried the heavy sacks on the long road between Egypt and Canaan.

44:5

Divination is the reading of omens to learn hidden things. A cup was used for it by pouring water or wine in, sometimes adding oil, and interpreting the patterns that formed. The Hebrew verb also carries the general sense of "discover by uncanny means," which is how Joseph uses it in verse 15.

44:7

"God forbid" is the King James way of translating a Hebrew phrase that literally means "far be it from your servants." It is an emphatic denial, not a prayer or an oath.

44:8

They are pointing back to the earlier trip, when the silver they had paid for grain turned up in their sacks and they carried it down to Egypt again instead of keeping it. Their argument is that men who returned money nobody was even asking for would hardly turn around and steal.

44:9

Naming a harsh penalty for oneself was the ordinary way of swearing innocence: the speaker stakes his life on the claim being true. The brothers are not expecting the terms to be applied.

44:12

The steward begins with the eldest and works down to the youngest even though he put the cup there himself and knows exactly where it is. The slow search is part of the trap.

44:13

Tearing one's clothes was the standard public sign of grief or shock, done at a death or a disaster. It was a visible, deliberate act, not a loss of composure.

44:14

Falling face down on the ground was the normal court greeting to a high official in Egypt, a gesture of submission rather than of worship.

44:15

"Wot ye not" means "do you not know." "Wot" is an old English verb meaning to know, and has nothing to do with the modern word "what."

44:16

Judah never actually says the brothers took the cup, and he offers no account of how it got into the sack. He says their guilt has been uncovered, which reaches back past this morning to what these same brothers did years earlier when they sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt.

44:18

Pharaoh was the title of Egypt's king. "You are equal to Pharaoh" means Joseph's word carries the king's own authority, so defying him is as serious as defying the throne. Throughout this speech Judah avoids the word "you" for himself, calling himself "your servant" and Joseph "my lord", the required manner of address to a ruler.

44:20

The brother they describe as dead is Joseph, who is standing in front of them listening. Jacob had twelve sons by four women; Rachel, the wife he loved most, bore only two of them, Joseph and Benjamin, which is why Benjamin can be called the only son of his mother still alive.

44:21

"Set my eyes on him" is an idiom for looking at someone directly, and often carries the added sense of taking an interest in them or looking on them with favor.

44:22

"Lad" is the King James word for a boy or a young man. Benjamin is the youngest brother and his father still treats him as a child, but by this point in the story he is a grown man with sons of his own.

44:23

To "see the face" of a ruler means to be granted an audience with him. Refusing it was a formal shutting of the door, not merely a refusal to be looked at.

44:24

The Hebrew always speaks of going "down" to Egypt and coming "up" from it. Canaan is hill country and the Nile delta is low and flat, so the direction words describe the land, and they stay fixed no matter which way the traveler is actually heading.

44:27

Jacob says "my wife" of Rachel alone, though he also had children by Leah and by two servant women. Rachel died giving birth to Benjamin, the second of the two sons he means here.

44:28

Jacob is repeating the conclusion he drew when his sons brought him Joseph's blood-soaked coat and let him assume a wild animal had killed him. He still does not know that the brothers standing in Egypt sold Joseph themselves.

44:29

Gray hairs stand for old age and for the father himself in his last years. "The grave" translates Sheol, the shadowy underworld where the Hebrews pictured all the dead as going, good and bad alike; it is not a word for a burial plot, nor for a place of punishment.

44:30

"His life is bound up in the lad's life" is a Hebrew way of saying the father's own being is tied to the boy's, so that losing Benjamin would not be something Jacob could survive.

44:32

To stand surety was a recognized legal arrangement: one person pledged himself as the guarantee for another, and became liable in that person's place if the obligation failed. Judah had put himself, not property, on the line.

44:33

The slavery proposed here is the penalty for theft, a thief unable to pay was worked off as a debt. Judah is offering to take that sentence in Benjamin's place.

44:34

"Peradventure" is old English for "perhaps." The whole phrase means Judah cannot face the possibility of standing there and watching what the loss of Benjamin would do to his father.