Tamar, and Joseph’s Rise in Egypt

At about this same time Judah, Jacob’s son, married Sava, a Canaanite woman. By her he had three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. Er took Tamar as his concubine. When Er died, Onan took his brother’s wife, and he is said to have been destroyed by God because he spilled his seed on the ground. Then Tamar put on the dress of a prostitute, lay with her brother-in-law, and bore him two sons. At their birth there was this remarkable thing: when one of the boys was being born, the midwife tied a scarlet thread on his hand to show which of them was born first; but he drew back again into his mother’s womb, and was born the last of the two. The children were named Perez and Zerah. [a]

Joseph, meanwhile, was treated kindly by the royal governor who had bought him for a sum of money, and was made manager of his house and household. But by his remarkable good looks he had drawn the eyes of his master’s wife. Gripped madly by that shameful passion, she made advances to him more than once; and when he would not give in to her desires, she disgraced him with the charge of a crime he had not committed, complaining to her husband that he had tried to violate her. So Joseph was thrown into prison.

Two of the king’s servants were in the same prison. They told Joseph their dreams, and he interpreted them as pointing to the future: one of them, he said, would be put to death, and the other pardoned. And so it happened. Then, two years later, the king too had a dream. When the wise men of the Egyptians could not explain it, the king’s servant who had been set free from prison told the king that Joseph was a wonderful interpreter of dreams. So Joseph was brought out of prison and interpreted the king’s dream for him: for the next seven years the land would be extremely fertile, but in the years that followed there would be famine. The king was alarmed by this terrifying news, and seeing that there was a divine spirit in Joseph, he put him in charge of the food supply and made him his equal in governing.

Then Joseph, while grain was plentiful throughout Egypt, gathered an immense quantity of it and, by adding to the number of granaries, made provision against the coming famine. At that time the hope and safety of Egypt rested on him alone. About then Asenath bore him two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. He himself was thirty years old when he received the chief power from the king; for he had been sold by his brothers when he was seventeen.