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| Chapter XI.
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Chapter XI.
About this same time,
Judah, the son of Jacob, took in marriage Sava,268
a woman of Canaan. By her he had three sons,—Her, Onan, and Sela.
Her was allied by concubinage269
| 269 Or perhaps,
rather, marriage of a sort, as appears from what
follows. | to Thamar. On his
death, Onan took his brother’s wife; and he is related to have
been destroyed by God, because he spilled his seed upon the earth. Then
Thamar, assuming the garb of a harlot, united with her brother-in-law,
and bore him two sons. But when she brought them forth, there was this
remarkable fact, that, when on one of the boys being born, the midwife
had bound his hand with a scarlet thread to indicate which of them was
born first, he, drawing back again into the womb of his mother, was
born270
| 270 A different reading
gives, “was born on the following day.” | the last boy of the two. The names of Fares
and Zarah were given to the children. But Joseph, being kindly treated
by the royal governor who had obtained him for a sum of money, and
having been made manager of his house and family, had drawn the eyes of
his master’s wife upon himself through his remarkable beauty. And
as she was madly laboring under that base passion, she made advances to
him oftener than once, and when he would not yield to her desires, she
disgraced him by the imputation of a false crime, and complained to her
husband that he had made an attempt upon her virtue. Accordingly,
Joseph was thrown into prison. There were in the same place of
confinement two of the king’s servants, who made known their
dreams to Joseph, and he, interpreting these as bearing upon the
future, declared that one of them would be put to death, and the other
would be pardoned. And so it came to pass. Well, after the lapse of two
years, the king also had a dream. And when this could not be explained
by the wise men among the Egyptians, that servant of the king who was
liberated from prison informs the king that Joseph was a wonderful
interpreter of dreams. Accordingly, Joseph was brought out of prison,
and interpreted to the king his dream, to this effect, that, for the
next seven years, there would be the greatest fertility in the land;
but in those that followed, famine. The king being alarmed by this
terror, and seeing that there was a divine spirit in Joseph, set him
over the department of food-supply, and made him equal with himself in
the government. Then Joseph, while corn was abundant throughout all
Egypt, gathered together an immense quantity, and, by increasing the
number of granaries, took measures against the future famine. At that
time, the hope and safety of Egypt were placed in him alone. About the
same period, Aseneh bore him two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. He
himself, when he received the chief power from the king, was thirty
years old; for he was sold by his brothers when he was seventeen years
of age.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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