Joseph and the Missing Money
Joseph’s brothers are forced to travel to Egypt to buy corn, and the overseer of Pharaoh’s granaries recognises them at once.
Bronze Age ?3000 – ?1050 BC
Joseph’s brothers are forced to travel to Egypt to buy corn, and the overseer of Pharaoh’s granaries recognises them at once.
Bronze Age ?3000 – ?1050 BC
Joseph has explained Pharaoh’s troubling dreams, and such is Pharaoh’s relief that he has appointed him to oversee the kingdom’s granaries. Now famine has brought Joseph’s brothers to Egypt to buy grain, but they have no idea that the aristocratic Egyptian before them is the brother they sold into slavery.
JOSEPH’S brothers presented themselves humbly before him, quite unaware who he was, and declared that they had come from Canaan to buy corn. But Joseph, speaking loftily and through an interpreter (as if he knew no Hebrew), denounced them as spies.
Hastily, they explained that they were just an ordinary family, minus the youngest. But Joseph, remembering the childhood dreams in which all eleven of his brothers bowed low before him, said he would sell them some corn but he would keep Simeon hostage until the others produced this youngest brother. He overheard Reuben mutter that it was a judgment on them for their treatment of their brother Joseph, and had to hide his tears.
When the brothers arrived back home, Jacob was angry. Joseph and Simeon were lost, he said, and Benjamin would be next. Then they opened their corn sacks, only to discover the money they had paid for it stuffed inside. How were they to explain that to the Egyptian aristocrat?