Workshop on Genesis 39

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Old Testament Studies from Genesis chapter 39.

What I would like to do first this morning is simply read Genesis 39 so that the text is fresh in our minds, and then I will pray. Then I want to make some general remarks on the genre of narrative and how to interpret it, think it through, and so forth, and finally I will make some general remarks about interpreting this particular narrative without tipping my hand too much on homiletic structure, since that part I will learn from you. Hear then what Scripture says:

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“Now Joseph had been taken down to Egypt. Potiphar, an Egyptian who was one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had taken him there. The Lord was with Joseph, and he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. When his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord gave him success in everything he did, Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant. Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned. From the time he put him in charge of his household and of all that he owned, the Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph. The blessing of the Lord was on everything Potiphar had, both in the house and in the field. So he left in Joseph’s care everything he had; with Joseph in charge, he did not concern himself with anything except the food he ate. Now Joseph was well-built and handsome, and after awhile his master’s wife took notice of Joseph and said, ‘Come to bed with me!’ But he refused. ‘With me in charge,’ he told her, ‘my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me, except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?’ And though she spoke to Joseph day after day, he refused to go to bed with her or even be with her. One day he went into the house to attend to his duties, and none of the household servants was inside. She caught him by his cloak and said, ‘Come to bed with me!’ But he left his cloak in her hand and ran out of the house. When she saw that he had left his cloak in her hand and had run out of the house, she called to her household servants. ‘Look!’ She said to them, ‘this Hebrew has been brought to us to make sport of us! He came in here to sleep with me, but I screamed. When he heard me scream for help he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.’ She kept his cloak beside her until his master came home. Then she told him this story: ‘That Hebrew slave you brought us came to me to make sport of me. But as soon as I screamed for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.’ When his master heard the story his wife told him, saying, ‘This is how your slave treated me,’ he burned with anger. Joseph’s master took him and put him in prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined. But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there. The warden paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

1. Literary genre

Let me say a few things about literary genre, first of all. None of this is frightfully new or the like, but sometimes we need to be reminded of these things. The briefest reflection discloses the importance of recognizing different literary genres, not only in order to interpret Scripture better but to preach it better.

We all recognize, at least in theory, that God has not chosen to give us a volume of systematic theology, nicely set out under the 10 traditional headings and all set forth in propositional categories and the like. Moreover, we all recognize, too, that different cultures favor different kinds of literature.

Until fairly recently on my various trips to Africa, I found it very difficult to find any sub-Saharan Black African who could handle Romans. Terrific with narrative. They live in narrative cultures and tell very good stories, so when they’re dealing with narrative parts of Scripture often they’re very, very astute, but not always quite so astute in handling Ephesians or Galatians. That is beginning to change, but that was typical.

Meanwhile, I look at the literary heritage in the volumes of sermons of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Of those 72 volumes, guess how many touch narrative parts of Scripture. Precisely one. Now in all fairness to both sides, that does not mean that a well-thought-out Christian in Africa does not know the heart of Romans as content, nor does it mean that Lloyd-Jones never, ever taught Bible stories.

In fact, he often regaled his congregations with large chunks of biblical narrative as illustrative of the things he was teaching when he took his eight years to go through Romans 1–8. There are different ways of doing these kinds of things. I understand that. Yet at the same time, the very fact that things can be tilted in those sorts of directions shows that there are cultural factors to what we expect, to what we’re comfortable with, to how we read Scripture, and so on.

Increasingly, however, many of us live in cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial environments where people bring different packages with them. You have a lot of people from the Arab world; many of them are brought up on proverbs, one-liners, aphoristic sayings, and enigmatic utterances. God, in His wisdom, has given us a book that is astonishingly diverse in literary form.

Besides the normal things like prophecy and history and letters and apocalyptic, there are many, many, many sub-forms such as lament, dirge, fable (like Joseph’s fable), parable, oracle, and so on, all with their forms and overtones quite apart from other things like different kinds of poetry. Even in English we have different kinds of poetry, and none of them line up very well with biblical poetry.

On the one hand, we have Shakespearean sonnets:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no; it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

Versus E.E. Cummings:

anyone lived in a little how town

(with up so many pulling bells down)

Or the blank verse of Robert Frost. (You have to be a Canadian to like this one.)

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

Ice-storms do that.

Oh! He’s got it exactly. If you’ve ever seen a birch tree after an ice storm, he has it perfectly.

Or versus the limerick. I don’t know any other language that has limericks. I mean, you can translate a limerick, but you lose it because of the beat and the expectation. You just start a limerick and everybody is already waiting for line five in English.

