Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: After all the difficulties of reading an Epistle, I thought it would be fun to read another ancient Bible story, and since we left off studying the story of Abraham during the life of Jacob, it seems like a good idea to read the story of Joseph. (However, we are going to take Wedenesdays and Sundays off, to study New Testament excerpts, to give us some variety.) Not many of us are too terribly clear about Joseph. We might remember taking out our crayons in Sunday school, to draw a "coat of many colors", or remember that he went to Egypt for a while. It's a good story, though, and important in understanding the continuum of Hebrew history. For where Exodus is the story of how Moses brought the Jews out of Egypt, Joseph is the story of how they came to be there. The Pentateuch is one of very few good narrative histories that exists of events before 1500 B.C., and the only one about the lower Middle East. While secular scholars sometimes spend their lives trying to prove that it is fictional, or "mythical", I don't believe them. There are no hard facts to disprove anything in it. The most common attack is that, say, there is no other record or evidence of such-and-such a town where Abraham is said to have lived; and yet, every once in a while, archaeologists will "discover" a site that shows that the skeptics were wrong, and the Bible is right. Genesis and Exodus are unique; they were preserved and handed down as a living part of Hebrew culture, because the Hebrews themselves were unique. They were chosen by God to receive His word and bring it to us. There are parts of Genesis that archaeologists now admit are true, which appear in no other contemporary writing. Jacob was also known as "Israel", and it is he for whom Israel is named. He was the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, and was the third and final patriarch of the Hebrews. He had twelve sons — of whom Joseph is one — who became the patriarchs of twelve great tribes, the Tribes of Israel. So the story of Joseph is the story of one of Jacob/Israel's twelve sons. It is the point where God's promise to Abraham begins to be fulfilled, for the great nation that Abraham was to found begins to grow in size and organization. Keeping track of Jacob's wives is tricky. He was supposed to marry Leah, but loved her sister, Rachel. Suffice it to say that Jacob eventually took both of them as wives. Then, Rachel and Leah found additional wives for Jacob to increase the size of the family: Bilhah and Zilpah. Their children were considered fully legitimate, so the twelve tribes of Israel had four mothers. But Rachel, the wife of Jacob's heart, had only two of the twelve sons, Joseph and Benjamin; and this will come to play an important part of our story.