My first encounter with D. A. Carson occurred while in high school when my brother introduced me to Exegetical Fallacies. Since that time, I’ve read dozens of books and articles written by Dr. Carson, each with great profit. Like so many others, I have found Dr. Carson’s work compelling, not just for its academic credibility but because he is unwaveringly clear. In addition, I’ve long admired the way Dr. Carson has wielded his prodigious intellectual gifts as an act of love for truth, love for Christ, and for the good of the church and its undershepherds, like myself, who lead them. It’s no coincidence that one of my sons is named Carson.

On a personal note, I’ve had the privilege of meeting Dr. Carson on only one occasion. Just prior to the publication of From Prisoner to Prince, he was preaching at the Ocean City Bible Conference which I was attending. During our brief conversation between sessions, he was extraordinarily kind—both commending me for my work in From Prisoner to Prince and offering counsel on different ways I could encourage my wife during a particularly busy season of our life for our family. That brief moment was revelatory of his love for the saints and pastoral character.

It’s a privilege to honor Dr. Carson with an article in this journal summarizing one part of my argument in From Prisoner to Prince.

1. A Word on From Prisoner to Prince and on Typology

From Prisoner to Prince explores the Joseph story’s contribution to biblical theology, particularly focusing on whether it’s appropriate to recognize Joseph as a type of the Messiah.¹Samuel Emadi, From Prisoner to Prince: The Joseph Story in Biblical Theology, NSBT 59 (London: Apollos, 2022). Since its publication, I have become even more firmly convinced that typology is neither a New Testament imposition on Old Testament texts nor a reading strategy or hermeneutical method. Typology is the product of author-oriented, grammatical-historical exegesis. To put it another way: We do not read typologically; rather, the biblical authors wrote typologically.²For a defense of typology as intended by Scripture’s human authors and thus as “prospective,” see my article with David Schrock, “Typology,” in Dictionary of the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale, et. al (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023), 852–60. Old Testament authors signaled to their readers that the persons, events, and institutions they described anticipate a messianic resolution. If something or someone in the Old Testament is typological, a careful, contextual, exegetical reading of the text will bear that out.

Thus, the burden of From Prisoner to Prince and the burden of this article is to establish Joseph as a type of the Messiah. My aim is not simply to appeal to NT texts that make that point plainly but to demonstrate from within the Genesis narrative itself that Moses intends readers to see Joseph as a typological figure foreshadowing Israel’s messianic, eschatological salvation.³For evidence that NT authors understood the Joseph story as typologically pointing to the Messiah, see Emadi, From Prisoner to Prince, 121–46.

2. Genesis and Messianic Expectation

From its earliest chapters, Genesis is eschatological. Genesis 1–2 is not simply a record of creation, it is also a declaration of God’s purposes for the world. Baked within the creation narrative is an eschatology, one which anticipates image-bearing priest-kings taking dominion over the earth, covering the globe with more image bearers, and expanding the boundaries of Eden until all creation becomes God’s garden sanctuary.

What becomes immediately clear in the wake of the fall is that the entrance of sin into the world does not alter where creation is headed, it simply reroutes the path to getting there. Read in the context of Genesis 1–2, the protoevangelium’s promise that a coming “Seed of the Woman” will crush the head of the seed of the Serpent draws a direct parallel between the coming seed and the work that Adam failed to do: protect the garden, conquer the serpent, and bring creation to its divinely ordained goal. Thus Genesis establishes an eschatological orientation first by the creation account and then immediately after the fall in Genesis 3:15. Those eschatological expectations are then only further developed and bolstered by subsequent prophecies and promises in passages like Genesis 12:1–3 and Genesis 22:15–18. As a result, reading with the grain of Genesis requires that interpreters understand the Genesis narratives within the current of the book’s eschatological hopes.

Regrettably interpreters have often jettisoned Genesis’s eschatological orientation when it comes to understanding the role Joseph plays within the book. Given Joseph’s distinctive and unique literary characteristics, many scholars have suggested that a meaningful theological relationship between Joseph and the first thirty-six chapters simply does not exist. For instance Donald Redford suggested:

The theological outlook of the writer of Gen 37–50 is different from that of the Patriarchal narrator. He does not mention the Covenant or the Promise, ubiquitous in the earlier chapters of Genesis. He is not interested in supplying the reader with comment on matters theological, as the Patriarchal author was.⁴Donald B. Redford, A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph, VTSup 20 (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 247.

Similar sentiments are found in Bill Arnold’s commentary on Genesis:

A final question about the Joseph narrative is its function in Genesis and the Pentateuch as a whole. The covenant and the ancestral promises of land and seed—so central throughout Gen 12–36—are absent entirely, nor do we encounter any further revelatory theophanies. This theological uniqueness combines with the literary distinctiveness we have discussed to illustrate the role of the Joseph narrative in the Bible.⁵Bill T. Arnold, Genesis, NCBC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 316.

