Joseph and the Coat with Long Sleeves

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A man is standing in a very grand room in Egypt, with a great deal of power and a very long memory, and eleven nervous men are kneeling on the floor in front of him. They do not know who he is. He knows exactly who they are. He knows it by their faces, and by their voices, and by the way the youngest of them is trying not to look up. And he is deciding, in the space of one long breath, what kind of man he is going to be.

We'll come back to him. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, and the place to start is with a coat.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is about the Patriarch Joseph, and it comes from the book of Genesis, which Jews and Christians have read as Scripture for a very long time. I will tell it the way the Bible tells it. A few of the small conversations, the weather, and the thoughts of a few people along the way are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me set the scene.

Imagine a family. A big one. A tent-dwelling, flock-keeping family in the hill country of Canaan, a few thousand years ago, with a father, four mothers, and twelve sons. If that sounds like a lot of people for one dinner, it is. If it sounds like a recipe for trouble, you are beginning to see why the book of Genesis spends so many chapters on them.

The father is Jacob, whom you may remember as the grandson of Abraham, and who is also called Israel. He is an older man now, and he has had a hard and interesting life. He has wrestled with an angel in the dark. He has been cheated by his own uncle, and has cheated a few people himself, and he has come out the other side of all of it a little lame in one hip and a great deal wiser. And he has twelve sons.

Ten of the sons are grown men. They work the flocks, and they are the sort of men you would want beside you in a storm. They are strong and sunburnt, and not especially subtle. Then there is the youngest but one, and he is called Joseph. And there is one more, the very youngest, a little boy named Benjamin, who is still at home.

Joseph is seventeen years old at the start of our story. He is clever, and good looking, and he has two weaknesses. The first is that he is his father's favourite. The second is that he does not seem to know it is a bad idea to say so out loud.

I should say a word about why he was the favourite. Joseph was the first son of Jacob's beloved wife, Rachel, who had waited a long time for a child and had died not long after the birth of the second one. So Jacob looked at Joseph and saw, quite simply, the face of the woman he had loved. It is a very human reason. It does not make it a wise one. The Bible does not hide this, by the way. Genesis is the most honest book about families that has ever been written, and it never once pretends that the heroes got everything right.

Now, about the coat.

Jacob made Joseph a special garment. For many years, English readers have been told that it was a coat of many colours, which is a nice picture, and it has been the title of a musical. But the Hebrew word is a rare one, and nobody is entirely sure what it means. Some scholars think it was a long tunic with sleeves, the kind that a person wears when he is not expected to carry anything heavy. The kind that says, without a word, that the person inside it is not going to be mucking out the sheep. Whatever it was, it was clearly splendid, and it was clearly given to one son and not to the others. Every time Joseph put it on, ten brothers saw it, and every time they saw it, something in them went a little more sour.

Let us start with the dreams.

Joseph, you see, had begun to have dreams. And he had begun, which was the unwise part, to tell them at breakfast.

In the first dream, he and his brothers were out in the field tying up sheaves of grain. And his sheaf stood up straight, and the brothers' sheaves gathered round and bowed down to it.

Now. If you were one of the ten brothers, how would you feel about this? Exactly. The brothers said, "So are you going to be king over us?" And the Bible says that they hated him all the more for his dreams and for his words.

Joseph, being seventeen, did not take the hint. He had a second dream, in which the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing down to him, and he told that one too. This time even his father frowned. "What is this dream you have dreamed?" said Jacob. "Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come and bow ourselves to the ground before you?" But the Bible adds one small, quiet line. The brothers were jealous of him, it says, but his father kept the saying in mind.

I like that line. A father who frowns, and says something stern, and then goes away and keeps turning it over. As if he suspected that it was not only a teenager showing off.

One day, Jacob sent Joseph on an errand.

The older brothers had taken the flocks a long way north, to the pastures near a place called Shechem, and it had been a while since anyone had heard from them. Jacob said to Joseph, "Go and see whether it is well with your brothers and well with the flock, and bring me word."

Notice that. He sent his favourite son, alone, in that coat, to the ten brothers who could hardly bear to look at it. I do not think Jacob suspected for a moment how bad things were. Fathers, like the rest of us, can be very good at not seeing what they do not wish to see.

