8.1 Introduction

The Joseph story is the most beautiful of the three fathers’ stories in literary terms. It is world-class literature. The drama that Joseph stages until he reveals himself is narratively highly artistic. For long stretches, this long story can live solely from the dramaturgy of the conflict situations it addresses. It is only in the last verses of the story that the narrator reveals the all-determining theological meaning with the

beautiful word:

“You intended to do evil to me, but God intended to do good to me.” (50, 20)

Actually, we are still in the story of Jacob. Because this story ends in its wide narrative arc only with the death of Jacob; the last section is rather a closing credits (50, 15ff). Unnoticed, however, it becomes the story of Joseph, the longest of all stories.

Fathers’ stories, cleverly composed in themselves and not made up of various individual stories. Whereas Westermann in his 1984 Bibelkunde still sees the Joseph story as a unity that cannot be assigned to any source, because it is

would have a completely different narrative style than J, he now assigns it with others to the Jahvist with some additions by E and fragments by P. In the Joseph story, for long stretches the interest in the fathers in the faith recedes in favor of the true-to-life description of family strife (e.g., the preference of the offspring over the older siblings) or of Joseph’s meteoric rise from slave to grand vizier. It is therefore also much easier and more enjoyable to read and narrate.