What Profit for Us? Remembering the Story of Joseph (review)

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 301 Reviews WHAT PROFIT FOR US? REMEMBERING THE STORY OF JOSEPH. By Barbara Green. Pp. vi + 234. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998. Paper, $28.50. The purpose behind this book is "to offer adult, sophisticated, spiritually-awakened readers access to the depth of biblical texts by exposing their multiple surfaces, by making explicit the varied pathways by which such readers may enter texts" (p. 4). The technique Green uses to access the Joseph story is the formalism of North American literary criticism. The book begins with a crash course in literary criticism, distilled largely from the works of Seymour Chatman. Readers, including those familiar with the methods and jargon of literary-criticism, should be hesitant to skip this chapter, because it provides definitions for the technical vocabulary used throughout the book. The following seven chapters apply her techniques to Genesis 37-50. Green identifies and describes features of plot, characterization, point of view, and discourse time in each chapter. Moreover, she carefully monitors and evaluates the rhetorical effect of each lineament. The book closes with a chapter on the structure, ideology, and rhetorical contours of the Joseph novella as a whole. Green concludes that the ideology and macro-structure of the story are reflected in miniature within the dreams of Joseph, the courtiers, and Pharaoh. She identifies three planes on which this effect can be observed: the discourse plane, structural plane, and character plane. On the discourse plane, the composer of the story has allowed characteristic themes from the dreams to appear again and again within the surrounding narratives. In his second dream, thirteen heavenly bodies bow to Joseph. Precisely thirteen years later Joseph's brothers bow to him in Egypt. Small, weak cattle swallow up healthy, strong cattle in Pharaoh's first dream. Likewise, the young, foreign prisoner Joseph swallows up the resources of Egypt. Green itemizes a long list of such correspondences. On the structural plane, Green observes that the skeleton of the story's action fulfills Joseph's dreams of authority. In chapters 37--41, Joseph goes down to Egypt and is raised to a position of authority. In chapters 42-45, the brothers are maneuvered into correct position around Joseph. They also go down to Egypt, and find themselves bowing down to their younger brother. In chapters 46-50, the patriarch leads the whole family down from Canaan to live under Joseph's authority and protection. On the character plane, the theme of remembrance is dominant. This theme appears in many of the scenes within the story (e.g., Joseph calls on the cupbearer to remember him to Pharaoh; the brothers remember what they did to Joseph Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 302 Reviews while unwittingly standing before t4~ir lost sibling). Green argues that the strongest realization of this theme is'associated with a failure to remember the dreams. In the first scene, Joseph's dreams reveal the end of the story to characters and readers alike. Nevertheless, the characters fail to comprehend what is happening to them. At several major turning points in the story, one of the brothers blurts out some version of the question, "What has happened to usT' The answer, as the reader is well aware, is that everyone must bow down. In the first instance, the family bows to Joseph in Egypt. In the sequel to the Joseph story, poetic justice is met when we learn that just as Joseph went down to Egypt as a slave, so also the whole family shared his fate. On the level of individual pericope, I found Green's observations to be careful and perceptive. There are a few points at which a closer reading of the Hebrew text would have produced a different result. One minor criticism , for example, is that in the non-P portions of the Torah, n~, (37:2) is used exclusively for a false report. This kind of criticism, however, is minor. More importantly, I was not compelled by all of Green's arguments for her thesis that the dreams exert ideological and structural control over the narrative as a whole. Most convincing are her observations regarding the discourse plane of the story. Green...