At Joseph's table the platters move in a strange rhythm. Every brother receives a portion. Then Benjamin receives five.
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan accounts for the arithmetic. "Benjamin's portion was larger than the portions of any of them; five portions: one was his own portion, one portion from himself, one from his wife, and two portions from his two sons" (Genesis 43:34). The Aramaic counts the invisible family Joseph is honoring. Joseph's own portion, for himself. His wife Asenath's portion. And the portions of his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. All of it heaped onto Benjamin's plate as though the vizier were sending his whole household to sit, symbolically, beside the one brother who shares his mother.
The sages note the risk. Joseph had been sold by his brothers in part because their father loved him more. Now he publicly loves Benjamin more at the dinner table. Is he repeating the mistake?
The midrash answers no. Joseph is testing. He wants to see whether his brothers will resent Benjamin the way they once resented him. If jealousy flares, their teshuvah is incomplete. If they accept the lopsided favor without complaint, they have changed. The Targum implies they passed — they simply ate.
Then the final detail, almost unbearable: "They drank and were drunken with him; for from the day when they were separated from him they had not drunk wine, neither he nor they, until that day." Twenty-two years of abstention from wine, on both sides. The sages say Joseph vowed no wine until he saw his brothers again. The brothers, racked by guilt, did the same. This meal is the first cup any of them has tasted since the pit at Dothan. Five portions and a goblet long denied — the quiet calculus of a family returning to itself.