Opus 2025-155: Peak Personalities: Joseph

Certain individuals stand out in the history of salvation, the Bible.  The one I am fixated on today is Joseph.  Joseph fits the description of a paragon of virtue.

The question I have is where did Joseph get his instruction manual?  How do he know what was right and what was wrong?  At this point in time there was no evidence of any written law.  Moses was yet to come.  If anything, it would’ve only been oral tradition.  But Moses was not raised in a home of the Hebrews and the Hebrews themselves didn’t have the law at that point.  I would say that the Children of Israel didn’t even know what was moral and what was not moral.

We have the cases of Joseph interpreting dreams.  That obviously took the intervention of God into his life to give him those insights.  But where did he learn to resist Potiphar’s wife?  Where did he learn the virtue and integrity that put him second in control of Egypt?

I don’t think there’s any evidence in the account of him having a conversation with God like Abraham or Moses.

One of the lessons that we can get from studying the life of Joseph or any of the other early Bible figures is that everything is not recorded.  God and Joseph may have had many awesome discussions.  God may have revealed to him many exciting things.  We just don’t have a record of it.  That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.  Remember that the Bible is here not to satisfy our curiosity, but to give us what we need to know for salvation.

It is possible that the conversations between God and the patriarchs were so common that they didn’t seem out of the ordinary, so they weren’t written down.

It is possible that there was such an element of common sense in those days that you didn’t need to tell people to take an umbrella with them to work on cloudy days.  You didn’t need to tell them to keep their gas tank more than half full.  You didn’t need to remind them to wash their hands after powdering their nose.  Keep in mind that writing existed, but it was not a matter of typing some words in and having auto-spell or of having dictation copied down by an algorithm.  You had to make your ink.  You have to sharpen your quill.  You might’ve had to pluck the chicken to get the quill.  You may have had to go out and harvest the papyrus or kill the lamb for the parchment.  You didn’t waste your time writing down things that were obvious.

However it materialized, Joseph had the knowledge he needed to be a good example for the rest of us.  May we be so blessed and be such a blessing.

homo unius libri