Week 4: Raised Up By God

Two years after the cupbearer forgot him, Joseph is brought up out of the pit in a single morning, and Genesis 41 asks what thirteen years down have made of him. Pharaoh dreams twice, Egypt's wise men have nothing, and a man protecting his job finally remembers a Hebrew who was good with dreams. Shaved and dressed, standing in front of a king who thought he was a god, Joseph answers the compliment with one word and hands God the credit before he has heard a thing. The interpretation makes him the second man in Egypt, and Egypt goes to work on him at once: a ring, fine linen, a chariot, a new name, a wife from the house of the sun god. He wears all of it and names his sons in Hebrew.

This lesson pays off the third pair of dreams and the rule that a doubled dream is a fixed one, follows the garments and the bowing into a country that kneels to him in the street, and closes Part One where Genesis does: with a man at the top of the world, a son named Forget, and a famine reaching the family he says he has forgotten.