Do you ever wonder why Joseph was so harsh with his brothers? Why did he insist on calling them spies? Why throw them in jail? Was it petty revenge? Was there a master plan? I always thought it rather incongruent with the character God instilled in him during his hardships, his eventual forgiveness and generosity, his recognition that there was a master plan behind even his brothers' evil plottings that brought blessing a more in line with what we have seen of Joseph in his recent life. I was reading these passages and I wondered, maybe he really did have a plan. Joseph was a master planner. He was the one who implemented the storage system and even the prices and eventually caused the entirety of Egypt to surrender their lands to Pharaoh and work as vassals. Pretty savvy from a governmental, economical viewpoint. Perhaps Joseph looked at his brothers, and what he knew of their characters from several years before, thought that he needed them to truly have deference and even fear for the Egyptian officials so that they would not deal duplicitously. After all, he needed to contrive a way to bring his brother down to visit him. What if he had revealed himself to them, they took the grain, and ran back to Canaan and didn't return so that they didn't have to reveal to Jacob that Joseph still lived? It's all speculation. I may never know until I get to Heaven what Joseph was thinking. But I wondered.
Tomorrow's Reading: Genesis 43:1-34
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