What Does Genesis 43:29 Mean?

And he lifted up his eyes and saw his brother Benjamin, his mother's son, and said, "Is this your youngest brother, of whom you spoke to me? God be gracious to you, my son!" Joseph looks up and sees Benjamin: his full brother, the other son of Rachel, the boy he left at home in Canaan when he was seventeen. Benjamin is now approximately thirty-three years old; he was a child when Joseph was sold. The recognition is not of a face remembered from childhood but of the confirmation of family identity: this is my mother's son, the one they spoke of as "the youngest at home with our father."

"God be gracious to you, my son": the blessing Joseph pronounces on Benjamin is the language of paternal or senior-fraternal blessing. He calls him "my son": using the relationship term that is slightly senior to "my brother" but equally warm. The blessing invokes God's grace (the Hebrew chen: favor, grace, kindness) on the one who has just arrived before him. It is the first act of explicit blessing in the encounter, and it is directed at the full brother whose safety is the reason for the whole elaborate test. Benjamin, who does not know who is blessing him, receives from the stranger-official the kind of blessing that families give to one another.

The sight of Benjamin is what breaks Joseph's composure: verse 30 will describe him rushing out to weep. The same man who maintained the official persona through the accusation and the interrogation of Genesis 42, who wept privately when he heard the guilt confession (Genesis 42:24), is now overcome by the sight of his brother's face. Benjamin, standing before the official in his mother's absence (Rachel died before Joseph's sale: Genesis 35:19), is the last remaining connection between Joseph and the mother he lost in childhood and the brother-bond of shared parenthood. The sight of Benjamin's face produces the tears that cannot be suppressed.