So Joseph set off. He went to Shechem, and the brothers were not there, and he wandered about in the fields until a man found him and asked what he was looking for. "I am seeking my brothers," said Joseph. "Tell me, please, where they are pasturing the flock." And the man said, "They have gone away. I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan." So Joseph went on, another day's walk or so, and he found them at last.

Now, imagine you are one of the brothers, sitting on a rock in the heat with the sheep nibbling around you, looking down the long valley, and you see in the distance a figure coming along the path. You cannot see his face. But you can see the coat.

"Here comes that dreamer," says one of them.

It does not take them long to get from there to the rest. They say, in the hot way people do when they have been resenting something for years, "Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits, and we will say that a wild beast has devoured him. And we shall see what becomes of his dreams."

I will tell you plainly that this is a dark moment, and there is no sense dressing it up. But it is a bedtime story, and the Bible's own way of telling it is quick and quiet, so I will be quick and quiet too.

Because there is one brother, the eldest, named Reuben, who hears this and says, "Let us not take his life. Shed no blood. Throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but do not lay a hand on him." The Bible tells us what he was thinking. He meant to come back later, when the others had gone, and rescue Joseph and take him home to his father.

So when Joseph arrived, all out of breath, saying, "Shalom, brothers, I've found you, Father was worried," they took hold of him. They pulled off the coat. And they put him down into an empty pit, a deep, dry hole in the ground, a cistern with no water in it.

And then, the Bible says, they sat down to eat.

I want you to notice that. It is one of the most uncomfortable details in the whole of Genesis, and the writer does not comment on it. They sat down to eat their bread, with their brother in the hole. It is a way of showing us how far a heart can go when it has nursed a grudge for long enough, without ever saying a word against them. A bit later, Joseph himself will have his say about it, and it will surprise you.

Now Reuben, the one who had a plan, was not there at that moment. He had gone off somewhere about the flocks. And while he was away, the rest of them looked up and saw a caravan coming along the road. A line of camels, loaded with spices and balm and myrrh, on its way down to Egypt. Traders. Merchants. The Bible calls them Ishmaelites, and at another point Midianites, which tells us that people living in that country were a mixed lot and the names were used loosely.

And Judah, who was the fourth brother, and not the worst of them, said, "What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother, our own flesh."

You can see what is going on in Judah's mind. He is a man looking for a way out of a murder that does not cost him too much, and he has found one. It is not a good plan. It is only a slightly less terrible one. His brothers agreed.

So they pulled Joseph up out of the pit, and they sold him to the traders for twenty pieces of silver. And the caravan went on its way, down to Egypt, with Joseph walking among the camels, and his brothers did not turn round to watch him go.

When Reuben came back and found the pit empty, he tore his clothes and cried out, "The boy is gone, and I, where shall I go?" And the brothers, who had by now got their story straight, took the beautiful coat, killed a young goat, and dipped the coat in the blood. They sent it home to their father with a message. "This we have found. Please identify it. Is it your son's robe or not?"

Jacob knew it at once. "It is my son's robe," he said. "A wild beast has devoured him. Joseph has been torn to pieces."

And the Bible says that he tore his clothes and put sackcloth on his loins and mourned for his son for many days. All his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. "No," he said, "I shall go down to the grave to my son, mourning." Thus his father wept for him.

I will leave that there for a moment. Ten men standing round an old man weeping, each one holding a secret like a hot coal. That is the cost of it. They have got what they wanted, and it is sitting in the room with them for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, a boy is walking to Egypt.

Imagine it. Seventeen years old. No coat. A rope round the wrist, perhaps, or a place in a line of other people being taken to a market. He has never been out of the hill country. He has never seen the great river, or the vast flat fields, or the stone buildings that look as though they were put there by giants. Everything is strange, and the language sounds like throat-clearing.

And at the end of the road is a slave market. And he is bought by a man named Potiphar, who is an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard. A man with a large house and a large staff and a great many things that need doing.

