Pharaoh's Throne Had Seventy Steps and Joseph Could Only Climb Three

Most people read Genesis 41 and picture a quick swap. Joseph is pulled out of a dungeon, he shaves, he walks into a palace, he interprets a dream, he becomes viceroy of Egypt. The whole pivot takes about twenty verses. The rabbis who preserved the older Jewish tradition said that walk between the prison and the throne was the most dangerous walk of Joseph's life, and that he nearly lost everything on the staircase.

The detail is in Legends of the Jews 1:163, compiled by Louis Ginzberg in 1909 from centuries of rabbinic lore. Pharaoh's throne in the midrash is not a single chair. It is a structure. Seventy steps rise to it, covered in gold and silver and onyx, and each step corresponds to one of the seventy nations of the world and one of the seventy languages spoken on earth. The whole staircase is a test. Any visitor coming before Pharaoh was measured by how many steps he could ascend, and the rule was brutal. A prince could rise to the thirty-first step and Pharaoh would descend thirty-six to meet him. An ordinary foreigner could only go to the third step, and Pharaoh would come down four. But anyone who could speak all seventy languages, anyone fluent in every tongue in Pharaoh's empire, could climb the whole staircase and stand beside the king.

Joseph was a Hebrew shepherd's son who had been in prison for twelve years. He knew Hebrew and he had picked up Egyptian. Two languages. He could not reach the top.

Before Joseph even arrived, the chief butler had made sure the deck was stacked. According to Legends of the Jews 1:163, the butler described Joseph to Pharaoh as a "slave," and the word was not casual. Egyptian law ruled that a slave could never become king, could not even set his foot in a royal stirrup. The butler was building a legal wall around the throne room before Joseph got there, trying to make sure the boy could rise only so far and no further. God was going to have to push through the wall.

Joseph was brought up from the dungeon in a hurry. He shaved. He changed his clothes. Ginzberg preserves the strange detail that the fresh garments he put on were not Egyptian robes at all. They were raiment brought to him by an angel from Paradise. The boy who walked into Pharaoh's throne room that morning was wearing clothing the angels had handed him on the way. That will matter in a moment.

He reached the foot of the staircase.

Joseph bowed, and then he climbed exactly three steps. That was all he was legally entitled to. Pharaoh, seeing a foreigner in a robe he did not recognize, descended four steps to meet him. They stood there, a few stairs apart, while Pharaoh asked him about the dream. And here Legends of the Jews 1:166 preserves a moment that is easy to miss. Pharaoh tried to trap him. "How do you know," Pharaoh asked, "that my wise men are wrong?" Joseph could have boasted. Any boy with a chance to become second in Egypt would have boasted. Joseph refused. He said, "It is not in me. It is in the hand of God, and if it be the wish of God, He will permit me to announce tidings of peace to Pharaoh." The rabbis said this single sentence, this refusal to take credit, was the key that unlocked the staircase.

There is a tradition, preserved in later midrash, that while Joseph stood on the third step and spoke, the angel Gabriel descended invisibly and taught him the remaining sixty-eight languages on the spot. Right there in the throne room, mid-conversation. By the time Joseph finished interpreting the dream, he could answer Pharaoh in every tongue in the empire. Pharaoh tested him, switching from language to language, and Joseph answered in each one. Then Joseph switched into a language Pharaoh himself did not know, Hebrew, and Pharaoh could not follow him. That was the moment the ban was broken. A man fluent in all seventy languages, plus one more, could not be blocked from the throne by a butler's insult about slavery.

Pharaoh elevated him on the spot.

Book of Jubilees 40:12, the Hebrew apocryphon composed in the second century BCE and preserved in Ge'ez by Ethiopian scribes, describes the ceremony. Pharaoh put Joseph in the second chariot of Egypt. He clothed him in byssus, the fine linen that royalty wore. He placed a gold chain on his neck. He slipped his own signet ring onto Joseph's hand. And a herald walked in front of the chariot proclaiming a phrase Jubilees preserves in untranslated Ge'ez, Êl Êl wa' Abîrêr, which scholars have been arguing about ever since. The phrase meant something like "God, God, and Mighty One." The herald was announcing that the boy in the second chariot was protected by the Name.

And then comes the detail that gives the whole elevation its moral shape.

Legends of the Jews 1:176 says every piece of Joseph's new glory was a precise, measure-for-measure reward for the body he had protected in Potiphar's house years earlier. "Now Joseph reaped the harvest of his virtues." The mouth that had refused the forbidden kiss from Potiphar's wife received the kisses of homage from the people of Egypt. The neck that had refused to bend toward sin was adorned with the gold chain Pharaoh placed on it. The hands that had not touched sin were given the signet ring. The body that had not come into contact with sin was dressed in byssus. The feet that had not stepped toward sin were set in the royal chariot. The thoughts that had stayed clean were proclaimed as wisdom across the empire. Every single piece of Joseph's elevation was an organ of his own body being paid back for refusing a woman in an empty house twelve years earlier.

Pharaoh said to him, "Only on the throne shall I be greater than thou." One step. That was the new gap. The boy who had climbed three steps that morning was now standing one step below the king, and the staircase itself had been rewritten around his body.

The rabbis liked to close the scene with a quiet reminder. The butler had called him a slave to block his rise. Pharaoh had tested him with seventy languages to block his rise. Egyptian law had refused to let slaves touch the stirrups of royal horses. None of it held. A boy in borrowed clothes from Paradise walked into a room and came out wearing gold, because the angels were tutoring him on the stairs.