What Does Genesis 41:51 Mean?

Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh. "For," he said, "God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father's house." The name Manasseh (Hebrew: nashani: God has made me forget) is Joseph's interpretive reckoning with thirteen years of hardship. The hardship he names is comprehensive: all my hardship (the sale, the enslavement, the false accusation, the imprisonment) and all my father's house (the separation from Jacob, from Benjamin, from the family of promise). Both the external suffering and the relational exile are gathered into the name of his firstborn son.

The verb "forget" in Joseph's naming explanation is not a denial or suppression of the past but a theological framing of what God has done with it. "God has made me forget": the forgetting is attributed to God, not to Joseph's own effort or to the passage of time alone. The prosperity of Egypt, the fruitfulness of the marriage, the abundance of the years: God has used all of this to work in Joseph's experience a release from the consuming weight of what was done to him. The hardship is not gone; Joseph knows what happened. But the intensity of the wound, the preoccupation with loss and injustice, has been eased by what God has given him in Egypt.

The naming also communicates something about Joseph's stance toward his brothers. He has not named his son "Revenge" or "Justice" or "Remember what they did." He has named him "God has made me forget all my hardship." The release from hardship-as-consuming-preoccupation is the psychological preparation for the reconciliation that will come in Genesis 42 to 45. Joseph will not be able to forgive his brothers while still defined entirely by what they did to him; Manasseh's name is evidence that the thirteen years of hardship have not made Joseph into a man of permanent bitterness.