Now here is the part the Bible says over and over again, and I want you to hear it. The Lord was with Joseph. That is the whole of it. It does not say that he had it easy. It says he was with him. And so, though he was a slave in a foreign house, in the place he never wanted to be, Joseph did well. He worked hard. He was honest. He was good with numbers and with people. And soon Potiphar noticed that everything Joseph touched seemed to prosper, and he put him in charge of the house, and of all that he had. All Potiphar had to worry about, the Bible says, was the food he ate.

It is a funny picture, actually. A grown man in high office with a servant who runs everything so well that his only job is lunch.

But we are not at the end of the trouble yet.

Potiphar's wife took a liking to Joseph, and she said things that she ought not to have said. Joseph refused. He said, quite simply, that his master had trusted him with everything in the house but her, and that he could not do such a great wickedness and sin against God. She asked him day after day, and day after day he said no. And one day, when no one else was in the house, she caught hold of his garment, and he left it in her hand and ran outside.

And then she told her household, and when her husband came home, she told him, that the Hebrew slave had tried to hurt her. And she held up the garment as proof.

It is the second time a piece of Joseph's clothing has been used to tell a lie about him. Genesis does not remark on it. It simply sets it down, and lets us see.

Potiphar was furious, and he had Joseph put in prison. It was the king's prison, the place where the king's own prisoners were kept. And you might expect the story to be at its darkest here. A young man, far from home, once a favourite son, once a trusted steward, now a prisoner for something he did not do. And he cannot even write to his father to say he is alive.

But the Bible says again, the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love. And before long, the keeper of the prison noticed him, and put him in charge of the other prisoners. And there, in the cell, in the dark, among the people nobody wanted, Joseph went on being exactly who he had always been, a man you could trust.

Now it happened that two of Pharaoh's own servants offended him, the chief cupbearer and the chief baker, and they were thrown into the same prison. And one night each of them had a dream, and in the morning they were sitting there looking miserable. And Joseph, who had a way of noticing when people were low, asked them what was wrong. "We have had dreams," they said, "and there is no one to interpret them."

"Do not interpretations belong to God?" said Joseph. "Please tell them to me."

I love that answer. He is not showing off this time. The boy who once told his dreams at breakfast has been to a pit and a slave market and a prison, and he has learned to say, it is not me, it is God. The cupbearer told his dream, and Joseph said that in three days Pharaoh would lift up his head and restore him to his place. The baker, seeing that this was good news, told his dream too, and Joseph, with a heavy heart, had to tell him that it was not good news at all.

All of it came true on the third day, on Pharaoh's birthday, exactly as he had said.

And Joseph said to the cupbearer, "Only remember me, when it is well with you. Please do me the kindness to mention me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house."

And the cupbearer went out of the prison, and put on his fine clothes, and went back to his old work. And he did not remember Joseph. He forgot him.

Two full years went by.

I want you to sit with that, as well. Two years. It is what the Bible says, in four small words, and moves on. Two years of cold mornings and stone floors and the same few faces. Two years of a man looking up each time the door opened, and each time it was only the bread.

And then Pharaoh had a dream.

He dreamed that he was standing by the Nile. And seven cows came up out of the river, sleek and fat, and began to graze among the reeds. And after them came seven other cows, gaunt and thin, and the thin cows ate up the fat ones. And Pharaoh woke up. He went back to sleep, and dreamed again, this time of seven plump ears of grain on one stalk, swallowed by seven thin ears blasted by the east wind. And he woke up, and his heart was troubled.

In the morning he sent for all the magicians and wise men of Egypt, and he told them his dreams. And not one of them could say what they meant.

And that was when the chief cupbearer cleared his throat.

"I remember my offences today," he said. It is, by the way, one of the more graceful apologies in literature. He told Pharaoh about the young Hebrew in the prison, and the dreams, and how everything had turned out just as Joseph had said.

So Pharaoh sent for Joseph. And they brought him quickly out of the dungeon. And he shaved, and changed his clothes, and came in to Pharaoh. I always imagine him squinting. Two years in the dark, and now the full light of a palace.

"I have had a dream," said Pharaoh, "and there is no one who can interpret it. I have heard it said of you that when you hear a dream you can interpret it."

And Joseph said, "It is not in me. God will give Pharaoh a favourable answer."

