There are many impressive qualities about Joseph, one of them is his sheer resilience. God simply put inside Joseph the right stuff and shaped it as a potter does clay, working on his masterpiece until it’s useful to him, making Joseph useful at this time meant putting him in prison. In the next chapter, Joseph describes it as a pit and it’s obvious he didn’t like it.
Captain of the Guard
The phrase captain of the guard was used in the previous chapter to describe Potiphar, with the prison described as being inside Potiphar’s house. Two of Pharoah’s attendants, a cupbearer, and baker caused him trouble, the details are not explained, so Pharoah sends them to the captain of the guard to be put under house arrest.
Troubling Dreams
On the same night, the cupbearer and the baker have bad dreams and are discouraged because they have no access to a professional religious seer who can interpret their dreams. Joseph’s response is not to claim his own supernatural power, but to elevate how such things belong to God.
Tell Them To Me
The cupbearer tells Joseph the dream, and it’s a rather simple one – three branches bud on a vine and the cupbearer is able to squeeze the fruit into the Pharoah’s cup and place it in his hand. Joseph quickly interprets the dream, the branches represent 3 days, and placing the cup back in Pharoah’s hand means the cupbearer gets his job back.
For the cupbearer, it happened exactly as Joseph said.
Then Joseph begged the cupbearer to remember him before Pharoah, that is how confident Joseph was in his interpretation.
The baker now asks to share his dream with Joseph. In the dream, the baker has 3 baskets on his head, one stacked on top of the others. Inside the top basket were all kinds of food, and birds were eating the food. Joseph doesn’t stutter when he speaks, in 3 days the baker will be executed and hung on a tree where birds will eat his flesh.
For the baker, it happened exactly as Joseph said.
For Bible Geeks Only
There are 21 dreams recorded in the Bible, and 10 of them are in Genesis. Only 5 books of the bible record any kind of dream (Genesis, Judges, I Kings, Daniel, Matthew).
6 dreams belong to kings, 1 is a woman (this is Pilates wife who told him not to mess around with Jesus), and 2 dreamers are named Joseph.
Oddly enough Jesus’ stepfather is also named Joseph and has 4 dreams designed to guide him- marry the girl, immediately leave for Egypt, now go back to Israel, and don’t go back to Judea.
