What Game is Genesis Playing?

What Game Is Genesis Playing?
Genesis 42:36-43:34

In the movie The English Patient, Count Laszlo crashes a plane and in order to go to get help has to abandon the only woman he has loved, in an injured state, in a cave in a desert mountain. He is long unable to convince people to listen to him. When he eventually returns, she has died. He gathers his love’s body and carries it around the mountain to where he had landed his plane, crying a scream that we see on his lips but do not hear, so that it all the more fills the cinema with its silence. That was the scene in the movie that most affected me, but I discovered this reaction to be a male perspective. Not surprisingly, a woman with whom I discussed it found the most emotionally engaging moment to be the one when the woman, left to die alone in the cave, tries to draw a final picture while daylight diminishes and darkness and cold descend. You can walk home with friends after a movie and discover you have all seen different things, and you may disagree vehemently about what it meant. A movie’s nature is often to leave gaps for the audience to fill, and we fill them in light of who we are...

That also happens in biblical stories. In Genesis, not only is Joseph playing games with his brothers, but the author of Genesis is playing games with the people listening to the story. We cannot be sure of the answer to the questions about Joseph’s motivation; in the end, that is between Joseph and God. The effect of the story’s unclarity is to put the ball into our court and make us examine ourselves. If I were Joseph, what would be my motivation? What do I learn from the way I read the story? Paradoxically, often the Bible works on us by leaving things unclear, making us fill in the gaps, and then asking why we fill them in the way we do.

Among the ironies of the story is the way Jacob is affected as well as the brothers who were directly responsible for Joseph’s being in Egypt. “I am the one you have bereaved of children,” he says. Joseph, Simeon, Benjamin: when will it stop? The grievous aspect to the irony is that Jacob is having to lie in the bed he has made; his favoritism towards Joseph as his first son by his favorite wife played a key role in events that followed. Yet he made his bed the way he did because of his own family background. Readers of exodus are offended by the suggestion that the sins of parents are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation, but one does not have to read the Bible to learn that it is so. Yet the Bible does provide one or two spectacular illustrations of how this works out, and Jacob is one of them. The way Genesis tells the story, we cannot attribute all of Jacob’s troubles to the way Isaac and Rebekah related to him and his brother, but neither can they be absolved of some of the responsibility. Jacob pays the penalty for who his parents were. In turn, his sons pay the penalty for the person their father was. They too become experts at deception and victims of deception. And Jacob becomes the victim of their deception—both that of Joseph and that of his brothers. He goes through a bereavement over which he grieves for years when actually his son, the elder son of the woman he really loved, is still alive.


Taken from Genesis for Everyone Part 2 by John Goldingay