Then he listened to the dreams, and told Pharaoh what they meant. Seven years of great plenty were coming to the land of Egypt, he said, and after them seven years of famine, so severe that the plenty would be forgotten. The dream was doubled, he said, because God had fixed the matter and would shortly bring it about.

And then Joseph did something the magicians had not. He gave advice. He said, let Pharaoh find a man who is discreet and wise, and set him over the land. Let him take a fifth of the harvest in the seven good years, and store the grain in the cities, so that the land may not perish in the famine.

And Pharaoh looked round at his servants and said, "Can we find a man like this, in whom is the Spirit of God?" And then he turned to Joseph and said, "Since God has shown you all this, there is none so discerning and wise as you. You shall be over my house, and all my people shall order themselves as you command."

He took the signet ring from his own hand and put it on Joseph's. He had him dressed in fine linen, and put a gold chain round his neck, and had him ride in the second chariot, with people calling out ahead of him. Joseph was thirty years old. Thirteen years before, he had been in a pit.

He was given an Egyptian name and an Egyptian wife, a woman named Asenath, and in time two sons. He named the first Manasseh, which sounds like the Hebrew for forgetting, because, he said, God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father's house. And the second he named Ephraim, which sounds like fruitful, because God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction.

I find those names very moving. In the first, I think you can hear that he has not really forgotten, any more than a man forgets a tooth that has been pulled. And in the second, you can hear the opposite, which is a man deciding that his life is not going to be only about what was done to him.

Then the seven good years came. The land brought forth in handfuls, the Bible says, and Joseph gathered up the grain like the sand of the sea, until he stopped counting, because it could not be counted. And the seven years of plenty ended, and the famine began, exactly as he had said.

Now. Famine does not stop at a border. It stretched across all the lands round about, and it reached Canaan, where an old man named Jacob was looking at a nearly empty granary.

"Why do you look at one another?" he said to his sons. "I have heard that there is grain in Egypt. Go down and buy some for us there, that we may live and not die."

So ten of the brothers set off. But Jacob kept the youngest, Benjamin, at home. He was the last son of Rachel, and the only one left. He had lost one of those, he thought, and he would not risk the other.

And so the brothers walked into Egypt, and they came in a long line to the man in charge of selling the grain to all the people of the land. And they bowed down to him with their faces to the ground.

Do you see what has happened? The sheaves are bowing down. It is the dream, at last, exactly as it was dreamed. And I think that if I had been Joseph, in that moment, I would have been struck dumb. I do not know whether he laughed or cried or went quite white. The Bible says only this. Joseph saw his brothers, and he knew them, but he treated them as strangers and spoke roughly to them.

And he remembered the dreams.

They did not know him. How could they? He had been a boy in a long-sleeved coat, and now he was a shaven Egyptian official in linen, speaking through an interpreter. They knew only that this was a great man, and that they were afraid of him.

"You are spies," said Joseph. "You have come to see where our land is weak."

"No, my lord," they said. "We have come to buy food. We are all sons of one man. We are honest men. Your servants are twelve brothers, the sons of one man in the land of Canaan, and behold, the youngest is this day with our father, and one is no more."

One is no more. They said it as a fact about the world, the way you might say a road is closed. And Joseph, standing there, heard it.

I think that is where the real story begins. Not with the dreams, and not with the pit, but here, in a hall, with a man of power watching to see what his brothers have become.

He put them in prison for three days, and on the third day he said, "Do this and you will live, for I fear God. If you are honest men, let one of your brothers be bound in your prison, and let the rest go and carry grain for the famine of your households. And bring your youngest brother to me, so your words will be verified."

And the brothers turned to each other and spoke in their own language, thinking he could not understand. "In truth we are guilty concerning our brother," they said, "in that we saw the distress of his soul, when he begged us for mercy, and we did not listen. That is why this distress has come upon us."

And Reuben said, "Did I not tell you not to sin against the boy? But you did not listen. Now there comes a reckoning for his blood."

They did not know that Joseph understood every word. He had been standing near them with the interpreter. And he turned away from them, and wept.

It is the first of many times he weeps in this story. A man with all the power in the world, going into a side room to be sick with feeling. And then he washed his face and came back, and took Simeon, and had him bound before their eyes.

