1. put each man’s silver in the mouth of his bag. This detail is a small puzzle because nothing is made of the discovery of silver when the majordomo searches through the bags. This seeming discrepancy has led critics to write off the return of the silver as a later addition made to harmonize this episode with the one in chapter 42, but that is by no means a necessary conclusion. Joseph’s scheme, after all, is to make the brothers feel they are trapped in a network of uncanny circumstances they can neither control nor explain. A repetition of the device of returning the silver would nicely serve this purpose. The majordomo, however, is exclusively focused on the retrieval of a particular silver object, the divining goblet, and so does not even deign to mention the weights of silver in the bags, as though their appearance there were a matter of course, whatever consternation it might cause the brothers. Meanwhile, as in dream logic—or perhaps one should say, guilt logic—the brothers, who once took silver when they sold Joseph down into Egypt, seem helpless to “return” the silver to Egypt, as much as they try. The returned silver, moreover, makes the purported stealing of the silver goblet look all the more heinous.

2. And my goblet, the silver goblet. The double formulation highlights both the fact that the goblet is Joseph’s special possession and that it is made of silver.

3. they and their donkeys. Again the donkeys are tacked onto the end of the sentence, perhaps because the donkeys are carrying the packs, which will have to be set down on the ground and then reloaded (verses 11 and 12), in one of which the goblet has been secreted.

5. Is not this the one from which my lord drinks, and in which he always divines? The fact that the goblet is referred to only by a demonstrative pronoun (“the one from which”) may reflect a flaunting of the assumption that, as all concerned should recognize, the only thing at issue here is the goblet. The brothers may well have seen Joseph drinking from the goblet at the dinner the day before, whereas its use for divination would have been news to them. The probable mechanism of divination in a goblet would be to interpret patterns on the surface of the liquid it contained or in drops running down its sides. Divination would have been a plausible activity on the part of a member of the high Egyptian bureaucracy, with its technology of soothsaying, but the emphasis it is given here is also linked with Joseph’s demonstrated ability to predict the future and his superiority of knowledge in relation to his brothers.

9. He of your servants with whom it be found shall die. This pronouncement of a death sentence for stealing may be excessive in relation to the standards of ancient Near Eastern law, though Gerhard von Rad has proposed that stealing a sacred object would have been deemed a capital crime. The brothers’ words are quite similar to those spoken by their father to Laban (31:32) before he rummaged through the belongings of Jacob’s wives in search of his missing household gods. It is a teasing parallel with crucial differences: Laban does not find what he is looking for, but the death sentence pronounced on the actually guilty party—Benjamin’s mother, Rachel—appears to be carried out later when she dies bearing him.

and . . . we shall become slaves to our lord. This gratuitous additional condition, a reflex of their perfect confidence in their innocence of the theft, carries forward the great theme of moral restitution: the brothers who sold Joseph into slavery now offer themselves as slaves. The term ʿeved means both servant and slave, and the speeches in this episode pointedly play the two meanings against each other. When the brothers refer to themselves as “your servants,” they are clearly using courtly language of self-abasement; when they, or Judah, offer to be slaves, they are proposing to surrender their freedom and enter into a condition of actual servitude.

10. Even so, as by your words, let it be. These first words of response by the majordomo may constitute a kind of bureaucratic, or legal, flourish. He begins by seeming to concur in the stern sentence the brothers have pronounced on themselves should the goblet be found among them; but, having accepted the principle they enunciated that the guilty party should be punished and a distinction made between him and his brothers, the majordomo modifies the sentence to make it more reasonable—the guilty brother will be made a slave and the others allowed to go free.

14. And Judah with his brothers came. The Hebrew says, “Judah and his brothers” but uses a characteristic grammatical device, a verb conjugated in the singular instead of the plural, to indicate that the first-stated noun (Judah) is the principal agent, the thematically focused subject of the verb. In a moment, Judah will step forward and become the spokesman for all the brothers, the ringing voice of their collective conscience.

15. Did you not know that a man like me would surely divine? Like much else in this story, Joseph’s words are contrived to yield a double meaning. He is saying they should have known that a person of his standing would practice divination and so the goblet they purloined was no mere silver cup but a dedicated instrument of divination. But, in keeping with the sustained theme of his knowledge and his brothers’ ignorance, he is also suggesting that a man of his powers would be able to divine such a theft, and its perpetrator.

