Composition, a Unified Novella and a Quranic Parallel

Scholars who otherwise divide Genesis among the Yahwist, Elohist and Priestly sources tend to treat the Joseph narrative differently, reading it less as a patchwork of short units than as a comparatively unified novella, closer in style to short biblical narratives such as Ruth or Esther, whose relationship to the older patriarchal sources and mode of combination with them remains debated rather than settled among specialists. Traditional Jewish commentary reads the whole account as a single continuous story authored through Moses, and treats its literary unity as evidence of deliberate design rather than a puzzle to be explained by sources.

Joseph's story is retold at length in the Quran's Surah Yusuf, which the text itself calls the most beautiful of narratives, covering the same sequence of dreams, betrayal, slavery and eventual reconciliation, though with differences of detail and emphasis from the Genesis account; the wife of Potiphar's household, unnamed in the Torah, is not named in the Quranic text either but is called Zulaykha in later Islamic storytelling and commentary rather than in scripture itself. The parallel and divergence between the two accounts has long interested comparative scholars of scripture as an example of a shared narrative figure developed independently within two traditions.