What Does Genesis 41:4 Mean?

And the ugly, thin cows ate up the seven attractive, plump cows. And Pharaoh awoke. The thin cows eating the fat cows is the dream's central act: the visual statement of the relationship between the two periods. Seven years of famine consuming seven years of abundance: what was stored and generated in the good years is devoured by the bad years. The eating is the economic logic of famine: the reserves built up during plenty are exhausted by scarcity. The dream expresses this not abstractly but viscerally: one set of cattle consuming another, the thin devouring the fat, the bad period swallowing the good one.

The dramatic detail that the thin cows ate the fat ones but still appeared thin in verse 21 ("as if they had eaten no flesh at all") is the dream's most precise communication of the famine's severity. Normally, cattle that eat abundant food become fat; these cattle eat seven fat cows and remain thin. The famine is specifically comparable to the abundance: it consumes it entirely and shows no improvement. The economic translation: seven years of famine will consume the stored resources of seven abundant years and leave no visible trace of the abundance. Everything stored will be needed for the lean years.

Pharaoh awoke after this first dream. The waking marks the dream as complete and vivid enough to interrupt sleep: the kind of dream that stays with the dreamer upon waking. He awoke, and then went back to sleep and dreamed again (verse 5). The double dream: first the cows, then the grain: is the repetition that Joseph will interpret as divine emphasis: the thing is fixed, and God is hastening to bring it about (v.32). The first dream ends here with Pharaoh awake and troubled before the second dream begins.