XII. JOSEPH’S AFFECTION FOR JACOB

I Have already found an argument for the veracity of Moses in the identity of Jacob’s character: I now find another in the identity of that of Joseph. There is one quality (as it has been often observed, though with a different view from mine,) which runs like a thread through his whole history,—his affection for his father. Israel loved him, we read, more than all his children—he was the child of his age—his mother died whilst he was yet young, and a double care of him consequently devolved upon his surviving parent. He made him a coat of many colours—he kept him at home when his other sons were sent to feed the flocks. When the bloody garment was brought in, Jacob in his affection for him, (that same affection which, on a subsequent occasion, when it was told him that after all Joseph was alive, made him as slow to believe the good tidings as he was now quick to apprehend the sad,) in this his affection for him, I say, Jacob at once concluded the worst, and “he rent his clothes and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days, and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted, and he said, For I will go down into the grave of my son mourning.”

Now what were the feelings in Joseph which responded to these? When the sons of Jacob went down to Egypt, and Joseph knew them though they knew not him, for they (it may be remarked, and this again is not like fiction,) were of an age not to be greatly changed by the lapse of years, and were still sustaining the character in which Joseph had always seen them, whilst he himself had meanwhile grown out of the stripling into the man, and from a shepherd-boy was become the ruler of a kingdom—when his brethren thus came before him, his question was, “Is your father yet alive?” [Gen. 43:7.] They went down a second time, and again the question was, “Is your father well, the old man of whom ye spake, is he yet alive?” More he could not venture to ask, whilst he was yet in his disguise. By a stratagem he now detains Benjamin, leaving the others, if they would, to go their way. But Judah came near unto him, and entreated him for his brother, telling him how that he had been “surety to his father” to bring him back, how that “his father was an old man,” and that this was the “child of his old age, and that he loved him,”—how it would come to pass that if he should not see the lad with him he would die, and his grey hairs be brought with sorrow to the grave; for “how shall I go to my father, and the lad be not with me?—lest, peradventure, I see the evil that shall come on my father.” Here, without knowing it, he had struck the string that was the tenderest of all. Joseph’s firmness forsook him at this repeated mention of his father, and in terms so touching—he could not refrain himself any longer, and causing every man to go out, he made himself known to his brethren. Then, even in the paroxysm which came on him, (for he wept aloud so that the Egyptians heard,) still his first words, uttered from the fulness of his heart, were, “Doth my father yet live?” He now bids them hasten and bring the old man down, bearing to him tokens of his love and tidings of his glory. He goes to meet him—he presents himself unto him, and falls on his neck and weeps on his neck a good while—he provides for him and his household out of the fat of the land—he sets him before Pharoah. By and by he hears that he is sick, and hastens to visit him—he receives his blessing—watches his death-bed—embalms his body—mourns for him threescore and ten days—and then carries him (as he had desired) into Canaan to bury him, taking with him as an escort to do him honour “all the elders of Egypt, and all the servants of Pharoah, and all his house, and the house of his brethren, chariots and horsemen, a very great company.” How natural was it now for his brethren to think that the tie by which alone they could imagine Joseph to be held to them was dissolved, that any respect he might have felt or feigned for them, must have been buried in the Cave of Machpelah, and that he would now requite to them the evil they had done! “And they sent a message unto Joseph, saying, Thy father did command before he died, saying, So shall ye say unto Joseph, Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren and their sin,—for they did unto thee evil.” And then they add of themselves, as if well aware of the surest road to their brother’s heart, “Forgive, we pray thee, the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father.” In everything the father’s name is still put foremost: it is his memory which they count upon as their shield and buckler. Moreover it may be added, that though all intercourse had ceased for so many years between Joseph and his family, still the lasting affection he bore a parent is manifested in the name which he gave to his son born to him only two years before the famine, even Manasseh or forgetting, for God, said he, “hath made me forget all my toil and all my father’s house;” [Gen. 41:51.] as though ‘instead of his father he must have children’ to fill up the void in his heart which a parent’s loss had created.

It is not the singular beauty of these scenes, or the moral lesson they teach, excellent as it is, with which I am now concerned, but simply the perfect, artless consistency which prevails through them all. It is not the constancy with which the son’s strong affection for his father had lived through an interval of twenty years’ absence, and, what is more, through the temptation of sudden promotion to the highest estate—it is not the noble-minded frankness with which he still acknowledges his kindred, and makes a way for them, “shepherds” as they were, to the throne of Pharaoh himself—it is not the simplicity and singleness of heart, which allow him to give all the first-born of Egypt, men over whom he bore absolute rule, an opportunity of observing his own comparatively humble origin, by leading them in attendance upon his father’s corpse, to the valleys of Canaan and the modest cradle of his race—it is not, in a word, the grace, but the identity of Joseph’s character, the light in which it is exhibited by himself, and the light in which it is regarded by his brethren, to which I now point as stamping it with marks of reality not to be gainsaid.