THE BRETHREN IN THE FAMINE

The story never loses sight of the fact that what it has to tell is the birth of a nation; and soy while it speaks about individual lives, it constantly interweaves their fate and their fortunes with the larger unity of which they form a part Joseph had gone down into Egypt in order to provide food and a new settlement for his brethren, and from his side everything is ready. Everything is ready except the men: and now the story turns back to tell how they were made ready. Joseph can give his brethren food and land in Goshen, but it needs more than food supplies and pasture-lands to make a nation. It needs men, and these are not yet the men who can make a nation. Disunited, mutually distrustful, with the memory of a mutual crime on their consciences and with no great bond of a spiritual sort to bind them together, they would, had they been brought thus into contact with Egypt, have simply dissolved. Egypt would have swallowed them up, and they would have merged into the population of the land where they settled, when they went thither to seek bread.

1. A Change of Environment.

We are told that a change of environment will bring most other changes behind it, and that food in abundance in place of scarcity, certainty of tenure in room of insecurity, will change everything. The first part of the statement is very greatly true, but the second part, with its underlying definition of environment, only shows how material our judgment has become. Environment is too subtle a thing to be so crassly defined: that is exactly why it is so powerful. There are some things which come closer to a man than the house in which he lives or the food he eats, even the prayers and ideals in which his spirit is at home. Through their power he can transform even the most unfavourable outward surroundings. Without their presence he can sink among the most favourable.

The story tells how the spiritual horizon of the brethren was widened, so that they were bound together into the unity of a people and became capable of remaining Israel even in Egypt

There was something in the famine itself to quicken their thought. When it fell upon them, their own strength became no longer able to win, their own cleverness no longer competent to plan, subsistence for themselves. Their wonted occupations are gone, and have taken away their self-reliance. They stand, strong men, before their wornout father and have to acknowledge that he is a better man than they.

At his bidding they go down into Egypt and feel the strength of this old and ordered civilisation. Here men have bound themselves together to meet a catastrophe which they cannot avert. The brethren find human society going on still, though with dragging wheels, while their own society has tumbled into pieces at the shrewd touch of famine. They feel themselves helpless atoms, with nothing to meet one of the great events which come to all men. And these strong, lustful desert dwellers, accustomed to go on their insolent and self-reliant way, accustomed to want and take, are cowed. The helplessness of man against the mighty forces of the world is driven in upon them. Carried too far, the sense becomes a weakness: but without it how vain and individual and insolent man can be!

There are men about whom a wise man wrote "because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God." Such men are well known. The world has gone well with them. Their business has prospered greatly: and, if there have been troubles, these have been such as human shrewdness could foresee or extra effort put right. They have been little visited by the great things like death and sorrow, or, if they have been visited by these, have put them aside. And their world often shrinks together into the little world they know. Their morality becomes a code of petty prudence. Their hope shrinks into caution. Such men cannot found a nation where men must rely on each other. Therefore, when God called Abraham, He shook him out of the lap of the accustomed thing to the hills of Palestine. When the people came to its new birth, the patriarchs fled before famine into Egypt.

When they came, Joseph dealt roughly with them. He distrusted their words, — these men who distrusted each other. He cross-questioned them as to their intentions and their past, and finally he flung them into prison. For the liberal air of the hills and the scent of the tamarisk when the dew is drying on it, they have to exchange the close air of a prison in flat Egypt. They, who all their lives have waited on no man's bidding, nor consulted any other's convenience, are at the caprice of one man.

The first outcome is that they learn the uses of a family. They hold together, they maintain each other, they serve each other. They begin to live in social bonds when they live in prison. It is one of the fatal blindnesses which affect the man who has only known success, that he fails to see how it is not of his own making. He fails to see how he stands on the work and failure, the hope and prayer of dead men. He fails to recognise how, without that slow building up of society in which he had no hand, there would have been no place for his energy and no security. He fails to feel his debt, his quite infinite debt, for all which he has received. He does not realise that the men who serve him are as necessary to him as he is to them. The men learned the gracious meaning of our mutual dependence in prison.

Further, as they sat there, there rose out of the dim recesses of memory a distant day which all had tried to forget, some had succeeded in forgetting. They saw the fresh young face of their brother, convulsed with fear, as they lowered him into the pit. They recalled the hour when they dined together with indifference to his pain. And they saw a fitness in things which ordered that they in turn should be brought so low. "We are verily guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the distress of his soul, when he besought us and we would not hear. Therefore is this distress come upon us." These were teachable men, in whom their old life had not deadened all sense of the infinite justice of things. And they could see it, not when it was dealing with the universe in general, but when it was dealing with themselves. That God is just, that every base thing a man has done shall find its adequate requital somehow and at some hour, is not, thank God, the ultimate word in religion. But it is a great word, that sense which God in His mercy has set deep in the consciences of men, that "fearful looking for of judgment." And, though deadened in the eager world, it often waits for men when they are shut up to their thoughts.

2. A Change of Attitude.

The group, graver, humbler, stronger men went back to Palestine. They have come through strange things and have learned from them, and they returned to their father, who did not know all that had happened to them. He has sat brooding over the past, while they are already thinking new thoughts and feeling their way to a more fruitful future. They came back with a new sense of their solidarity and responsibility. And he tells them "all these things are against me." He does not feel that they are likely greatly to care about or understand his sorrows, for he has no reason to believe them capable of realising what the loss of Joseph, the loss of Simeon, and the departure of Benjamin mean to him. And the men must lay their hands on their mouths and recognise that he is just. Their father has but too good cause, from his past knowledge of them, to believe that they are careless of his sorrows, and they will need to prove their changed thoughts by their deeds.

