Joseph and the Butler

Joseph Interpreting the Dreams of Pharoah's Butler and Baker

Domenico Maggiotto (1713-1794)

And it came to pass after these things, that the butler of the king of Egypt and his baker had offended their lord the king of Egypt.
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And Pharaoh was wroth against two of his officers, against the chief of the butlers, and against the chief of the bakers.
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And he put them in ward in the house of the captain of the guard, into the prison, the place where Joseph was bound.
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And the captain of the guard charged Joseph with them, and he served them: and they continued a season in ward.
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And they dreamed a dream both of them, each man his dream in one night, each man according to the interpretation of his dream, the butler and the baker of the king of Egypt, which were bound in the prison.
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And Joseph came in unto them in the morning, and looked upon them, and, behold, they were sad.
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And he asked Pharaoh's officers that were with him in the ward of his lord's house, saying, Wherefore look ye so sadly to day?
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And they said unto him, We have dreamed a dream, and there is no interpreter of it. And Joseph said unto them, Do not interpretations belong to God? tell me them, I pray you.
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And the chief butler told his dream to Joseph, and said to him, In my dream, behold, a vine was before me;
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And in the vine were three branches: and it was as though it budded, and her blossoms shot forth; and the clusters thereof brought forth ripe grapes:
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And Pharaoh's cup was in my hand: and I took the grapes, and pressed them into Pharaoh's cup, and I gave the cup into Pharaoh's hand.
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And Joseph said unto him, This is the interpretation of it: The three branches are three days:
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Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thine head, and restore thee unto thy place: and thou shalt deliver Pharaoh's cup into his hand, after the former manner when thou wast his butler.
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But think on me when it shall be well with thee, and show kindness, I pray thee, unto me, and make mention of me unto Pharaoh, and bring me out of this house:

Genesis 40:1 - 40:15

King James Version

Joseph Recounting his Dreams

Recounting His Dreams

Woodner Collection

Rembrandt van Rijn

early 1640's

Joseph in Prison

Joseph Interprets the Butler's and Beggars's Dream in a Prison

Alexander Ivanoff

The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

1827

Jacob's ladder

Marc Chagall

Private Collection

1973

Joseph's Dream

Joseph's Dream

Giotto di Bondone

Fresco, Arena Chapel, Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padua

c. 1308

Joseph's Dream of the sheaves

Joseph's Brothers

Emile Jean Horace Vernet

1853

And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren: and they hated him yet the more.
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And he said unto them, Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed:
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For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf.
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And his brethren said to him, Shalt thou indeed reign over us? or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us? And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words.

Genesis 37:5-11 (King James Version)

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Commentary: Prof Nuhum Sarna

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Throughout the biblical world, dreams were recognized as vehicles of divine communication. Several instances of this are encountered in the book of Genesis. God revealed His will in dreams to Avimelech, King of Gerar,[1] to Jacob[2] and to Laban.[3]

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In each experience the theophany is straightforward and the message perfectly clear. This is not the case with Joseph's dreams,[4] nor with those of the butler and the baker[5] and Pharaoh.[6] Here, the symbol, not the words, is the language of intelligence, and the dream is therefore enigmatic.
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Against this background, it is not to be wondered at that dreams were frequently productive of anxiety. To be ignorant of the true meaning was to be deprived of knowledge that might well be vital to one's welfare. Notice how in each of the cryptic dreams God does not figure explicitly in the content. Yet it is tacitly accepted that He is the ultimate source of the message being conveyed. This does not mean that the ancients did not recognize such a thing as an idle dream. They did; and that is why dreams in the Joseph biography always comes in pairs: to prove their seriousness.

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In the two great center of Near Eastern civilization, Egypt and Mesopotamia, at either extremity of the Fertile Crescent, the science of dream interpretation was highly developed as a specialized skill, and a vast literature devoted to the subject came into being. One extant Egyptian papyrus, inscribed about 1300 BCE and claiming to be a copy of an archetype at least five hundred years older, is actually a reference book of dream interpretations arranged systematically according to symbol and meaning. We are told, for example, that seeing a large cat in a dream is good, for it portends a large harvest. Looking into a deep well, on the other hand, is bad, for it is premonitory of incarceration.The accepted predictive aspects of dreams was cause enough for the brothers to take Joseph seriously. But insofar as a dream was recognized to be inseparable from personality, it meant also that the dreamer somehow bore a measure of responsibility for his dreams.

