“There was a young Hebrew man with us in the prison who was a slave of the captain of the guard. We told him our dreams, and he told us what each of our dreams meant.”  (Genesis 41:12, bolding mine)

The following verse occurs in the Joseph Narrative in Genesis in the Bible.  Joseph is a rags-to-riches story.  In it, Joseph who is a young son to an old man who favors him over his brothers, moves from being a rather arrogant tattle-tale, to being second-in-command  of the most powerful empire of the ancient world—Egypt.  The prelude to Joseph’s elevation is anything but promising.  He is sold into slavery in Egypt, and accused of attempted rape by his master’s wife.  (She was actually trying to seduce him, but he refused.  There are some men with integrity.  Not many, perhaps, but some.)

In prison, Joseph became a prison trustee.  As such, he seems to have really cared about his fellow prisoners.  When he saw two of them, the baker and the cupbearer, looking especially gloomy one morning, he asked them why.  It seems that they had both had disturbing dreams the night before.  Joseph had correctly interpreted the dreams.

Fast forward two years, assuming that you can actually “fast forward” in prison.  Joseph is still in prison.  Pharaoh has two disturbing dreams in one night, and none of the magicians and diviners in Egypt know quite what to make of the dreams.  Pharaoh calls for his cupbearer to bring him some wine—probably to settle his nerves.  The cupbearer remembered Joseph, and speaks of the dream interpreter he had met in prison.

I’ve read this story many times.  I thought I knew it pretty well.  However, I noticed something different this time.  It is about how the cupbearer described Joseph to Pharaoh.

“There was a young Hebrew man with us in the prison who was a slave of the captain of the guard. We told him our dreams, and he told us what each of our dreams meant.”  (Genesis 41:12, bolding mine)

The cupbearer does not refer to Joseph as his fellow-prisoner, but as “a slave of the captain of the guard.”  The description of the cupbearer might easily be interpreted as meaning that Joseph was not in prison, but rather was at the prison in his “official” capacity as “a servant/slave of the captain of the guard.”

Meier Sternberg has a wonderful title for a chapter in his book, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative.   One chapter is entitled “Between the Truth and the Whole Truth.”[1]  It would seem that the cupbearer was speaking the truth, but not (perhaps) the whole truth about Joseph.

While we don’t know precisely why the cupbearer described Joseph in this manner, we are told that he did so.  This provokes questions that probably have no answers.  Was the cupbearer thinking that Pharaoh might be more likely to listen to the servant/slave of the captain of the guard, than he would to a garden-variety prisoner?

Or did the cupbearer not think of Joseph as a prisoner, but as the servant/slave of the captain of the guard?  In the ancient world, to be a slave of a person in a high position was, by its very nature, to have an important status.

I wonder how Joseph thought of himself?  Did he think of himself as a prisoner, or as something more?

The scriptural text does not tell us, but being brought to a sudden halt by these questions was good for me.  These thoughts invited me to think about how I think about and speak of other people.  Do I think of them in terms of their weaknesses or their strengths?  Do I think of what they can do, or what they can’t do?

And, of course, there is the question of how I think of myself.  How do I think of and speak about myself.  Am I “just a . . . .”?  Or do I say, “I am a . . . !”?  Do I recognize that I am and everyone else is, at least, potentially, a servant/slave of the King of kings?

[1] Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University, 1985), 230-263.