Now comes the answer. Joseph looks at his brothers — these old, frightened men — and finally explains the awkward meal. "You indeed imagined against me evil thoughts, that when I did not recline with you to eat it was because I retained enmity against you."
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis (50:20) reads Joseph's words with unusual tenderness. The empty seat wasn't hatred. In the Targum's expansion, Joseph reveals that Jacob himself had placed him at the head of the table — and out of his father's honor, Joseph had accepted. Now that Jacob was gone, the seating arrangement had simply fallen away. There was no grudge. There was only the absence of the father who had arranged them.
Then Joseph lifts the whole episode into a theology. "But the Memra — the Word of the Lord — thought on me for good." He will not take credit for his rise in Mizraim. He insists it was not his righteousness that saved them, not his merit that stored the grain. "Not for the sake of my own righteousness or merit was it given me to work out for you deliverance this day, for the preservation of much people of the house of Jakob."
The Targum's Joseph is a model of what the sages called mesirat nefesh — giving the self over so completely to the divine plan that even one's accomplishments become footnotes to someone else's story.
Beloved, the next time you are praised for what you alone did — remember who arranged the table. Remember who set you at its head.