People of the Bible

Joseph (son of Jacob)

The patriarchs and matriarchs · Around 1800 BC (traditional) · Appears in Genesis 37 to 50

Joseph is the favored son of Jacob, sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers, who rose through suffering and faithfulness to become ruler of all Egypt under Pharaoh. When famine drove his brothers to him for grain, he forgave them, saying that what they meant for evil, God meant for good. His life is one of the Bible's clearest pictures of God's providence.

But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.Genesis 50:20 (KJV)

The favored son and the pit

Joseph was the firstborn of Jacob's beloved Rachel, the son of his father's old age, and Jacob loved him more than all his other children and made him a coat of many colors. His brothers hated him for it, and they hated him the more for the dreams he told, in which their sheaves bowed to his sheaf and the sun, moon, and stars bowed down to him. Envy hardened into murder in their hearts.

When his father sent him to check on his brothers in the fields, they saw him coming and plotted to kill the dreamer. Reuben spared his life, and instead they stripped him of his coat, threw him into a pit, and then sold him for twenty pieces of silver to a caravan of traders bound for Egypt. They dipped his coat in goat's blood and carried it to their father, who believed a wild beast had devoured him and mourned inconsolably. So Joseph, seventeen years old, came down into Egypt a slave, cut off from everything he had known.

Slavery, temptation, and prison

In Egypt Joseph was bought by Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, and the LORD was with him so that everything he did prospered, until Potiphar set him over his whole house. But Potiphar's wife tried again and again to seduce him, and Joseph refused, saying, How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God. When at last she caught his garment and he fled, she accused him falsely, and his master cast him into prison. His reward for integrity was another descent, from favored slave to forgotten prisoner.

Even in the dungeon the LORD was with Joseph and gave him favor with the keeper of the prison. There he interpreted the troubling dreams of two of Pharaoh's servants, telling the butler he would be restored and the baker he would die, and it happened just as he said. Yet the butler forgot him, and Joseph waited two more years in prison, faithful in the dark with no sign of rescue, learning the long patience of a man who trusts a God he cannot see at work.

From prison to the throne of Egypt

When Pharaoh was troubled by dreams of seven fat cattle devoured by seven lean, and seven full ears swallowed by seven withered ones, and no one could interpret them, the butler at last remembered Joseph. Brought hurriedly from the dungeon, Joseph gave God the glory and told Pharaoh that seven years of plenty would be followed by seven years of famine, and counseled him to store grain against the coming need. Pharaoh saw the Spirit of God in him and set him over all the land of Egypt, second only to the throne.

So the slave and prisoner became the savior of nations. Joseph gathered grain through the years of plenty, and when the famine spread over all the earth, people came from every land to buy bread from him. Among them came his own brothers, down from Canaan, who bowed before the Egyptian ruler without knowing him, and the dreams of his boyhood were fulfilled. After testing them to see if their hearts had changed, Joseph could hold back no longer, and wept aloud, and said, I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt.

Forgiveness and providence

Joseph's response to the brothers who had betrayed him is one of the great heights of the Old Testament. Instead of revenge, he wept and embraced them and told them not to be grieved nor angry with themselves, for God had sent him before them to preserve life. Be not grieved, he said, for God did send me before you to preserve a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. He brought his aged father Jacob and the whole family, seventy souls, down to Egypt and settled them in Goshen.

When Jacob died, the brothers feared Joseph would at last take his revenge, but he reassured them with the words that hold the meaning of his whole life: But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. Before his own death, Joseph made the children of Israel promise that when God visited them and brought them up to the promised land, they would carry his bones with them, a dying act of faith in a promise he would not live to see.

The fruit of affliction

Before the years of famine came, two sons were born to Joseph in Egypt, and the names he gave them tell the story of his healed heart. The first he called Manasseh, saying, God hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house. The second he called Ephraim, saying, God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction. He did not forget his suffering, but he saw God's hand turning it to fruitfulness and giving him a new life in the very place of his exile.

That grace shaped how Joseph governed. Through the seven years of plenty he stored grain in every city until it was beyond measure, and when the famine came over all the earth, he opened the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians and to all the countries that came to buy bread. The boy sold into slavery had become the means by which many nations were kept alive. When at last his father Jacob came down to Egypt and blessed Joseph's two sons, the promise of God to Abraham was carried safely into a new land and a new generation.

His character and where he points to Christ

Joseph is a portrait of integrity under injustice. Slandered, enslaved, and imprisoned, he neither grew bitter nor abandoned his God, but kept working faithfully wherever he was put. He resisted temptation at great cost, forgave freely when he held all the power, and trusted from the pit to the palace that God was weaving even the wickedness of others into good. His story closes the book of Genesis and preserves the covenant family through the famine that could have destroyed them.

Again and again his life foreshadows Jesus. He was the beloved son, sent by his father to his brothers and rejected by them, sold for pieces of silver, condemned though innocent, and numbered among criminals. He was brought low into a pit and a prison, and then raised to the right hand of the throne, and from that high place he became the savior of the very ones who had wronged him, and of a starving world beyond. What his brothers meant for evil, God meant for good, and at the cross that same paradox reaches its fullness, for there the worst thing men ever did became the means of the world's salvation.

A note on the sources: everything above is drawn from the biblical text itself. Where a detail comes from later tradition rather than Scripture, it is named as tradition. Dates for the earliest figures are traditional and approximate, and Scripture does not always give them. The aim is to tell each life honestly, and to let it do what the whole Bible does, point to Jesus Christ the Lord.

Related: Jacob · Moses · All the people of the Bible