He gave orders that their sacks be filled with grain, and that each man's silver be put back in his sack. And on the road, when one of them opened his sack at an inn to feed his donkey, there was the silver, right at the top. Their hearts failed them, the Bible says, and they turned trembling to one another and said, "What is this that God has done to us?"

I will go more quickly now, because the middle of the story is a long dance and the listener is, I hope, starting to feel sleepy.

The brothers got home. They told Jacob everything. And Jacob said, "You have bereaved me of my children. Joseph is no more, and Simeon is no more, and now you would take Benjamin. All this has come against me." And Reuben offered his own two sons as a pledge, and Jacob said, "My son shall not go down with you. If harm should happen to him, you would bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave."

But the famine did not care. The grain ran out. And at last Jacob said, with the weariness of a man who has no more arguments, "Go again, buy us a little food."

And this time it was Judah who stepped forward. The same Judah who had said, let us sell him. He said to his father, "Send the boy with me, and we will arise and go, that we may live and not die, both we and you and our little ones. I will be a pledge of his safety. From my hand you shall require him. If I do not bring him back to you and set him before you, then let me bear the blame forever."

Something has changed in Judah. He is not the man he was on that hillside. I think perhaps twenty years of looking at his father's face have done their work.

So Jacob sent them, with gifts, and double the silver, and with Benjamin. And he said, "May God Almighty grant you mercy before the man, that he may send back your other brother and Benjamin. And if I am bereaved of my children, I am bereaved."

When Joseph saw Benjamin, his own mother's son, his heart overflowed. He hurried out of the room, looking for a place to weep, and he went into his chamber, and wept there. Then he washed his face and came out and said, "Serve the food."

He had them to dinner at his own house. They were seated in order of age, from the eldest to the youngest, and they looked at one another in astonishment, for how could the Egyptian have known? And Benjamin's portion was five times as large as any of theirs.

And the Bible says they feasted and drank with him and were merry. I wonder what that evening was like, a table of men who did not know that one of them was their brother, laughing in a kind of nervous relief, while the host watched.

But Joseph was not finished. He wanted to know something. He wanted to know whether these men had changed. Whether, if one of them were in danger again, as he had been, they would leave him there.

So he gave a command to his steward. Fill the men's sacks with food, as much as they can carry, and put each man's silver in the mouth of his sack. And in the mouth of the youngest one's sack, put my silver cup.

The brothers set off at dawn, glad to be going home with grain and with Simeon and with Benjamin. They had not gone far when Joseph's steward overtook them and accused them of stealing the cup. "Whoever is found with it shall be my slave," he said, "and the rest of you shall go free."

They protested, as people do. "Behold, the silver that we found in the mouths of our sacks we brought back to you. How then should we steal? Whichever of your servants is found with it, let him die, and we also will be my lord's slaves."

The steward searched. He began with the eldest and ended with the youngest. And there, in Benjamin's sack, was the cup.

They tore their clothes. Every one of them. They loaded their donkeys again and went back to the city, and they came to Joseph's house and fell to the ground before him.

Think what he is offering them. It is the same trap, set in another country. An easy way to be free. Here is a favourite son of Jacob, and all you have to do to go home is leave him here. It is the pit again, and the traders. All they have to do is walk away.

"Far be it from me that I should do so," said Joseph. "Only the man in whose hand the cup was found shall be my slave. But as for you, go up in peace to your father."

And it is Judah who steps forward.

Judah's speech is one of the longest in Genesis, and one of the best. He does not argue about the cup. He does not say Benjamin is innocent, or that someone must have planted it. He simply tells the story. He tells of the old father, and of the son who is dead, and of the son who is left, and he says, "If I come to your servant my father, and the boy is not with us, then, as his life is bound up in the boy's life, as soon as he sees that the boy is not with us, he will die. And your servants will bring down the grey hairs of your servant our father with sorrow to the grave."

And then he says the thing that undoes everything.

"Now therefore, please let your servant remain instead of the boy as a servant to my lord, and let the boy go back with his brothers. For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? I fear to see the evil that would find my father."

