2. And he wept aloud. The Hebrew says literally, “and he gave his voice in weeping.” This is the third, climactic weeping of Joseph: now he no longer turns aside to weep in secret but sobs uncontrollably in the presence of his brothers, so audibly that he is heard by the Egyptians outside and heard all the way to the palace of Pharaoh. As in English, “house” may refer either to the physical structure or to the people associated with it.

3. I am Joseph. Is my father still alive? His very first utterance, after his sobs have subsided, is the essential revelation of identity, a two-word (in the Hebrew) bombshell tossed at his brothers. He follows this by asking whether his father is alive, as though he could not altogether trust the assurances they had given him about this when he questioned them in his guise of Egyptian viceroy. His repeated reference to “my father” serves double duty: the first-person singular possessive expresses his sense of personal connection with old Jacob (he is, after all, my father, he is saying to his brothers); but it is also idiomatic usage for the familiar “Father” in biblical Hebrew (rather like ʾabba in Aramaic and later Hebrew).

4. And Joseph said to his brothers, “Come close to me, pray.” The purblindness to which a mechanical focus on source criticism can lead is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the contention of some critics that this verse reflects a different source from the preceding verse because it is a “doublet” of it. What should be obvious is that this repeated speech is a brilliant realization of the dramatic moment. When Joseph first reveals himself to his brothers, they are, quite understandably, “dismayed.” And so he must speak again, first asking them to draw close. (The proposal of the Midrash Bereishit Rabba that he invites them to come close in order to show them that he is circumcised is of course fanciful, but the closing of physical space does reflect his sense that he must somehow bridge the enormous distance he has maintained between himself and them in his Egyptian persona.)

I am Joseph your brother whom you sold into Egypt. The qualifying clause Joseph now adds to his initial “I am Joseph” is surely a heart-stopper for the brothers, and could be construed as the last—inadvertent?—gesture of his test of them. Their most dire imaginings of retribution could easily follow from these words, but instead, Joseph immediately proceeds in the next sentence to reassure them.

5. do not be incensed with yourselves. The literal Hebrew wording is “let it not be incensed in your eyes.”

for sustenance God has sent me before you. Joseph’s speech is a luminous illustration of the Bible’s double system of causation, human and divine. Commentators have tended to tilt the balance to one side, making Joseph a mouthpiece of piety here. His recognition of a providential plan may well be admirable from the viewpoint of monotheistic faith, but there is no reason to assume that Joseph has lost the sense of his own brilliant initiative in all that he has accomplished, and so when he says “God” (ʾelohim, which could also suggest something more general like “providence” or “fate”), he also means Joseph. “Before you” is the first intimation that he intends the whole clan to come down to Egypt after him.

8. father to Pharaoh. The obvious meaning of “father” is “authority,” and there are biblical parallels for this sense of the term. It is a matter of debate among specialists whether the term also reflects an actual Egyptian administrative title. Joseph’s characterization of his political power moves outward through concentric circles from Pharaoh to the court (“all his house”) to the whole land of Egypt.

9. Thus says your son Joseph. This is the so-called messenger formula that is regularly used in biblical Hebrew as a kind of salutation to introduce letters or orally conveyed messages.

10. the land of Goshen. “Land” here obviously means a region, not a country. The area referred to is the rich pastureland of the Nile delta, which would also be close to the border of the Sinai. In historical fact, Semitic nomads from the Sinai were granted permission by the Egyptian government to graze their flocks in this region.

11. lest you lose all. The Hebrew verb here has often been confused with another one, with which it shares two consonants, meaning “to become poor.” The literal meaning of the verb used by Joseph is “to be inherited,” that is, to lose all of one’s possessions, either through bankruptcy or by being conquered by an enemy.

12. it is my very mouth that speaks to you. As Abraham ibn Ezra nicely observed, until the crucial moment when Joseph said, “Clear out everyone around me,” all his communications with the brothers would have been through an interpreter, as we were reminded in 42:23. Now he has been speaking to them directly in their native Hebrew, a fact they may have barely assimilated in their dumbfounded condition, and of which he reminds them now at the end of his speech as confirmation of his identity.

14. and he wept, and Benjamin wept. After the three times Joseph wept apart from his brothers, there is at last a mutual weeping in the reunion of the two sons of Rachel.

