What Does Genesis 42:6 Mean?

Now Joseph was governor over the land. He was the one who sold to all the people of the land. And Joseph's brothers came and bowed themselves before him with their faces to the ground. The convergence arrives. The narrator states the structural facts before the moment of encounter: Joseph is governor, Joseph is the one who distributes grain: and Joseph's brothers came and bowed before him. The bowing is the fulfillment of the dreams from Genesis 37:5 to 9. Joseph dreamed that his brothers' sheaves bowed to his sheaf, that the sun and moon and eleven stars bowed to him. His father rebuked him for the dream. His brothers hated him for it. Now, twenty-two years later, ten brothers bow with their faces to the ground before the prime minister of Egypt who is their brother.

The bowing "with their faces to the ground" is the prostration position: the most complete form of submission and deference in the ancient Near Eastern world. They are specifically nodding or acknowledging; they are performing the full prostration before the Egyptian official who controls the grain they need to survive. The physical act is the exact image of the dream: eleven (here ten; Benjamin will add the eleventh later) prostrating before Joseph. The dream was true. The hatred that drove the brothers to pit him and sell him was the hatred generated by a true dream they refused to believe.

The dramatic irony of this verse is the chapter's central engine: the brothers do not know who they are bowing to. Joseph recognizes them, as verse 7 will confirm, but they do not recognize him. Twenty-two years have passed; the seventeen-year-old boy they sold is now a thirty-nine-year-old Egyptian prime minister, clean-shaven, in court linen, carrying Pharaoh's signet. They bow before a stranger. He is bowed before by his brothers. The dream has come true and neither party knows it: though one of them will know it the moment he looks up.