You see what he has done. Years ago, he stood on a hillside and bargained away a brother. Now he stands in a hall and offers himself in a brother's place. Not as a plan. Not as a trick. Out of love for an old man, and for the boy, and out of whatever it is that grows in a person after twenty years of carrying a secret.

And Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him. He cried out, "Make everyone go out from me!"

So everyone went out. And when he was alone with his brothers, he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it.

And he said to his brothers, "I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?"

His brothers could not answer him, for they were dismayed at his presence.

I think it is the loudest silence in the Bible. Eleven men with their mouths open. The great Egyptian lord, whose face has been a mask of power for months, has dropped it, and underneath is the face of a seventeen-year-old boy, and they can see it, and they know him.

"Come near to me, please," said Joseph. And they came near. And he said, "I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt."

Now here is the sentence that, to me, makes this one of the greatest stories ever told.

"And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there are yet five years in which there will be neither ploughing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God."

He is not saying that what they did was fine. He is not saying it did not matter. He is saying that it was not the last word. The same God who was with him in the pit and the prison and the palace was already at work in the thing they had meant for harm. And he would not let it be turned into a reason for more harm.

And he fell on his brother Benjamin's neck and wept, and Benjamin wept on his. And he kissed all his brothers and wept over them. And after that his brothers talked with him.

After that, they talked with him. It is a very small sentence. Twenty years of silence, and then, simply, they talked.

The news reached Pharaoh's house, and Pharaoh was pleased. He told Joseph, "Say to your brothers, load your beasts and go to the land of Canaan, and take your father and your households, and come to me. I will give you the best of the land of Egypt, and you shall eat the fat of the land."

Joseph sent them off with wagons and provisions and new clothes for all of them. And to Benjamin he gave three hundred pieces of silver and five changes of clothes, which I suppose was an apology for the cup, and for the five times larger portion, and for everything. And as they were leaving, he said, with a small smile, "Do not quarrel on the way."

I like that. The big brother. It is as though, in all the weeping and forgiving, he has not lost his sense of what his brothers are like.

And they came to their father Jacob and said, "Joseph is still alive, and he is ruler over all the land of Egypt." And Jacob's heart went numb, for he did not believe them. But when they told him all the words of Joseph, and he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of their father Jacob revived. And Israel said, "It is enough. Joseph my son is still alive. I will go and see him before I die."

So he set out, and he came to Egypt with all that he had, and with his sons and grandsons, seventy persons in all. And Joseph made ready his chariot and went up to meet his father. He presented himself to him, and fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a good while.

"Now let me die," said Jacob, "since I have seen your face and know that you are still alive."

But he did not die just yet. He lived seventeen more years in the land of Goshen, in the best of the land, with his family round him. And before he died, Jacob blessed Joseph's sons, and then he blessed each of his own, and told them what would come to them. And he died, and Joseph fell on his father's face and wept over him and kissed him. And the Egyptians wept for him seventy days, and Joseph took his father home to Canaan and buried him in the cave where Abraham and Sarah lay.

There is one more part to the story, and I think it is the part I would most like you to take to bed with you.

When their father was dead, the brothers began to be afraid again. They said to one another, "It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him."

Isn't that a human thing? They had been forgiven, in tears, in front of Pharaoh's household, with wagons and silver and new clothes. They had lived for seventeen years in a land that Joseph had given them. And still, as soon as their father was gone, something in them said, that was only for his sake. Now it will come.

So they sent a message to Joseph. "Your father gave this command before he died. Say to Joseph, please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you." And then they came and fell down before him and said, "Behold, we are your servants."

And Joseph wept when they spoke to him.

I think he wept because he understood at last how long a wrong can go on being felt. That a forgiveness can be given, truly, and still not be believed. That the people who did the harm can go on carrying it, long after the one who suffered it has put it down.

"Fear not," he said. "Am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. So do not fear. I will provide for you and your little ones."

Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.

That is the whole of it. A man who was handed all the power he could ever want to pay his brothers back, and who used it to feed them.

Let us come down now, slowly, to the end.

Joseph lived in Egypt to be a hundred and ten years old. He saw his great-grandchildren, the Bible says, and they were born on his knees. And when he knew his time was near, he called his brothers and said, "I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob."

