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Judah and Joseph Named as the Two Sticks Themselves

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Judah and Joseph Named as the Two Sticks Themselves

The pairing with Parashah Vayigash, whose central episode is Judah's impassioned plea on behalf of Benjamin and Joseph's subsequent revelation of his identity to the brothers who had once sold him, rests on the most literal possible connection available anywhere in the haftarah cycle: Ezekiel's sign act names Judah and Joseph directly as the two sticks that must be joined, the same two brothers whose reconciliation the parashah itself dramatizes at length.

Where the parashah resolves a family rupture, Joseph forgiving the brothers who wronged him and the family reuniting in Egypt, the haftarah expands that same pattern of estranged kin restored to one another into a national scale, the two kingdoms descended from Judah and from Joseph's own tribes eventually reunited under one ruler after centuries of political division.

The parashah's reconciliation between Judah and Joseph specifically, the two brothers whose descendants would one day give their names to Israel's two rival kingdoms, gives the haftarah's prophecy an added resonance: the personal reunion this parashah records is treated by the tradition as a kind of preview, in miniature, of the larger national reunion Ezekiel later promises between the very same two lines.

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