What Does Genesis 50:15 Mean?

When Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, "It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him." The brothers' fear surfaces after Jacob's death: now that the protecting patriarch is gone, will Joseph settle the account? The fear is the projection of their own guilt: they know what they did; they assume Joseph remembers; they fear that restraint during Jacob's life meant only that Joseph was waiting for Jacob to die before acting. The brothers' anxiety is the logic of retaliation: if I were Joseph, I would wait until the father is gone and then exact the revenge that I've been holding back.

The brothers have misread Joseph's forgiveness as tactical patience rather than genuine resolution. The Genesis 45 revelation: "God sent me before you to preserve life": was Joseph's explicit theological re-framing of the sale. But the brothers, perhaps unable to fully believe that forgiveness could be as complete as Joseph expressed, fall back on the fear that it was not real. The fear of verse 15 is the residue of guilt that genuine forgiveness offered but not fully received leaves: Joseph said he forgave; they did not fully receive the forgiveness; Jacob's death surfaces the unresolved terror.

"Pay us back for all the evil that we did to him": the brothers use the language of retributive justice (pay back for evil). They know the categories of their guilt: they nearly killed him, sold him into slavery, showed their father the bloodied robe and let him grieve for twenty-two years. These acts deserve retribution by the standards of human justice. Joseph's stated forgiveness (Genesis 45) was extraordinary precisely because it departed from the logic of deserved retribution. The brothers fear that the extraordinary forgiveness was not real: that the ordinary retributive logic will eventually reassert itself.