What Does Genesis 40:16 Mean?

When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was favorable, he also said to Joseph, "I also had a dream: there were three cake baskets on my head." The baker's decision to share his dream is triggered by the favorable interpretation of the cupbearer's dream. He was holding back: perhaps not knowing whether Joseph's interpretations could be trusted, perhaps fearing an unfavorable answer: and the positive reading of the cupbearer's dream emboldened him to speak. This is a psychologically realistic detail: the baker waits to see what kind of interpreter Joseph is before entrusting to him the dream whose news he cannot yet know.

The baker's dream opens with three cake baskets on his head. The three baskets, like the three branches, will map onto a three-day timeline. The head-carrying is the specific detail that will carry the terrible weight of Joseph's interpretation: the baker carries the baskets on his head, and the birds eat from the top basket. The image is vivid and personal to the baker's professional world, just as The vine and cup were personal to the cupbearer's. Each official dreams in the symbolic vocabulary of his professional life. For the baker, the materials of his work: bread products, baskets, the royal baked goods: are the language of the dream's communication.

There is a structural parallel between the baker's eagerness in verse 16 and the reader's knowledge from verse 5 that each dream carries "its own interpretation." The baker has watched the cupbearer receive a favorable interpretation and now wants the same. What he does not know is that the structural feature of his own dream: the birds eating from the top basket: signals something entirely different from the cupbearer's dream. The hope with which he says "I also had a dream" is about to encounter an interpretation that the eagerness in "also" could not have anticipated. The word "also" reaches toward the cupbearer's good news; the reality will be otherwise.