Now the point is that biblical poetry likewise has its expectations, and we sometimes make huge mistakes in interpretation simply because we’re not reading genres properly. Thus, for example, many people look at proverbs and read them either as infallible promises or case law.

For example, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” If it’s an unconditional promise, then every time one of our kids goes off the rails you know whom to blame. God knows, pretty often you can track a fair bit of the blame, but you’re not in pastoral ministry very long before you find some instances where it would just be unbearably cruel to lay an awful lot of blame on certain parents when a particular Jonathan or Susie goes off the rails.

Does that mean God’s Word is not very reliable? No. The point is that the proverbs in wisdom structure depend on the assumption that God in his wisdom has set out the universe in a certain way, and wisdom for us depends on certain skill sets that are built on the assumption that this is the way God has built the universe.

There are skills about social interaction. There are skills about surviving. There are skills about guarding the tongue. There are skills to do with building things and creating things. That, too, is called wisdom, like those who are described as “very wise” as they build the tabernacle or sew skins together or create gold pieces. They’re also called wise. They’re using what God has built into his universe, and wisdom has a certain framework.

So within this framework, a proverb like, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” is telling us how we should live in the light of how God has built his universe, but it doesn’t put in any of the footnotes or other factors that could go in, or that a kid might rebel at 23, or whatever. It just doesn’t put any of those kinds of things in. To read the proverb any other way is going to distort how you preach it to the people in your congregation. That brings us to …

2. Story

I wish I could say a lot more about literary genre, but let me make some observations about stories. First, written history (whatever else it is) is story, and like all good storytelling, history storytelling (that is, telling what happened in space-time flow) is first and foremost telling a story. That means it is bound up with such things as plot development and the characterization of the people in it.

Good stories don’t sound preachy, not in and of themselves, and yet they can be immensely powerful in evoking certain moral responses, and not because there’s some part of them that sounds preachy. There’s no law in it, there’s no unambiguous thou shalt not. There’s no proverbial enigmatic utterance or the like, unless it’s just part of the narrative.

Yet different genres of literature have their own rhetorical strategies for making their appeal, and not only must we learn what those strategies are in order to interpret the text aright, ideally the sermon should also reflect some of those same strategies so that we begin to manage to get across something of the power of that particular form in which God has disclosed his revelation.

In other words, if you can get through a sermon on a chunk of proverbs without dropping in any wise utterances or proverbial axiomatic truths or the like, it’s probably slightly distorted. Part of your telling of a story is going to be bound up with handling the thing as a historical narrative, looking for the structure of the narrative itself.

That means, for example, in a story like the book of Ruth you need to look at the whole thing. Then you can’t help but see that there’s a kind of swing to it, a kind of chiasm. You start with no king, no food, no son, no name … it’s just utter emptiness. Then you have name, Naomi; a son Obed; food again, as there’s nursing; and then a king, David.

There’s a kind of swing movement to the whole account, and unless you see that then it just becomes sort of a pious reflection on the nice woman who loves God and is a decent daughter-in-law, and you don’t actually get to the bit about David and how that fits in until the last couple of verses. In fact, there’s a much bigger swing in the narrative itself.

Moreover, in narrative and in history, history-writing is never the whole story. In this sense the postmoderns are right, of course. We can’t ever have the whole story about anything because we’re not omniscient. Therefore, we should constantly be reflecting on what in film would be called the camera angle.

So if you have an Olympic race and you put the camera at the level of the track looking up to the runners as they’re coming, then their legs are distorted in size and so on, but there’s a kind of sense of immediacy and power as these racers are pounding towards you and then dividing around the camera. The camera angle, in that case, gives a sense of immediacy, of threatening power, or the like.

On the other hand, it’s also possible to set up the camera at the finish line so you’re watching them come by in exactly the right order. Or you can have them from a helicopter overhead, in which case you don’t have anything like the pounding immediacy but you get the global picture of the whole, and where everybody is, and so on.

All of those different camera angles are doing different things, aren’t they? It’s the same thing with a story. There’s always a camera angle. It’s always being written from a certain point of view, and part of good storytelling is to reflect and capture and present that point of view, because that is part of what’s going to give that account its immediacy and its relevance.

3. Genesis 39

Now then, much more could be said about stories, but let me turn briefly to Genesis 39. How shall we think about this passage, not only to understand it but also to preach it? Well, at one level, it’s a story of sexual enticement and overcoming temptation, and at that level all kinds of very useful things can be said.

