Reflections on Genesis 50:15-21″The Trickiness of Forgiveness”

I have long believed that the famous forgiveness that Joseph offers his terrified brothers at the end of the saga of the book of Genesis is in the main a failure and may in fact be no real forgiveness at all. Forgiveness is tricky business. The word’s English synonyms are illuminative of this trickiness. My thesaurus lists the following: pardon, excuse, allow, indulge, condone, vindicate, overlook, ignore, disregard, pass over. The related word “forgiveness” yields some other words: reprieve, absolution, remission, acquittal, amnesty, exculpation, exoneration, mercy. I would argue that most of these words are used in contexts where the one who offers forgiveness to another is in a position of power over the other. In other words, the forgiver feels wronged, and suggests that the person who did the wrong to the forgiver should simply forget what was done. And once the forgetting occurs, the two involved in the interchange may simply move on with their lives, either together or not.

Two of the words from the first list strike me as especially interesting: indulge and condone. To indulge someone is to accept the behaviors and not necessarily to correct them. If a child weeps and demands a cookie, I may simply say no, and move on, indulging the behavior as typically the actions of a child. However, I may not condone the behavior; I may not choose to accept it. I may try to correct it, not wishing to endure such behavior again. In this case, I think forgiveness involves correction and, hence, is not really mercy or amnesty, as those are usually understood. Neither is it fully acquittal, since there is still something that the one forgiven must do to continue in a state of exoneration or reprieve. Let us see how the case of Joseph’s so-called forgiveness of his brothers fits into this brief discussion.

No reader of this long story can be allowed to forget the dreadful game of cat and mouse that Joseph played with his desperate brothers when the come to Egypt to buy food for their starving family. The brothers thought that their tattle-tailing little prig of a brother was long dead in the slave pits of Egypt. Little could they imagine in their wildest nightmares that the awesome Egyptian they were forced to negotiate with about the food was none other than that same brother. He was dressed in Egyptian finery and was speaking fluent Egyptian, conversing with them through an interpreter. Most importantly, he knew immediately who they were, but instead of revealing who he was to them, he played with them for a very long period, imprisoning one of them while sending the others back to their father, putting the money they dutifully paid for the food back into their saddlebags, and then accusing them of theft, demanding the presence of the now youngest boy, then hiding his famous divining cup in the sack of that same boy, accusing him of theft, and threatening murder for all of them. It is a most cruel charade, and when Joseph finally does reveal his identity to them, they are struck mute in horror (Gen.45:3).

So now at the end of the tale, the brothers are hardly reconciled to Joseph, despite his theological claims that “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant” (Gen.45:7). Jacob, the patriarch has now died and been buried in Israel, attended by all of the brothers. But nothing has been resolved between them. “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and returns to us all the evil that we troubled him with” (Gen.50:15)? And so they lie, saying that Jacob, before he died, had told the brothers to tell Joseph that he, Jacob, begged him to forgive them for the crime and trouble they had brought to him. There is no place in the story that has anything like that on the lips of Jacob. Joseph’s response? “Joseph wept when they spoke to him” (50:17). Joseph has wept several times earlier in the tale, but that weeping has primarily been done in secret. But these tears are quite public; all the brothers are witnesses to these tears. And what is their source? I can only imagine that Joseph now weeps because he realizes that his earlier attempts to reconcile himself to his brothers have not worked. The pleasant and sweeping theological claims of Gen.45 and his promises to care for them in Egypt have done nothing to provide a forgiveness that they can accept. They still fear Joseph; they do not love him.

This is so because of his immense power over them, not only physically, but emotionally, as well. They know they are guilty of a great wrong against him, and he knows it, too. When he weeps here, they all join him in weeping, but the causes of the tears are quite different. Joseph weeps because he has failed in forgiveness and reconciliation; the brothers weep because they are still afraid of this terribly powerful Egyptian/Hebrew. All Joseph can do is revert to more sweeping theology and to vow to care for them. “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God” (Gen.50:19)? That is a very good question. To his brothers, Joseph might as well be in the place of God, such power he wields over them. And he may say all day not to fear him, but what else can they do? He has played them like a drum, and that will never be forgotten. He may claim to condone, claim to forget, claim to exculpate them, but it is extremely hard to accept such claims from such a man as this.

“Have no fear,” he repeats, “I myself (he emphasizes his power by using both pronoun and verbal form) will provide for you and your little ones” (Gen.50:21). The scene closes with the narrator saying, literally, “He changed his mind (or “was sorry”) about them, and spoke to them according to their heart” (Gen.50:21). This narrative comment is ambiguous in the extreme. Does it mean he was sorry for them, and spoke in ways he thought they would like? Or does it mean that he is trying another tactic with them, changing his mind about earlier comments he has made, and speaking to them in ways they might respond to? Whatever it means, Joseph never reconciles with his brothers fully, because when he dies, though he asks the brothers to take his bones up with them back to Israel, the text never says they did that deed. Unlike the death of Jacob, Joseph is “placed in a coffin in Egypt,” the final words of Genesis.

Forgiveness is a tricky business. Joseph’s attempts to forgive his brothers, if that is what they are, just do not work; they remain unreconciled. Can a person of great power ever actually forgive those who may have wronged her, or is the act of forgiveness tainted by that power and by any wrong the person of power may have committed against the other? I have no easy answers to any of this, but I do think that the story of Joseph and his brothers is a living testimony to the stark difficulties of any act of forgiveness.