Something has changed in Judah. The man who sold his brother is now offering himself as surety for his brother. Twenty years of living with what he did has done something to him. The guilt that the brothers felt when they saw Joseph’s distress and did not listen they said it to each other in Egypt, not knowing Joseph understood them that guilt has been working on them. And Judah has come out the other side of it willing to pay any price to protect what remains.
The famine is grinding on. The grain Joseph’s brothers brought back from Egypt is gone. Jacob tells them to go back and buy more. And Judah the same Judah who suggested selling Joseph for twenty pieces of silver stands before his father and says: I will be a pledge for Benjamin. If I do not bring him back, let me bear the blame before you forever.
Something has changed in Judah. The man who sold his brother is now offering himself as surety for his brother. Twenty years of living with what he did has done something to him. The guilt that the brothers felt when they saw Joseph’s distress and did not listen they said it to each other in Egypt, not knowing Joseph understood them that guilt has been working on them. And Judah has come out the other side of it willing to pay any price to protect what remains.
God uses time and consequence to do in a person what a single rebuke never could. What guilt began, grace will finish. The man Judah was becoming over twenty years is exactly the man the next moment will require.
They return to Egypt with Benjamin and with double the silver and with gifts. Joseph sees Benjamin and has to leave the room. He goes to his chamber and weeps. Then he washes his face and comes back out and serves them a meal and seats them in birth order, from the firstborn to the youngest, and the brothers look at each other in astonishment. How does he know?
They are sitting at the table of the brother they sold, eating food he prepared, in the exact order of their births. They do not know it yet. But everything is already arranged.
The silver cup is placed in Benjamin’s sack on Joseph’s orders. The brothers leave. They are barely out of the city when Joseph’s steward overtakes them. The cup is found in Benjamin’s sack. They tear their clothes. They return, all of them, to the city.
And Judah speaks. He speaks for all of them and his speech is one of the most remarkable in Genesis. He does not make excuses. He does not protest Benjamin’s innocence. He says: God has found out the guilt of your servants. He is confessing, in front of this Egyptian official, to something deeper than the cup. He is confessing to what they did twenty years ago. And then he does something extraordinary:
“Now then, please let your servant remain here
as my lord’s slave in place of the boy,
and let the boy return with his brothers.”
— Genesis 44:33
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