Joseph is in a particularly difficult situation. Brought up where he was, he would not have learned Egyptian, so when he was first sold into slavery he had to learn the language. The story is condensed, but he didn’t start off as chief steward.

He started off at the bottom, not even knowing the language, and yet worked his way up without any prospects of marriage, as Egyptian slaves were not permitted to be married, and without any prospects of release or returning home, from the normal accepted treatment of slaves at the time. Apart from any trust he had in God there was no hope really in front of him.

Yet he had come quite a long way, and now 15 years or so into all of this, his master’s wife flashes her eyes at him. He can’t help but be tempted, not only with the flattery of it, the sexual temptation of it, but even could he turn this to good? Maybe could he even someday win his release through this means? Who knows what was going through his mind. I don’t know.

Yet at the same time, the arguments that he presents for turning down temptation are surely things that are found in Scripture again and again and again, and thus become illustrative of what fighting temptation looks like. We could say, for instance, that he successfully resists temptation because of who he is. That’s not meant to be a mere solecism, but look at the form of his logic.

Verse 8: “He refused. ‘With me in charge,’ he told her, ‘my master does not concern himself with anything in the house. Everything he owns he has entrusted to my care, and no one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife, so how can I do this?’ ”

Now, exactly the same logic could have led to another conclusion in another kind of person. “With me in charge my master does not concern himself with anything in this house, so I can arrange things so that all of the rest of the servants are in the back 40 and nobody knows that I’m going to be here. Therefore, I can get away with it scot free. Who is ever going to know?”

Exactly the same premises, exactly the same structures, exactly the same evidence could lead another sort of person into the sin. In part, the reasons that he advances for not sinning are bound up with who he is as a man at this juncture, which suggests once again that temptation is not so much fought merely in the individual acute crisis but on a whole life.

One does not have to go far before one can think of Pauline parallels. Then he is also fighting it successfully because he’s prepared to call a spade a spade. He’s prepared to call sin sin. He calls it “this wicked thing.” He doesn’t refer to it as a peccadillo or momentary weakness or anything. Moreover, he fears God and sees the act with reference to him. “How could I do this thing and sin against God.” That is a massive bulwark against temptation, isn’t it?

If instead it’s seen with respect to the horizontal only, “Well, a lot of other people are doing it. They’re doing a lot worse things than I am. At least I’m not paying a prostitute and, after all, I am a slave. I ought to have something back from my master.” One can rationalize indefinitely. As soon as you align it up against God, however, then the thing is crystallized; it’s immediate. The possibilities of application on that front in our society are overwhelming.

Moreover, Joseph knew not to play with fire in verse 10. He refuses to be with her if he possibly can get away with it. He doesn’t even want to talk with her. He does not want to see how far he can go in petting before he actually sleeps with her.

Also, at the end in verses 11–12, Joseph is more concerned for his purity than his prospects. He can’t be so stupid as not to know that a woman spurned is likely to be enraged, and yet he’s quite prepared to run and leave his cloak behind, knowing full well what this could lead to, because he would rather be pure and be judged impure than be judged pure and be impure. He’s more concerned for his purity than for his prospects.

There are lots of things that can be said along those lines that are eminently preachable, but if you’re reading this as a coherent account you must immediately do two or three other things that give another twist to things. What I’ve said is all there in the text. It’s faithful to say those things, but, on the other hand, when you read the chapter as a whole you cannot help but see there’s a kind of literary inclusio, an inclusion, from the first part of the chapter to the last part of the chapter.

He’s sold into slavery, but God was with Joseph, blessed him in all that he did, and so on, so on, and so on. Then he lands up in prison but God was with Joseph and blessed him in all that he did and he was trusted with everything again. This literary inclusion at the beginning of the chapter and the end of the chapter is that you have to read the whole chapter under this rubric.

Immediately there’s another lesson that is unavoidable, namely that God often blesses you, not by taking you out of pretty miserable circumstances but by granting you integrity and a reputation for integrity in the midst of horrific circumstances. At the end of the day, he’s a slave in the first part.

He’s a condemned criminal in the second part at the end of the chapter, but in both cases the blessing of God is demonstrated in his life, not by some miraculous release but by integrity, by a reputation for trustworthiness which, with time, earns him the respect of those around him without taking him out of the circumstances. That’s there on the surface of the text once you see the literary inclusion.

