Money in their sacks—Genesis 42:25-35

What would you do if you found money in your wallet that you knew you hadn’t earned, especially if it looked like a mistake?

When Joseph sends his brothers home to Canaan, he sends them with an unexpected gift, still not having told them who he is. Joseph orders their vessels filled with grain (42:25), supplying the needs of their households, for whom Joseph had concern (cf. 42:19; 45:19). Yet Joseph also orders that their silver be returned to each of them clandestinely in their sacks, undoubtedly as part of testing them. He must know whether they are genuinely “honest” men as they claim (42:11, 19). They had sold Joseph for silver; now he needs to know if silver still matters more to them than integrity.

Joseph’s plan appears wise: surely, knowing that Simeon is in custody, they will return with Benjamin if he is well. If they return the silver, he will also need to see whether they will protect or relinquish Benjamin. What Joseph cannot know is the unwillingness of his father to part with Benjamin or the sheer terror the planting of money in their sacks will bring them. Thus for some time it may appear that they have both kept the silver and abandoned their brother Simeon.

Happily, God’s plan is even greater than Joseph’s; also happily, Jacob does not have a heart attack in parting with Benjamin, although the parting is delayed far longer than Joseph (or Simeon) would have hoped (cf. 43:10). (The delay may provoke Joseph’s special concern as to whether their father remains alive—43:27.)

The brothers had traveled alongside other travelers going down to Egypt for food (42:5), and undoubtedly the road was full of people traveling both directions. If the grain was to keep them very long, they would need much grain loaded on each of the donkeys (cf. 44:1), though they probably planned to make multiple trips (43:10). (Why workers and other animals are not mentioned is unclear, unless Genesis expects hearers to envision Jacob’s earlier camp as having disbanded, perhaps due to the famine; perhaps Genesis merely focuses on the activity of the immediate family—the way a scriptwriter today would—and deliberately leaves less relevant details untold. We learn of such spotlighting even in ancient biographies.)

I had often thought it risky for Joseph to have their money returned in the mouths of their sacks, where they would find it when opening the sacks. What if one opened a sack before leaving the area? But the risk of depositing the money deeper in the sack was greater, because some of their workers might be the ones to find the money when feeding animals and some of the money might disappear (perhaps along with some of the workers).

Joseph may ultimately plan for them to see the money as a gift from God in a kind way (43:23), but he may also want them thinking about their past greed (and may want to test them about their current greed). They recognize that God had returned the money to them (42:28), but they do not experience this recognition in a positive way. Their honesty was already in question with the vizier of Egypt, and now it might appear that they had not paid for the grain they took. Or worse yet, perhaps God was exposing the fruit of their past greed, when they sold a brother for money—a matter already on their minds (42:22). Their father allows that it may have been an oversight (43:12), but he is no less afraid (42:35). Such fear undoubtedly makes him more hesitant to send Benjamin (42:36, 38), the subject of the next installment on Genesis. In any case, we can be glad that even when our plans work less smoothly than we intend, God is still in charge to bring about his purposes.