But the why behind the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine might be more dramatic than you think.
Remember how Joseph, after years of hardship, finally finds himself interpreting Pharaoh's dreams? Two dreams, both pointing to the same thing: seven years of abundance followed by seven years of crippling famine. What a gig, right? From prisoner to prophet in a single bound.
But here's where the story takes a twist. According to some traditions, particularly in Legends of the Jews, the famine was originally intended to last not just seven years, but a whopping forty-two! Forty-two years of hardship for Egypt. Can you imagine the social upheaval? The suffering?
So, what changed? Why the divine reduction in sentence, so to speak?
The answer, as with so much in our tradition, lies in the power of blessing, specifically the blessing of Jacob. You see, when Jacob, also known as Israel, finally makes his way to Egypt to reunite with his son Joseph, it's already the second year of the famine. According to Ginzberg's retelling in Legends of the Jews, God shortened the famine to only two years because of Jacob's arrival and the blessing he brought with him.
That's right. The presence of a righteous man, a patriarch, had the power to mitigate a divinely ordained disaster. That's a pretty profound thought, isn't it?
But what happened to the other forty years of famine? Did they just vanish into thin air? Not quite. The story doesn't simply erase them. Instead, it relocates them. According to this tradition, the remaining forty years were inflicted upon the land during the time of the prophet Ezekiel.
Think about that for a moment. This suggests a kind of divine accounting, a balancing of the scales. The suffering wasn't averted; it was simply deferred and perhaps redistributed. What does that say about divine justice? About the interconnectedness of generations? About the lasting impact of our actions, both good and bad?
It leaves you pondering the long arc of history, doesn't it? We often think of stories like Joseph's as self-contained narratives, but this glimpse behind the curtain reveals a much larger tapestry, a divine plan playing out over centuries, shaped by the choices and blessings of individuals like Jacob and the pronouncements of prophets like Ezekiel.