And then he asked something of them. He made the sons of Israel swear an oath. "God will surely visit you," he said, "and you shall carry up my bones from here."

So Joseph died, and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.

And I always think that is such a quiet and faithful ending. A man who had been the second most powerful person in the greatest kingdom of the world, who could have had a tomb like a mountain, asking only to be carried home when the time came. Centuries later, the book of Exodus tells us, when the people of Israel finally left Egypt, Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, as he had sworn. And Joshua buried them at Shechem, in the fields not far from the place where, long ago, a boy had walked into the hills looking for his brothers.

The road went full circle.

The Church has always loved this story. In the Orthodox Church, the Patriarch Joseph is remembered at the very start of Holy Week, on Great and Holy Monday, as one who was betrayed and sold and then raised up to save his people. And in the Catholic Church, the story is read in the second week of Lent, when the Church is thinking about forgiveness and how hard it can be. Saint Stephen tells it in the Acts of the Apostles, and the Fathers of the Church, such as Saint Ambrose and Saint John Chrysostom, were fond of it. Many of them saw in Joseph a likeness of Christ, who was also beloved of a father, also sold for silver, also handed over by his own, and who raised up the very people who wronged him. That is a reading, a tradition of interpretation, and not a thing the text itself says, but it is an old and a beautiful one. And the line that comes closest to it is the one we have just heard: you meant evil, but God meant it for good.

So let us finish with the quiet part.

It is evening in Egypt, a long time ago. The great river is slow and wide, with the last of the light lying on it like a sheet of beaten copper. On the bank, a man is sitting in the open air, a grey man now, in plain linen, with the signet ring in his lap. He has been busy all day. The granaries are full. The people have been fed. The records have been kept.

He is looking at the water going by, and thinking of nothing in particular. A hillside. A pit. A prison. A palace. A table full of men. The road, going on and on.

Behind him, in the house, there is the sound of children laughing, and a woman calling them in. And further off, in the land of Goshen, a few hundred miles of flat green fields away, his brothers' sheep are settling down for the night, and his brothers are sitting at their doors, talking, as brothers do, about nothing very much.

No one is angry. Not tonight.

You do not have to understand all of it. You do not have to see how the pit and the prison and the long forgetting could ever be turned to good. You only have to know, tonight, that it is possible. That the story is not finished with you. That the hand that is holding you now is the same hand that held a boy in a hole in the ground, and that held him in a cell, and held him in the palace, and held, all along, a family that did not deserve it.

And so, breathe out. Let go of whatever you are holding that you cannot put right tonight. It will keep until morning. Someone else is awake, and watching over it.

The river goes on. The stars come out over Egypt. Count them if you can.

Before we go, a few notes for the curious.

The story you have just heard comes from the book of Genesis, chapters thirty-seven and thirty-nine to fifty. It is Scripture in both the Catholic and the Orthodox Church, and I have tried to tell it as it stands, though with some of the long middle quickened up. What is invented is the colour. The weather on the road, the thoughts of the brothers, the sound of the pit, and the small conversations that fill in the gaps are ours. The great speeches are Scripture, and I have kept them as close to the text as an English retelling for the ear allows.

I have been deliberately brief on the story of Judah and Tamar, which the Bible tells in chapter thirty-eight, in the middle of the story of Joseph, and which is not a bedtime tale. It is there, and it is worth reading in daylight. I have also kept the account of Potiphar's wife short and gentle, which is a choice for the sake of the listener and not a softening of what the Bible says.

The reading of Joseph as a figure of Christ is a tradition of the Fathers. I have given it as a tradition and no more. And the word for Joseph's garment is uncertain in the Hebrew, as I said, so the coat of many colours and the coat with long sleeves are both fair guesses.

That's the story of the Patriarch Joseph for tonight. The Orthodox Church remembers him on Great and Holy Monday, and the Catholic Church reads his story in Lent. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

May the God of Joseph, who is with us in the pit and the prison and the palace alike, bring good out of what was meant for harm, give you the grace to forgive and the grace to be forgiven, and give you tonight a deep and quiet sleep. Goodnight, and God bless.

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