On the other hand, the next thing you must do is place this story within the larger account of Genesis. It’s not, after all, a story by itself. That, in my judgment, is one of the huge mistakes of Walter Brueggemann. If you read some of Brueggemann’s books, he is immensely interesting and stimulating. It’s always worth perusing him just because he is creative and writes well and he’s interesting and can’t write a boring sentence even if he tries.

On the other hand, his hermeneutics are terribly warped by the fact that he refuses to read any biblical narrative as anything other than an independent narrative. In other words, he will not read a narrative within the framework of a whole book, so he comes to Genesis 3, and he wants to interpret Genesis 3 independently of Genesis 1, 2, and 4 and all the rest, let alone the rest of the Bible.

One of the reasons why he is so innovative is that the interpretive possibilities of any single story obviously multiply a great deal once you disconnect them from a larger context, which is also why he is so dangerous, because he can say something that sounds so plausible which immediately becomes a great deal less plausible once you anchor the thing within a bigger framework.

Now the fact of the matter is many people have their devotions by reading chapter 37 today and 38 tomorrow and 39 the next day and 40 the day after that, and basically when they read 39 they barely remember 38 and they have not yet refreshed their memory as to the content of 40. As a result they, too, are doing a Brueggemann without even thinking about it. Do you see?

Once you place 39 in the context of the flow, then some other things leap to mind immediately. There’s an automatic literary foil between 38 and 39. In 38 there’s Judah, from whom ultimately Messiah springs, to whom royalty ultimately belongs, who’s busy sleeping with Tamar; so 39 serves as a foil to 38 and vice versa.

Yet 39 also becomes God’s providential means for getting Joseph into prison, even if he’s there for years. After he has earned the trust of the jailer, it’s two more years before he bumps into the butler and the baker, but that nevertheless becomes the means by which ultimately Joseph becomes prime minister of Egypt.

And then, of course, in the larger story, if he becomes prime minister of Egypt he also becomes God’s appointed means, not only for saving the lives of millions, or at least hundreds of thousands, of Egyptians but ultimately of his own family.

Then, of course, in the larger narrative, beginning with the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 12; rearticulated in chapter 15 and the like), the preservation of Abraham’s line and this seed who is to come is managed, in fact, because Joseph keeps his integrity and lands up in prison and, in consequence, saves his own family. Thus he fulfills ultimately not only the dreams he had as a young man with his brothers and ultimately his parents bowing before him, but quite apart from that he keeps the seed and the family alive.

In case we have not seen God’s hand in this, because it’s merely described, then you get Joseph’s own theological reflections on it by the end of the book when you come to Genesis, chapter 50, verses 19 and 20, “You meant this for evil, but God meant it for good to keep many people alive to this day.” Without mitigating for a moment their evil and their responsibility, nevertheless, he sees God’s hand in it all.

Then, of course, if you read that within the framework of the Pentateuch, this is part of what sets up the condition for the exodus. If you read this canonically, this is precisely what preserves not only the exodus narrative, which becomes such a major type right across Scripture, not only for the exile but also for the new exodus in which we’re freed from the slavery to sin, but also this becomes God’s means ultimately for saving Jesus or for bringing him to birth.

When you think of the various turning points in Old Testament history where the Davidic line is almost wiped out but where God has sovereignly intervened in history to bring this all about, this is the first of those big steps. God is behind the scenes, no doubt, but humanly speaking Jesus comes and saves us because Joseph kept his trousers on. That’s quite remarkable really, isn’t it? It’s important, then, to see God working behind the scenes in grace in Joseph’s life.

I’m not trying to make suddenly the coming of Christ absolutely contingent or anything like that. Yet it is important to see that there are consequences to actions. Who knows but that because you keep your trousers on your daughter learns to cherish holiness, eventually marries some Christian young man at university, and they produce a boy in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, who marries some charming young woman who produces the next George Whitefield, humanly speaking, because you kept your trousers on and didn’t embitter your own children.

Because at the end of the day, God is no man’s debtor, and because sin is social, does not God himself visit wrath upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate him and despitefully use him? He keeps covenant love to the fourth generation of those who love him and keep his commandments. Sin is social, so that the peculiar mercies and providential ways of God behind this text bringing this narrative to the surface constitute part of the major flow that brings us to Jesus and our salvation.

Now there are all kinds of ways of tying that together in terms of homiletic structure, but it seems to me that if you’re dealing with a narrative, you see those sorts of issues. All right. Let me close at this juncture. We’ll break up into our two groups, but let me pray briefly.

Help us, merciful Father, to be good workers, rightly interpreting the Word of Truth. For Jesus’ sake, amen.