What were Joseph’s dreams?

The sheaves

for behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and also stood upright; and behold, your sheaves came around, and bowed down to my sheaf.

It is an odd dream for a shepherd’s son. Jacob’s family lives by its flocks, yet Joseph dreams of a harvest field. Looking back, the image is exact: when his brothers finally bow to him, years later, they are kneeling to buy grain. At the time they heard only a younger brother claiming to be king (see why his brothers hated him).

The sun, the moon and eleven stars

Behold, I have dreamed yet another dream: and behold, the sun and the moon and eleven stars bowed down to me.

This time Joseph tells his father too, and Jacob decodes it on the spot: “Will I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves down to the earth before you?” (37:10). Sun for the father, moon for the mother, eleven stars for eleven brothers. He scolds the boy in front of everyone. Yet the next verse adds that “his father kept this saying in mind” (37:11). The rebuke was for the room. The question stayed with him.

One detail has puzzled readers for centuries. In the order Genesis tells things, Rachel, Joseph’s mother, has already died (35:19). So who is the moon? Rashi, the medieval Jewish commentator, says Jacob mentioned the dead mother on purpose, to make the whole dream sound absurd and calm the brothers. He also passes on a tradition that the moon was Bilhah, Rachel’s servant, who raised Joseph like a mother. And the Talmud has a proverb for loose ends like this one: just as there is no grain without straw, there is no dream without some nonsense in it.

Dreams come in pairs

Joseph’s story runs on doubled dreams: his own two, the cupbearer’s and the baker’s in prison, and Pharaoh’s cows and grain. Six dreams in all, always two at a time. Later Joseph states the rule himself: a dream given twice means the matter is settled (41:32; see Pharaoh’s dream).

There is a quieter pattern too. Joseph never dreams again after Genesis 37, and God never speaks to him directly, as he did to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. From here on, Joseph is the one who reads other people’s dreams.

How they came true

Joseph waited more than twenty years. When it happened, Genesis makes sure the reader notices:

• First trip. Ten brothers bow “with their faces to the earth,” and “Joseph remembered the dreams which he dreamed about them” (42:6–9).
• Second trip. Benjamin has come too, so all eleven are there, and they bow twice (43:26–28). The eleven stars are complete.
• The silver cup. Caught with the cup, they throw themselves on the ground before him (44:14).
• After Jacob’s death. They fall down before him and say, “Behold, we are your servants” (50:18).

And the sun? Whether Jacob ever bows is debated. At 47:31, after Joseph swears to bury him in Canaan, Israel bows on the head of his bed. Some read that as the father’s bow at last; others as a prayer. How the brothers ended up on their faces before a governor they did not know is told in why Joseph tested his brothers.