My contention is that such statements ignore the many allusions, references, and thematic developments of early chapters of Genesis throughout the Joseph story. Attention to these points of contact not only demonstrate the literary unity of Genesis, they also unfurl the typological role Joseph plays in the book that cements him into Genesis’s own eschatological outlook. For Moses, Joseph does not simply conclude the book of Genesis, his story resolves various themes, plot points, promises, and expectations established earlier in the book. In relation to Genesis 1–11, Joseph is a new Adam, a seed of the woman, who delivers God’s people from the Primeval curses. In relation to Genesis 12–36 Joseph is an anticipatory fulfilment of the Abrahamic promises. Moses thus portrays the life of Joseph as a messianic figure; his life represents the “type” of work God will do when he brings eschatological salvation.

3. Joseph and Genesis 1–11

On several occasions Moses links Joseph’s story with that of Adam’s, portraying Joseph as a new Adam and succeeding where Adam failed. For instance, Genesis 39 contains a number of notable narrative reversals of the account of the fall. In Genesis 3, Adam ate forbidden fruit because he “listened to the voice of his wife” (Gen 3:17)—a repeated phrase in the account of Abraham’s sin with Hagar (16:2). As a result Adam’s innocence is shattered, moving him from a state of nakedness to clothing. Similar language and themes are found in Genesis 39, though inverted. Joseph rebuffs Potiphar’s wife’s sexual advances because “he would not listen to her” (39:10). Intriguingly, the narrative suggests Potiphar’s wife’s body is forbidden food. On account of Joseph’s wise administration, Potiphar “had no concern about anything but the food he ate” (39:6). And yet, later on in the same story, Joseph testifies that Potiphar “put everything that he has in my charge … nor has he kept back anything from me except you” (39:9, emphasis mine). Joseph’s refusal to sleep with Potiphar’s wife and thereby indulge in forbidden food reverses the course of Genesis 3. Joseph maintains his righteousness and as a result moves from a state of clothing to nakedness.

Moses develops even more direct points of contact between Adam and Joseph in the book’s final chapter. Adam rebelled against God by taking “good and evil” into his own hands (Gen 3:5). Joseph, on the other hand, refuses to define “good and evil” for himself, instead professing faith not just in God’s authority over good and evil but in his ability to bring good out of evil (50:20). Unlike Adam, Joseph refuses to count equality with God a thing to be grasped. By bookending Genesis with two stories that orbit around the word-pair “good and evil,” Moses thus presents Joseph as a New Adam who succeeds where the old Adam failed.

Similarly, Joseph does not just invert the story of the fall, he also reverses the tragedy of Cain and Abel. Allusions to Cain and Abel in the Joseph story abound. For instance, the words “brother” (אָח) and “blood” (דָּם) are prominent in both narratives, and in each account Moses uses “blood as evidence that death has taken place.”⁶Brian Sigmon, “Between Eden and Egypt: Echoes of the Garden Narrative in the Story of Joseph and His Brothers” (PhD diss., Marquette University, 2013), 137. The word אָח occurs eight times in the Cain and Abel narrative and twenty-one times in Genesis 37. The word דָּם occurs only in the Cain and Abel and Joseph narratives (Gen 4:11; 37:22, 26, 31–33; 42:22) as well as three other times in Genesis 9:4–6. For further points of contact between the Cain and Abel story and Joseph, see Emadi, From Prisoner to Prince, 78–82. As with the Adamic parallels, Joseph reverses the negative elements of the Cain and Abel story. Genesis begins with one brother murdering another, but Joseph overcomes his own brothers’ murderous intent by mercy. Genesis then takes us on a journey from fratricide to forgiveness with Joseph playing the role of the one who resolves humanity’s primeval sin.⁷The phrase “from fratricide to forgiveness” is from Matthew R. Schlimm, From Fratricide to Forgiveness: The Language and Ethics of Anger in Genesis, Siphrut 7 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011). Given these associations casting Joseph as a successful Adam and as one who reverses the fraternal conflict that has been plaguing the covenant family since Cain and Abel, it is no wonder Jacob’s prophecy about Joseph in Genesis 49:22–26 is brimming with imagery suggesting Joseph represents the blessing of the new creation.⁸G. K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 96–98. Joseph is a figure anticipating the eschatological restoration of the Edenic state.