Men who have been deeply moved to new religious convictions or higher ideals of life often find that their world has not moved with them. And it comes upon them like a dash of cold water that their old associates expect from them the same attitude as before, and that good men do not trust them at once. It is startling to discover how immobile the facts of life are for one who has changed his attitude to all the facts of life: and it is a wholesome shock. For men are required to live by the power of every new conviction they win, and only through life does it become their own.

How greatly the brethren learned, and how deep was the change in their character, the story reveals in its own way. It is not the habit of the Hebrew historians to describe men's feelings. There is never any subtle analysis of motives or picture of emotions in the Old Testament. What they give instead is a plain statement of what men did and said, from which it is possible to conclude as to where and how their feelings have changed. Now it is noteworthy how from this stage in the story, tender and beautiful sayings begin to appear in connection with the attitude of the brethren. Thus, when they present their demand for Benjamin to Jacob, the old father utters words which in their restraint and quietness yet touch the very heart of sorrow. "Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin away." He cries in his desolation, "all these things are against me." While the words show his isolation from his ten sons and form a just rebuke to them, they also convey the burden of old age, the strain on many women, the sorrow of all the people who have to be passive when others can act. The brethren could go down with Benjamin into Egypt, and, if necessary, try to protect him; but he must sit at home and wait for news. One feels the anguish of the women and men who are called to bear. Yet, when that cry has been wrung from him, Jacob rises up with a calm dignity and puts aside Judah's proposal to deliver over his children as hostages for Benjamin's safe return. He does not even mention it; for, if Benjamin were lost through Judah's fault, what use would it be to Jacob to have Judah's sons in his power? "If I am bereaved, I am bereaved."

3. A Change of Life.

How keenly the men have felt the situation and how deeply they have been impressed by it, is best seen in Judah's great plea before his unknown brother. "And we said unto my lord, We have a father, an old man, and a child of his old age, a little one; and his brother is dead, and he alone is left of his mother, and his father loveth him. . . . Now therefore when I come to thy servant my father, and the lad be not with us; seeing that his life is bound up in the lad's life; it shall come to pass, when he seeth that the lad is not with us, that he will die: and thy servants shall bring down the grey hairs of thy servant our father with sorrow to the grave.... Now therefore let thy servant, I pray thee, abide instead of the lad a bondman to my lord; and let the lad go up with his brethren. For how shall I go up to my father, and the lad be not with me?"

Such things increase in the later chapters, because they are in place there. The men had learned to feel them, as they had never done before. Judah could say such a thing now, because he could feel such a thing now. The brethren remembered nothing of their father's lament when Joseph's blood-dabbled cloak was spread before him. His lament fell on deaf ears then: it does not fall on deaf ears now, for the men have learned sympathy in the school of adversity.

There is a hard strain in human nature. Few creatures are more cruel than a healthy boy. Strong men will subscribe to infirmaries, but will send their wives to inquire for a sick friend. The infirmary is a convenient place for huddling the sick out of sight, where other men are free from the intolerable claim. The poor-house is a convenient place for relieving the prosperous from the painful claim of the brokendown.

The brethren have seen their children hunger-bitten and have been impotent to give them food. They have tasted for themselves exile, suspicion, prison. They have learned a new humane sense of the infinite pathos of life. Sympathy is suffering along with other men: and, while there are some gracious natures which seem to learn it by instinct, there are more who only learn it through the sharp discipline of God's grace.

The men, then, are greatly changed. They have learned the futility of envy and suspicion, and how mutual trust is the cement which holds life together. Their hearts have been awed by the sense of how the heart of things is just, for they have seen justice, not as a quality of which they desire to see more in die world, but as bringing them in guilty. Their souls have been touched to the tender uses of pity.

What remains to be required from them? This remains, the proof that they have departed from their sin and can be trusted anew with life. It is one thing to hate an old sin at the time when it has brought a man to failure; it is another not to do it again, when it seems the only means of escape from failure.

So, on what seemed their final and cheerful return from Egypt, the steward overtook them with a loud accusation of theft. Sack by sack was emptied; and with each fruitless search their triumph over a false accuser grew. At last the sack of the youngest showed gleaming among the rustling wheat the redder gold of the hateful cup. And at once, without question or hesitation, they reloaded their asses, turned their backs on their hopes of home, and, with their younger brother in their midst, went back to bondage.

Consider what they did. They refused to fall back into the sin of the selfish betrayal of their brother. It would have been easier to do, and far easier to justify than in the case of Joseph. What offers itself to them is not exactly the same temptation; but it never is the same temptation that is offered to any one. Life never takes men back to the old place where they fell before: it brings them to new places. So the thoughtless say that experience is useless, because experience never repeats itself. In truth, nothing ever repeats itself. There is always some colouring in the sky which makes each sunset something unique: and there is always some shade of difference between yesterday's temptation and that of to-day which makes men able to say, if they desire it, that they were taken by surprise. That is why Christ gave men, not a rule which will only fit the conditions that gave rise to it, but an ideal which will fit every condition.

It was possible that Benjamin had stolen that cup. In any case, to deliver him up was only to make sure that the matter should be inquired into and justice done. That being so, there was no reason why they should all go back with him, and delay for some time longer the needed relief for their starving families in Palestine. Indeed, in view of the urgent needs of the women and children it might even be expedient that one man die for the people and so the whole nation perish not. Any one with a little imagination can frame an excellent case for their riding on. But they acted on their first impulse, the impulse of humbled and repentant hearts, and they went back. Uncondemned they will not leave Benjamin alone. Friendless they will not leave him at all. The men have learned once for all that they cannot again deny the brotherly love which they once denied. Experience has been enough to make their repentance into that gracious thing which watches against the return of sin, that holy carefulness which is a safeguard. Their victory has been won.