This is the history of the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives. Joseph brought an evil report of them to their father.
Joseph: a fruitful bough by a spring: Joseph is a fruitful vine by a spring, branches over the wall. The tree of individuation, rooted at the source, growing beyond limits.
Psychoanalysis lens · Genesis 49:1-28
She named him Joseph, saying, “May Yahweh add another son to me.”
‘You shall tell Joseph, “Now please forgive the disobedience of your brothers, and their sin, because they did evil to you.” ’ Now, please forgive the disobedience of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him.
Joseph was brought down to Egypt. Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh’s, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him from the hand of the Ishmaelites that had brought him down there.
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Up in the hill country of Canaan, Jacob settles his household, and his seventeen-year-old son Joseph works the flocks with his half brothers and brings back bad reports of them. His father loves him more than the rest and gives him a long bright coat. A gift like that is never only a gift. The father is laying his own unlived hopes on the boy, dressing him in a destiny that is really the old man's, and the coat marks him out as the one who must carry it. The brothers see the favor and begin to hate him, unable even to speak to him kindly. What they hate is their own smallness, the part of themselves they will not look at, so they hang it on him instead. A family that refuses its own darkness always finds one member to put it on.
The dream comes again, because what is not heard gets repeated: sun, moon and eleven stars bending low. With him they make twelve, the full round of the sky, the oldest sign that a scattered life can become one whole thing. His father scolds him and yet keeps the saying turning in his heart, which is the only honest way to meet a dream, neither obeying it nor throwing it away.
Forgiveness offered to one is not truly offered until it reaches all, and so the embrace widens to include every part that had condemned. A mind cannot keep some of its brothers guilty and call itself at peace, and here love touches each of them alike, withholding from none.
Only after this does speech return, because communication was never blocked by the wrong done but by the guilt kept over it. Once no one is held guilty, the frightened silence ends and the mind can speak freely with itself again.
The name given here means to add, and what is added is the true self, the Christ within born of spirit in a person. Joseph is the child of promise, the administrator son the spirit raises up inside the one who has opened to it. The word that another will be added is the soul's knowledge that once the inner Christ is born, more of the higher life keeps arriving.
The name is the way itself, not a label, so calling the child Joseph names the arrival of the real self within. What reads as a woman bearing a son is a person bringing forth the Christ-consciousness from the spirit, the higher nature unfolding once its first child is present.
The brothers who sold Joseph now beg the very man they wronged to release the trespass. Forgiveness here is the choosing to let the old harm dissolve rather than collect on it, though every right to collect is his. He holds the whole account in his hand and opens his fingers.
Joseph does not answer their fear with the payback they expect. In him the grudge has already died, so there is nothing coiled and waiting to strike back. Like a well that has run clear, no bitterness rises when the bucket goes down.
His weeping is not injury reopening but a heart moved by the terror of frightened men. He feels their dread of him and it softens him toward them rather than hardening him. The strong brother's tears fall for the weak brothers who tremble before him.
Years of slavery and prison have worked on Joseph until the wound has become the thing that can now feed a whole family. What began as betrayal has slowly turned, like fruit that needed the long season, into the power to save. The evil done to him has ripened into good he can pour back on them.
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The brothers who sold Joseph beg the man they wronged to release the trespass. Letting the old harm dissolve rather than collecting on it (khama) is chosen while every right to collect is still his. He holds the account in his hand and opens his fingers.
He does not answer their fear with the payback they expect. The grudge has already died in him (averā). Nothing waits coiled to strike back.
Slavery and prison worked on him until the wound ripened by long stages (anupubbī) into the power to save a whole family.
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increase; addition
whom Jehovah will add to; Jehovah shall increase; he shall increase progressively
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