16. God has found out your servants’ crime. In this case, the double meaning expresses a buried psychological dimension in Judah’s plea to Joseph. On the surface, he is simply conceding guilt as his only recourse because one of his brothers had been caught with the evidence and he has no counterarguments to offer. But he speaks out of the consciousness of a real guilt incurred by him and his brothers more than two decades earlier—compare their response at their first detention, 42:21—and thus expresses a real sense that God has at last exacted retribution for that act of fraternal betrayal. He of course cannot guess that the man whom he is addressing perfectly understands both references. One should note that guilt is assumed by Judah in the first-person plural and is not restricted to “the one in whose hand the goblet was found.”

Here we are, slaves to my lord. Again, an unconscious principle of retribution asserts itself: the ten who condemned Joseph to slavery offer themselves as slaves to him, together with Benjamin.

in whose hand the goblet was found. In fact, it was found in the mouth of his bag. But the reiterated image of the hand holding the goblet links up with all the previous focusing on hands in the story and stresses the idea of agency and responsibility.

17. he shall become my slave. This is, of course, the last turn of the screw in Joseph’s testing of his brothers: will they allow Rachel’s other son to be enslaved, as they did with her elder son?

20. an aged father and a young child of his old age. The phrase suggests the intimate connection between father and child (“aged,” “old age”) as well as Benjamin’s vulnerability as youngest (the Hebrew for “young” also means “little”).

his brother being dead, he alone is left of his mother, and his father loves him. Either Judah assumes that after more than twenty years of slavery in a foreign land Joseph is likely to be dead or he states Joseph’s absence as death for the sake of rhetorical simplicity, to make clear that the son is irrevocably lost to his doting father. What is remarkable is that now Judah can bring himself, out of concern for his old father, to accept the painful fact of paternal favoritism (“and his father loves him”) that was the root of the brothers’ hostility to Joseph.

21. that I may set my eyes on him. This phrase, which in other contexts can mean something like showing royal favor toward someone, and which for Joseph has the personal meaning of wanting to behold his full brother, momentarily seems to have been given a sinister twist by the course of events.

22. The lad cannot leave his father. Although Benjamin is considerably beyond adolescence, “lad” (naʿar), as in a number of other notable occurrences, is a designation that suggests tenderness, and perhaps the vulnerability of the person so designated, and Judah also uses it here because Benjamin is the youngest. Joseph, it should be noted, had coldly referred to the purportedly guilty Benjamin as “the man” (verse 17).

Should he leave his father, he would die. The translation reflects the ambiguity of the Hebrew, and one may be skeptical of the often made claim that the second “he” must refer to Jacob. It seems more likely that this is a studied ambiguity on Judah’s part: he leaves it to Joseph to decide whether the old man would die if he were separated from Benjamin, or whether Benjamin could not survive without his father, or whether both dire possibilities might be probable.

25. Go back, buy us some food. Judah quotes Jacob’s words to his sons (43:2) verbatim. The report of their response in the next verse is a more approximate quotation.

27. two did my wife bear me. In Judah’s report, Jacob speaks characteristically as though Rachel were his only wife. Judah appears now to accept this outrageous favoritism as part of what his father is, part of the father he must still love.

28. he’s been torn to shreds, and I have not seen him since. In the first clause, Jacob is represented as quoting verbatim his actual response to Joseph’s supposed death, yet the second clause has the look of clinging to the hope that Joseph has merely disappeared but has not been killed.

31. when he saw the lad was not with us. The Masoretic Text lacks “with us,” though it is reflected in the Septuagint and in one version of the Samaritan Bible.

32. For your servant became pledge. Judah then proceeds to quote the actual formula of his pledge of surety to Jacob. As many commentators have noted, his invocation of his pledge is a way of explaining why he should have put himself forward as spokesman for the brothers.

33. let your servant, pray, stay instead of the lad as a slave. Judah, who conceived the plan of selling Joseph into slavery, now comes around 180 degrees by offering himself as a slave in place of Benjamin.

34. Let me see not the evil that would find out my father. This of course stands in stark contrast to his willingness years before to watch his father writhe in anguish over Joseph’s supposed death. The entire speech, as these concluding words suggest, is at once a moving piece of rhetoric and the expression of a profound inner change. Joseph’s “testing” of his brothers is thus also a process that induces the recognition of guilt and leads to psychological transformation.