The story of Joseph is an epic about how a young man grows up and becomes prominent enough to control a nation. But this protagonist is not a warrior. He is a bureaucrat. And that makes his story very different from seers and other figures like Noah, who just wanted to go back to his vineyards, or Moses, who was inspired by God to free his people. In fact, Joseph and his story are without magic, that applying even to his dreams, to which we will address, but let us start at the beginning of his story.
Joseph is a spoiled brat. He carries about his colored coat and has dreams about his own future glory. His dreams are transparent. His brothers will yield to him. Like sheaves in the wind. That is already a reconfiguration of what a dream is. It does not require an interpretation by an expert on dreams. Which is usually the case, from Artemidorus in the second century who said that the meaning of dreaming of sex with your mother depended on which position was used, to Freud in the twentieth century, who found incest in distorted and so concealed ways. Rather, a dream announces its own meaning and is to be treated as the reason for a real consequence.
Then the story moves to a moment of moral clarity that makes the Joseph story one of the great epics. Reuben, his brother, says that Joseph should not be allowed to remain in the pit but should be sold to a passing caravan so they make a profit of having captured Joseph. What Reuben is doing is finding a pecuniary excuse for not allowing it to happen which is not said: that Joseph would die in the pit, which is an enormity, the killing of a brother. The insight of the story is that people will find a venal excuse for avoiding immorality rather than, as people might think, a higher moral principle will trump a simply pecuniary one. Morality works differently. The minor advantage is more important than the moral principle, as also happens when prisoners are used as work details rather than just to be humane with them. Sufficient reasons trump moral reasons.
Joseph apparent;y was always a talented person. Joseph, when he arrives in Egypt, is sold to a man who soon enough makes Joseph his overseer. Joseph is undone, however, because the owner;s wife finds him handsome, just another of his talents, Joseph having every virtue but modesty, and when he spurns the wife’s advances, she by a ruse makes him in the wrong and he is sent to prison, where another set of prophecies are made which, remarkably enough, also do not require much interpretation to understand, just as was the case in Joseph having telegraphed his own ambitions in a dream. Here he hears of the imprisoned cupbearer and says he will be let go because a dream showing vines producing grapes is a positive development, while the baker dreams of birds eating cakes which is clear;y negative, and so Joseph sees will be executed. Hardly compelling or erudite conclusions. It makes a reader wonder whether Joseph drew his conclusions on circumstantial matters than the dreams themselves, the cup bearer more involved in palace intrigue and so a friendly word making him free, while a baker had little influence and so likely to perish. Joseph relies more on good sense than on omens.
Then the dramatic center of the Joseph story takes place. Now the Pharaoh has dreams to be interpreted and the cupbearer remembers Joseph had correctly interpreted his own dream and so Joseph is brought to the Pharaoh. The dream is also transparent. There will be prosperity and then famine after that. THe term “dream” has become more of a metaphor, as when today we might say that someone “dreamed something up”, which means invented it. The clever part is the plan Joseph invents, which is to put a fifth of the grain harvested in the abundant years to put them aside so as to provide food for the famine years, which means saving enough for the future without sacrificing too much in the plentiful years. It is like managing an oil reserve, but the idea of governmental planning is not so advanced that the person who dreams up the plan also does not have to become its administrator. Moreover, the idea that God is the one who allows people to interpret dreams, which is what Joseph regularly declares, but God has now become the one who anoints the inventor and administrator, so that ordinary secular offices are seen now to be God given. The development of bureaucracy takes a while.
The epic of Joseph is so extraordinary, so different, from epics so different from other epics, whether in the ancient or the modern world, such as “Henry V” or “Brand of Brothers", that a similar literary statement can’t be found until a great number of them were created in the English novels of the nineteenth century, including “Vanity Fair”:where a young woman makes her way to prosperity through both ambition and Waterloo. A particularly close analogy to the life of Joseph is found in the Dickens novel “Great Expectations”. Remember that both of them begin in violence: Jacob’s brothers deciding whether to kill him or sell him into exile, which turns out to be a fortunate fall; because that gave him an opportunity to shine in the big tent, and Pip, a boy of modest beginnings, intimidated into assisting an escaped criminal who might have killed him but became his unknown benefactor. Then Joseph is taken up by Profeia's family, which allows him to know how well to do people live while wise enough not to get so entangled as to compromise his future, while Pip is exposed to the wider and more auspicious world by Mrs. Haversham and Exmetrelda, strange people he thinks must be his benefactors but just passing adolescent involvements however much their psychological baggage he carried with them.
The story of Joseph does not recount the years Joseph was moving the way up through the Egyptian bureaucracy until he gets to the top, but he is always a talent and he can invent a way to imagine how to compensate for famines, as if he were a New Deal executive, government designed to correct an economy rather than just endure it, while Pip is tutored by on this new fangled business bureaucracy by learning the difference between personal ties and business obligations,and does well enough in this who at the end of his story hesitates about what he should do with his brothers when they resurface as victims of the famine. He hesitates and asks them to bring his youngest brother Benjamin to him, whether to take revenge or to have time to consider what to do. Is Joseph out to harm him or just to tease them? It would seem a petty thing given what Joseph has achieved and he acts as an elder statesman would, which is to be forbearing, whatever the circumstances of his youth. He is bigger than that. Pip, for his part, accomplishes economic order though never reaching the heights Joseph would achieve.
This reading of Pip as a man on the make supports one of the two versions of the last chapter of the novel that Dickens provided. The one that ends with Esmerelda and Pip reconciling as if they always had to be is Romantic in its deepest sense. The source of all things atr childhood experiences and all we can do is unravel them so that people can come to understand their true natures. That was true of Wordsworth and also of Freud, the last Romantic. The other option is that people grow up and become concerned with other matters than childhood obsessions. In that rendering, Pip runs across Esmerelda, but only fleetingly and without significance. That is the Victorian view, told by Tenneyson about a real warrior, Odysseus, who pushes on to more adventures without respite.
The same ambivalence about a proper ending occurs with Joseph. His brothers resurgence as victims of the famine. What should he do with them? Take revenge or embrace them as separated brethren? Joseph hesitates. He buys time by telling them to bring back to them their youngest brother Benjamin. Is Joseph out to harm him or just to tease them? It would seem a petty thing given what Joseph has achieved and he acts as an elder statesman would, which is to be forbearing, whatever the circumstances of his youth. He is bigger than that.
The difference between a warrior and a statesman is a profound one. The warriors are brave and loyal even to following orders even if he thinks them ill advised while a statesman relies on his own conscience as his compass. A good modern example was Colin Powell, a long time military leader who was Secretary of State who said he would support theGeorge W. Bush administration on there being weapons of mass destruction in Iraq even though the evidence for it was crap because Republicans had regularly promoted him as a military officer. On the other hand, two civilian secretaries of state resigned on matters of principle: William Jennings Btyan because Woodrow Wilson was inching towards joining the First World War and Cyrus Vance who told Jimmy Carter he was opposed to the rescue attempt in Teheran and would resign afterwards however the incident ended.
When did the shift from the warrior to the statesman take place? It depends on whom you consult. Erasmus said in the early sixteenth century that a prince should train to run a government rather than to lead an army and so was looking forward to the French Louises. A much later point is when the Romantic Age Lermentov, the military hero, is replaced by the Duke of Wellington as a military figure who becomes a political figure. The drama of these two archetypes, the military and the political leader remain dramatic contrasts and the transformation of one person becoming one sort and then the other remains fascinating as it was with Washington and Eisenhower.