15. And after that, his brothers spoke with him. The brothers’ silence through Joseph’s long speech is an eloquent expression of how overwhelmed they are by this amazing revelation. Only now, after he embraces them and weeps over them, are they able to speak, but the writer preserves the dramatic asymmetry between Joseph and his brothers by merely referring to their speaking without assigning actual dialogue to them.

18. the best of the land of Egypt. The source critics have noted an apparent contradiction with Joseph’s instructions, which are to settle specifically in the region of Goshen—unless one construes “the best of the land” as a reference to that fertile area, something supported by 47:11.

live off the fat of the land. The Hebrew says literally, “eat the fat of the land.”

19. And you, charge them. The Masoretic Text has “And you [singular] are charged,” which is a little incoherent in light of what follows. Both the Septuagint and the Vulgate read “charge them.” Evidently, Joseph is enjoined by Pharaoh to transmit this royal directive to his brothers conferring special status on their clan (Nahum Sarna).

20. regret not your belongings. The literal meaning of the Hebrew idiom used is “let not your eye spare.”

21. as Pharaoh had ordered. This reflects the Hebrew locution that means literally “according to Pharaoh’s mouth.”

22. he gave changes of garments, and to Benjamin he gave three hundred pieces of silver. The bestowal of garments, as Nahum Sarna notes, is a kind of antithetical response to Joseph’s having been stripped of his garment. The regal amount of silver given to Benjamin is the final gesture of “restitution” for the twenty pieces of silver the brothers took for the sale of Joseph.

23. as follows. Because a whole list of items is being introduced, the narrator announces it with kezoʾt, a term prefaced to catalogues or inventories.

24. Do not be perturbed on the journey. There has been some dispute about the meaning of the verb here. It is occasionally used in contexts that associate it with anger, and so many interpreters have imagined that Joseph is warning his brothers not to yield to mutual recrimination and perhaps fall to blows on the way home. But the primary meaning of the verb is “to quake” or “to shake,” either physically (as a mountain in an earthquake) or emotionally (as a person trembling with fear), and it is the antonym of being tranquil or at peace. In all likelihood, Joseph is reassuring his brothers that they need not fear any lurking residue of vengefulness on his part that would turn the journey homeward into a trap.

26. his heart stopped. Translations like “his heart fainted” (King James Version), “his heart was numb” (Speiser and New Jewish Publication Society), and “he was stunned” (Revised English Bible) blunt the force of the original. The Hebrew verb plainly means to stop, or more precisely, to intermit. Judah had warned that the loss of Benjamin would kill the old man. Now the tremendous shock of this news about Joseph, which at first he cannot believe—does he imagine his less-than-trustworthy sons are perpetrating a cruel hoax?—induces a physical syncope.

27. And they spoke to him all the words of Joseph . . . and he saw the wagons. Jacob’s incredulity begins to yield to the circumstantial account of Joseph’s own story that his sons give him. Then he fully registers the presence of the wagons, which would have been oxen-drawn vehicles of a distinctive Egyptian design that would not normally be seen in Canaan and that mere foreign buyers of grain would surely not be able to obtain. At this point his “spirit. . . . revived,” that is, came back to life: he emerges from the state of temporary heart failure, or heart pause, triggered by the astounding report. One should note that the only hint of direct discourse given to the brothers in this scene is “Joseph is still alive” (just three words, four syllables, in the Hebrew). The effect is to keep them in the background, even though they are actually speaking to Jacob. Joseph looms in the foreground in the first half of the chapter, as does Jacob—the father from whom he has been so long separated—in the second half.

28. Joseph my son is still alive. Let me go see him before I die. The wonderful poignancy of these words should not deflect us from noting that Jacob is again invoking a kind of self-defining motif. Ever since Joseph’s disappearance twenty-two years earlier in narrated time, he has been talking about going down to the grave. By now, he has in fact attained advanced old age (see 47:9), and so the idea that he has little time left is quite reasonable. The brief seizure he has just undergone is of course evidence of his physical frailty. Jacob’s story, like David’s, is virtually unique in ancient literature in its searching representation of the radical transformations a person undergoes in the slow course of time. The powerful young man who made his way across the Jordan to Mesopotamia with only his walking staff, who wrestled with stones and men and divine beings, is now an old man tottering on the brink of the grave, bearing the deep wounds of his long life.