4. Joseph and the Abrahamic Covenant

Just as the Joseph story both resolves and reverses various negative elements of the Genesis 1–11 narrative, so also Joseph functions as an anticipatory fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant. By “anticipatory fulfillment,” I mean that Moses describes Joseph’s life as genuinely fulfilling the promises given to Abraham, while at the same time making clear that Joseph’s fulfillment of those promises is incomplete and partial, thus anticipating a greater eschatological fulfillment in the future.

Importantly, each part of the Abrahamic promise—land, seed, blessing, and kingship—finds its roots in the creation narrative. As Jim Hamilton has demonstrated, each part of the Abrahamic promises in Genesis 12:1–3 is about God restoring what was lost in Eden.⁹James M. Hamilton, “The Seed of the Woman and the Blessing of Abraham,” TynBul 58 (2007): 253–73. Once again, Joseph is not simply fulfilling the promises to Abraham but reversing course on the plight of human sin and suffering introduced by the fall in the early chapters of Genesis. As a result, Joseph functions as a prophetic type, a picture forecasting a final, messianic fulfillment of the promise and restoration of Eden. In the rest of this article we will briefly consider Joseph’s relationship to the Abrahamic promises of seed, blessing, and kingship respectively.¹⁰Like others, I would summarize the Abrahamic promises as pertaining to land, seed, blessing, and kingship. Given the limitations of this article, we will not consider Joseph’s relationship to the land promise. For an examination of Joseph’s relationship to the Abrahamic land promise, see Emadi, From Prisoner to Prince, 83–88.

4.1. Seed

In Genesis 1:28 God commissions Adam and Eve with the task of populating creation with other image-bearers. Yet, in Genesis 3 the only thing that multiplies is pain in childbirth¹¹I owe that observation and phraseology to Laurence A. Turner, Announcements of Plot in Genesis, JSOTSup 96 (London: JSOT Press, 1990), 23–24.—a theme that reverberates throughout Genesis as barrenness plagues the women of the covenant (Gen 16:2; 25:21; 29:31). In the Abrahamic covenant, however, God takes the Adamic command—“be fruitful and multiply” (פְּרוּ וּרְבוּ)—and transposes it into a promise: “I will multiply you exceedingly … . I will make you exceedingly fruitful” (17:2, 6).

In the Joseph story the seed promise comes to fruition as he both preserves and proliferates the holy seed. Chapters 37–45 record how Joseph, by forgiveness, preserves the seed from the kind of internal strife and violence that has plagued the seed’s existence since Cain and Abel. Joseph himself makes that point plainly during his self-revelation to his brothers in Genesis 45:5–8. In this passage, Joseph, by a threefold use of “sent,” recognizes God’s sovereign ordering of his suffering to preserve the seed. God sent Joseph to Egypt to “preserve life” and “to preserve for you a remnant … and to keep alive … many survivors.” Each phrase is freighted with biblical-theological significance. “To preserve life” (v. 5 [לְמִֽחְיָה]) and to “keep alive” (v. 7 [וּלְהַחֲיֹות]) correlate Joseph with Noah, the archetypal seed-preserver in Genesis.¹²As Wenham notes, “‘to preserve’ (life) is a key phrase in the flood story (6:19–20; cf. 7:3; 50:20), implying that Joseph is like Noah, an agent in the divine saving plan.” Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 16–50, WBC 2 (Dallas: Word, 1994), 428. Additionally in verse 7, Joseph states that God sent him to “preserve a remnant (שְׁאֵרִית)” and to “keep alive … survivors (פְלֵיטָה).” Joseph’s use of this word-pair may be the genesis of identical language found in the prophets (Isa 10:20; 37:32; cf. 2 Kgs 19:31; Joel 2:32). In both Genesis and the prophets, the “remnant” and “survivor” are a signal of future hope for the covenant seed.

Whereas Genesis 37–45 focus on the preservation of the holy seed, Genesis 46–47 focus on its proliferation. Genesis 46:1–7 records the first theophanic vision of the Joseph story and contains a reaffirmation of the seed promise to Jacob, indicating that God will multiply the seed in Egypt (46:3). Genesis 46:8–27 then records the proliferation of the covenant seed to seventy persons, a new humanity modeled after the seventy nations of Genesis 10.

The seed promise then comes into full view in Genesis 47:27: “Thus Israel settled in the land of Egypt, in the land of Goshen. And they gained possessions in it, and were fruitful and multiplied greatly.” To this point in the Genesis narrative, the word-pair “be fruitful and multiply” has been used only as part of a command (to Adam and Noah) or as part of a promise (to Abrahm, Isaac, and Jacob). But in the story of Joseph, that language finally occurs in the indicative. Under the wise administration of Joseph the covenant seed fulfills the Adamic commission and experiences the firstfruits of the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise.

