Why Did Joseph Not Send a Messenger to His Father? – A Tragedy of Errors

The question of why Joseph never sent word that he was alive to his father has troubled commentators for the past thousand years. It received new impetus when R. Yoel Bin-Nun published the revolutionary theory that Joseph had acted on the assumption that Jacob himself was involved in the brothers’ decision to eliminate him, and therefore had not wished to communicate with his father — a thesis that aroused considerable discussion and opposition. Even setting aside Joseph’s belief in his father’s culpability, none of the other proposed answers is completely satisfactory. These include Joseph’s wish to see his dreams fulfilled (Ramban), his desire for revenge (Radak), a wish to bring about moral improvement in his brothers (Abarbanel), a need to first ascertain Benjamin’s safety (R. Samson R. Hirsch), guilt over his own tale-bearing (R. David Asulin), a realization that he had no alternative but to begin a new leading family for Israel (Prof. David Henshke), and a wish to avoid shaming his brothers (R. Chanan Porat).

None of these answers overcomes two basic assumptions that undermine R. Bin-Nun’s thesis.

Joseph the Righteous

Joseph is presented in the text as a fundamentally righteous individual, reflected in the rabbinic appellation Yosef haTzaddik. He kept the secret of how he came to Egypt for the seventeen years of his father’s life in Egypt, a secret whose disclosure could easily have destroyed the family. When, after Jacob’s death, the brothers fearfully sent word invoking a deathbed instruction from Jacob that was never actually given, Joseph — who knew full well no such instruction had been issued — might reasonably have responded with anger. Instead, “Joseph was in tears as they spoke to him” (Gen. 50:17), and reassured them: “Have no fear! Am I a substitute for God?… I will sustain you and your children” (Gen. 50:19-21). He had already told them, on first revealing himself, “do not be distressed… it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you” (Gen. 45:5) — astonishing generosity given that he had just learned of both their original crime and their deception of Jacob with the bloodied coat. As Isaac Samuel Reggio comments, “Joseph in the greatness of his righteousness did this because he wished to minimise their evil.”

A Father’s and Son’s Mutual Love

The second working assumption is that a special mutual love prevailed between Joseph and Jacob. Israel loved Joseph best of all his sons (Gen. 37:3), and Jacob’s mourning is extreme: he refuses all comfort, declaring, “No, I will go down mourning to my son in Sheol” (Gen. 37:35) — remarkable given that he was surrounded by a large family, including another son of his beloved Rachel, the young Benjamin. Years later Jacob still resists sending Benjamin to Egypt: “It is always me that you bereave: Joseph is no more… My son must not go down with you” (Gen. 42:36-38). The love was mutual: Joseph’s immediate response to his father’s request that he go find his brothers, despite their evident hatred of him, was simply “I am ready” (Gen. 37:14). And the strongest proof of Joseph’s longing is his very first question on revealing his identity — not an explanation, not a reproach, but “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” (Gen. 45:3).

The Difficulty with the Standard Answers

Given these two assumptions, all of the standard explanations for Joseph’s silence run into difficulty, since each in some way requires negating one of them. Would a righteous man who loved his father inflict suffering on him merely to see a dream fulfilled, or as revenge, or even to improve his brothers’ character at his father’s expense? There is also a practical problem: there was no certainty Joseph would ever see his brothers again unless he initiated contact himself, and no guarantee that all the brothers, or Jacob, would still be alive by the time of a chance reunion. Nor is R. Bin-Nun’s suggestion exempt: if Joseph forgave his brothers so completely, would he not, out of even greater affection, have forgiven a father he believed complicit?

A New Suggestion: The Tragedy of Errors

This article proposes that Joseph’s own analytical foresight — the same skill evident in his interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams — led him to the wrong conclusion about his father. Knowing his father’s love for him, Joseph expected that Jacob would mount an urgent search once he failed to return from Shechem. He also could not have known that the brothers had shown Jacob a bloodied coat, since that plan was hatched only after Joseph had already been taken captive (Gen. 37:18-31) — Joseph assumed, instead, that the brothers had simply denied any knowledge of his fate. As weeks and months passed with no sign of a search reaching him, Joseph could draw only one conclusion: his father must be dead, for otherwise nothing would have stopped him from searching. By the time, years later, Joseph was in a position to mount his own search, far too much time had passed to hold out realistic hope, and it seemed pointless — and given his brothers’ presence in a position of continuing power over the family, potentially dangerous — to send word to Canaan at all.

It was only upon hearing Judah’s impassioned speech, repeating Jacob’s own words — “one is gone from me and I said: Alas, he was torn by a beast” (Gen. 44:28) — that Joseph understood his father had been deceived, not complicit, and grasped for the first time that Jacob might still be alive. As R. Bin-Nun himself movingly describes it: “Here is the naked truth: father was deceived! … Is my father still alive? Still? My father? My loving father, who has not forgotten me? Is it possible?”¹ R. Hirsch frames the same turn negatively: only at this moment does Joseph fear that “possibly he has in the meantime passed away.”

Benjamin’s continued survival is explained the same way: had Jacob truly been dead and the family led entirely by the brothers who sold Joseph, Benjamin — another son of Rachel and thus a lingering threat to them — would have been in danger too, and it would have been equally pointless for Joseph to seek him out on the assumption that his father, and by extension his childhood family, no longer existed in any form he could safely contact.

R. Bin-Nun’s thesis rests on the premise that Jacob’s failure to find Joseph meant he had not looked, and therefore had colluded in the brothers’ plot. This article suggests a more logical alternative: Joseph, a righteous and loving son, concluded that his father had not found him because his father was no longer alive to search — not because his father had abandoned him. This is why there was no messenger: not treachery, but a tragedy of errors in which Joseph and Jacob each, wrongly, assumed the other was dead.