Joseph son of Jacob

Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob and the firstborn of his beloved Rachel, is the subject of the long closing movement of Genesis (chapters 37-50), a sustained and artful narrative that reads almost as a self-contained novella, quite different in texture from the episodic patriarchal stories before it.

Favoured by his father with a special garment, the coat of many colours, or perhaps a long ornamented robe, and given to dreams of his own future greatness, Joseph earns his brothers' hatred. They seize him, throw him into a pit, and sell him into slavery in Egypt. There his fortunes turn repeatedly: he rises in the house of Potiphar, is falsely accused by Potiphar's wife when he refuses her and cast into prison, and there interprets the dreams of fellow prisoners. Summoned at last to read Pharaoh's dreams of the coming years of plenty and famine, he interprets them, is raised to be the ruler of Egypt under Pharaoh, and administers the grain that saves the land.

When famine drives his brothers to Egypt to buy food, Joseph, unrecognized, tests them before revealing himself in one of scripture's great scenes of reconciliation, forgiving them with the words that what they meant for evil, God meant for good, and bringing the whole family down into Egypt.

The Joseph narrative has long been admired as a literary achievement, a tightly plotted story of reversal, recognition and reconciliation, exploring providence, forgiveness and the hidden purpose worked through human wrongdoing. It also serves a structural role in the Torah, carrying the family of Jacob down into Egypt and so setting the stage for the enslavement and the exodus that follow.

Joseph is the ancestor, through his sons Ephraim and Manasseh, of two of the tribes of Israel, so that his line is counted twice among the twelve, and the house of Joseph becomes a name for the northern tribes.

In Islam, Joseph (Yusuf) is a revered prophet, and his story fills a single sustained chapter of the Qur'an, Surat Yusuf, which the text itself calls the most beautiful of stories (ahsan al-qasas). The Qur'anic telling follows the arc of the Genesis account, the dreams, the pit, the temptation, the prison, the rise, the reunion, while giving particular attention to the episode of the Egyptian nobleman's wife, named Zulaykha in later tradition, and to the theme of patient trust in God through affliction. Joseph became in that tradition a byword for beauty, chastity and the vindication of the wronged, a favourite subject of Persian and Sufi poetry.