In these chapters we see again very strongly that we are not told by the text how to understand people’s actions, in these chapters we have to judge Joseph and his brothers, using the knowledge of good, evil and everything in between that is part of our experience as children of Eve and of Adam. And in this reading motives are far from clear cut!

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As we get intgo the body of the Joseph story the dramatic episode with Mrs Potiphar (surely another candidate for soap-opera treatment) has lots of interesting features in its telling, today I’ll focus on one, and then make sure to notice also the big theological message these chapters hammer home. In doing this we’ll notice the dramatic change in our hero between his teens and twenties, is it just “growing up” is is there something more profound going on?

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Often in biblical narrative things “just seem to happen”, rather like they do in our lives But are such “happenings” chance or divine providence at work? We’ll try to decide, using Gen 37:12ff. (read with Gen 39) and Ruth 2 as examples.

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Gapping, where hearers have to “fill in” information that is missing in the text, is a really significant part of biblical story-telling. So, I’ll need to introduce the idea to next year’s Biblical Narrative class. Normally we “gap” unconsciously, and not just when reading narratives as I hope I’ll show you in this podcast. We’ll also begin to think about what makes gapping more – or less – legitimate. (See 2 Corinthians 11)

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