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Joseph's visions of lordship, therefore, betrayed his true aspirations and contained, at the same time, the potentiality of fulfillment. That is why they could arouse hostility so intense as to culminate in a conspiracy to murder.[7] Looking at the dreams of the cupbearer, the baker and Pharaoh [Genesis 40-41], we observe that whereas they all need the services of an interpreter to extract meaning from the imagery, Joseph's dreams, although failing into the same symbolic category, were at once comprehensible to the narrator and his brothers. This distinction is more than incidental. Despite the fact that Israel shared with its pagan neighbors a belief in the reality of dreams as a medium of divine communication, it never developed, as in Egypt and Mesopotamia, a class of professional interpreters or a dream literature. In the entire Bible, only two Israelites engage in the interpretation of dreams — Joseph and Daniel — and significantly enough, each serves a pagan monarch, the one in Egypt, the other in Mesopotamia, precisely the lands in which oneriomancy flourished. Moreover, in each case, the Israelite is careful to disclaim any innate ability, attributing all to God.[8] Nor does skill at dream interpretation play an part in the definition of biblical wisdom or the equipment of prophet and sage.

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1] Gen. 20:3

2] Gen. 28:12ff; 31:11

[3] Gen. 31:24

[4] Gen. 37:5-10

[5] Gen. 40:5ff

[6] Gen. 41:1ff

[7] Gen. 37:5-20

[8] Gen. 40:8; Dan. 2:19-23,27,30

Nahum M. Sarna is Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies at Brandeis University. Author of Understanding Genesis, Exploring Exodus, and On the Book of Psalms, he is an editor and translator of the Jewish Publication Society's translation of the Bible.

http://www.jhom.com/topics/dreams/joseph.html

Jacob's Ladder: Jewish Interpretation

Jacob's Ladder(L'Echelle de Jacob)

c. 1490

Painting School of Avignon (1200's-1500/French)Musee du Petit-Palais, Avignon, France

This is from Wikipedia regarding Jewish Interpretations of the dream:

The Jewish Biblical philosopher Philo (d. ca. 50 CE) presents his allegorical interpretation of the ladder in the first book of his De somniis. There he gives four mutually non-exclusive interpretations:
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(1) The angels represent souls descending to and ascending from bodies -- Philo's clearest reference to the doctrine of reincarnation.
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(2) In the second interpretation the ladder is the human soul and the angels are God's logoi, pulling the soul up in distress and condescending in compassion.
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(3) In the third view the dream depicts the ups and downs of the life of the "practiser" (of virtue), and
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(4) in the last one the question is about the continually changing affairs of men.
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The classic Torah commentaries offer several interpretations of Jacob's ladder:According to the Midrash, the ladder signified the exiles which the Jewish people would suffer before the coming of the Messiah. First the angel representing the 70-year exile of Babylonia climbed "up" 70 rungs, and then fell "down". Then the angel representing the exile of Persia went up a number of steps, and fell, as did the angel representing the exile of Greece. Only the fourth angel, which represented the final exile of Rome/Edom (whose guardian angel was Esau himself), kept climbing higher and higher into the clouds. Jacob feared that his children would never be free of Esau's domination, but God assured him that at the End of Days, Edom too would come falling down.Another interpretation of the ladder keys into the fact that the angels first "ascended" and then "descended."
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The Midrash explains that Jacob, as a holy man, was always accompanied by angels. When he reached the border of the land of Canaan (the future land of Israel), the angels who were assigned to the Holy Land went back up to Heaven and the angels assigned to other lands came down to meet Jacob. When Jacob returned to Canaan (Genesis 32:2-4), he was greeted by the angels who were assigned to the Holy Land.The place at which Jacob stopped for the night was in reality Mount Moriah, the future home of the Temple in Jerusalem. The ladder therefore signifies the "bridge" between Heaven and earth, as prayers and sacrifices offered in the Holy Temple soldered a connection between God and the Jewish people. Moreover, the ladder alludes to the Giving of the Torah as another connection between heaven and earth. The Hebrew word for ladder, sulam - סלם - and the name for the mountain on which the Torah was given, Sinai - סיני - have the same gematria (numerical value of the letters).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob's_Ladder

Jacob's Ladder

Jacob's Dream

William Blake
29 cm x 37 cm

1800

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From the Book of Genesis (28:11-19)
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Jacob left Beersheba, and went toward Haran. He came to the place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you." Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it." And he was afraid, and said, "This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."

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Commentary by Marie Louise Von Franz

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Later in the Renaissance in the seventeenth century, Jacob's Ladder was interpreted symbolically as being the sounds and vowels of human speech, or the different qualities of the world, or the different numbers of the world. The basic idea of different systems of thought was projected onto the ladder. But in all casesthe ladder symbolized a continuous, constant connection with the divine powers of the unconscious. We could say the dream itself was such a ladder. It connects us with the unknown depth of our psyche. Every dream is a rung on a ladder, so to speak.

The Way of the Dream

Marie Louse Von Franz

pages 88-89
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