In answer to the video "Meeting the Quran's Challenge: Joseph and the Cutting of the Hands"
Here is another comparison relevant to the topic of consistency in the story of Joseph.
Jacob gave Joseph and his younger brother Benjamin special care among his sons. They were not only the youngest, but he also had them at an old age. More importantly, he had discerned in Yusuf signs of righteousness as opposed to his other envious sons, about whom Jewish tradition attributes many strange and abominable acts. These acts were in fact, according to Midrash, rumored by Yusuf who is also painted as a slanderer to whom God repaid his misbehavior through his ordeal. The Quran on the other hand leaves the impression that Yusuf's brothers were not completely evil characters, although certainly guilty of sins and obviously lacking in God-consciousness. This is seen at different stages of the story, including at the introduction, as they expressed their plan to rid themselves of Yusuf and then, once all honor is theirs to repent and straighten themselves spiritually. Jacob's intuition as regards Yusuf confirmed itself, when Yusuf related his dream predicting his own honoring by his entire family 12:4-5.
In the HB, this prophetic dream of Joseph is reduced to an insignificant anecdote. Not only didnt the dream come true at any point, but it was also defective if one takes the information that Joseph's mother Rachel had died while giving birth to his younger brother Benjamin in Gen35 as true. And yet the dream symbolically represented both Joseph's parents with the sun and moon, and his 11 brothers as 11 stars, all falling down to him in prostration
Gen37:9-10"And he told it to his father and to his brothers, and his father rebuked him and said to him "what is this dream that you have dreamed? will we come, I, your mother and your brothers to prostrate ourselves to you to the ground? So his brothers envied him, but his father awaited the matter".
Jacob immediately recognizes the correct interpretation of the dream, and awaits its unfolding, while trying to appease the jealous brothers through his rhetorical questions. An attempted but faulty harmonization in rabbinic commentaries is that the "prophet" Jacob slightly misunderstood the dream, since Rachel was dead
"he did not know that the matters referred to Bilhah, who had raised him (Joseph) Gen. Rabbah 84:11".This dream of Joseph never unfolds in the Bible, only in the Quran is the truth restored
"We narrate to you the best of narratives, by Our revealing to you this Quran, though before this you were certainly one of those who did not know..Then when they came in to Yusuf, he took his parents to lodge with him and said: Enter safe into Egypt, if Allah please. And he raised his parents upon the throne and they fell down in prostration before him, and he said: O my father! this is the significance of my vision of old; my Lord has indeed made it to be true; and He was indeed kind to me when He brought me forth from the prison and brought you from the desert after the Shaitan had sown dissensions between me and my brothers, surely my Lord is benignant to whom He pleases; surely He is the Knowing, the Wise. My Lord! Thou hast given me of the kingdom and taught me of the interpretation of sayings: Originator of the heavens and the earth! Thou art my guardian in this world and the hereafter; make me die a muslim and join me with the good. This is of the announcements relating to the unseen (which) We reveal to you, and you were not with them when they resolved upon their affair, and they were devising plans".
The relevance of this powerful Quranic statement becomes even clearer if one considers the context of revelation. It is said that the whole sura came down in Mecca prior to the hijra, in answer to a query from the prophet's opponents, who were instigated by the Jews of Medina to press him on that particular issue. This insightful story in addition consoled the prophet who was going through a particularly harsh time, having lost his wife then uncle and facing violent rejection.
Even the structure of Joseph's dream, as reported in the Quran, reflects the manner in which it manifested
12:4"when Joseph said to his father, "O my father, indeed I have seen [in a dream] eleven stars and the sun and the moon; I saw them prostrating to me".
When the Quran mentions elsewhere these 3 celestial bodies together, it begins with the brightest to the dimmest 7:54,16:12,22:18. The same is the case most of the time throughout the Bible, including when relating Joseph's dream Gen37:9. The Quran breaks that pattern in the story of Joseph because when the dream manifested, those that prostrated first were the brothers, ie the eleven stars, while the parents, the sun and moon, were, out of respect, first raised on the throne 12:100.
The discrepancies within the biblical version of the story are hard to make sense of, especially considering the pattern within the life of Joseph where the dreams brought to his attention—the wine-steward’s, the baker’s, and Pharaoh’s—are fulfilled in their every detail.
As to the reason to the scribes of the HB making such a blunder, no other rational reason can be given other than, either neglectfulness or purposeful character assassination as is so often the case throughout their books. The Benjamites were, according to them a treacherous tribe against whom other tribes of Israel were involved in bloody wars. What better way to vilify them further than by portraying their ancestor Benjamin, as the reason for the grand mother of the tribes of Israel's death. Prejudice, morally reprehensible actions by both God and the protagonists run through the weak and inconsistent Biblical narrative of Jacob and Joseph. Prophethood for example is depicted as a blessing that can be deceptively stolen from God, as Jacob is alleged to have done. Nobody steals from God, especially not prophethood which the Quran repeatedly says is bestowed upon those God deems fit, nor can one "wrestle" and outpower Him as naively depicted in the same story.
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