4.2. Blessing

In Genesis 12:1–3 God promises to Abraham a complete restoration of the Edenic state. These promises contain a fivefold blessing to match the fivefold curse that has fallen over creation (Gen 3:14, 17; 4:11; 5:29; 9:25). Additionally, these promises to Abraham make clear that this restorative blessing is not just for Abraham’s family but for all the nations through Abraham.

Once again, Joseph serves as an anticipatory fulfillment of the promise. Potiphar appoints Joseph “over his house” (עַל־בֵּיתֹו), and as a result Yahweh blesses Potiphar and his house “for Joseph’s sake” (39:4–5). Such language clearly has the Abrahamic promises in view. Even commentators who suggest the Joseph story rarely incorporates theology from the Abrahamic narratives admit that Genesis 39 is an “allusion to the ancestral promises.”¹³Arnold, Genesis, 331 Later, Joseph is placed over another house (עַל־בֵּיתֹו)—Pharaoh’s—and as a result he blesses “all the earth” by saving them from famine (41:56–57; cf. 12:3).

The theme of blessing is then climactically portrayed as Joseph brings his father Jacob to an audience with Pharaoh in Genesis 47:7–10. As Dempster notes, “there are not just two individuals meeting here, but two nations, one of them embryonic and the other the most powerful nation on earth.”¹⁴Stephen G. Dempster, Dominion and Dynasty: A Biblical Theology of the Hebrew Bible, NSBT 15 (Nottingham: Apollos, 2003), 89. Yet, shockingly, aged Jacob twice blesses the powerful Pharaoh. The message is clear: through Joseph’s wisdom and forgiveness of his brothers, the blessing of Abraham is now advancing to all the families of the earth.

4.3. Kingship

The hope for a royal seed is a major feature of the Abrahamic promises. Indeed, Genesis’s obsession with tracing the line of the seed, by both genealogies and narrative, is tied to the messianic hope of a coming priest-king inaugurated by the protoevangelium. The Joseph narrative once again brings these expectations into play, identifying Joseph as a royal seed of Abraham.

Moses introduces Joseph primarily with reference to his royal dreams. The brothers themselves understand the dreams as signifying royalty: “Are you indeed to reign over us [הֲמָלֹךְ תִּמְלֹךְ עָלֵינוּ] or are you indeed to rule over us [מָשֹׁול תִּמְשֹׁל בָּנוּ]?” (Gen 37:8). Both מלך and משׁל connote royal status, particularly when used together (Judg 9:2, 6, 8; Jer 33:21, 26; 2 Chr 9:26, 9:30).

Other features of Joseph’s introduction also identify him as a royal seed. His famous “robe of many colors” (כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים) is likely clothing approximating some kind of royal robe. The phrase כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים occurs only one other time in the OT with reference to the garments worn by the daughters of King David (2 Sam 13:18). Additionally, Moses identifies Joseph as a “son of old age” to Jacob (Gen 37:3). This phrase identifies Joseph with Isaac (21:2, 7), thus linking Joseph with the dynastic expectations of the Abrahamic promises. Given the prominence of Genesis’s royal expectations, Joseph’s introduction leaves readers asking, “Is this the one to come or should we expect another?”

The rest of the Joseph story, of course, records the fulfillment of Joseph’s dreams and his rise to the royal court. Joseph is thus an anticipatory fulfillment of the royal seed promise given to Abraham. Moses makes plain the “anticipatory” or typological nature of Joseph’s royal position in Genesis 49:8: “Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies; your father’s sons shall bow down before you.” Speaking of the coming Messianic king, Jacob indicates that his brothers will come and “bow down” (חוה) before him. Readers have already encountered this language and imagery in the Joseph story. Three times in the dream sequence Joseph’s brothers bow to him (37:7, 9, 10), which is then matched by a threefold bowing as the dreams are realized in history (42:4; 43:26, 28). By using language and imagery that is a prominent part of Joseph’s rise to the royal court, Jacob (and Moses through Jacob) casts the coming Judahite Messiah in the mold of Joseph. He is the type of king God will provide from the line of Judah.

5. Conclusion

The evidence above points to the conclusion that Joseph is not simply the last item in a series of disconnected tales. Joseph is the resolution to Genesis. Moses intends readers to see Joseph functioning typologically: acting as a new Adam, resolving the fratricidal conflict of Cain and Abel, fulfilling the promises of the Abrahamic Covenant, and mediating the blessing of Abraham to the nations. Joseph does this in a way that is partial and incomplete, thus anticipating a greater eschatological work in the future. These narrative elements all point to the fact that, even within his own context, Joseph—the rejected, royal son—functions as an indirect prophecy pointing to the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the true and better Joseph.

---