Lecture: Biblical Series XV: Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors

[Music] That's a hell of a welcome for someone who's gonna talk about the Bible. So I thought I would get farther than through Genesis by this point, but I'm not unhappy about the pace either. I've learned a tremendous amount, and so hopefully what we'll do today is finish Genesis completely. Then, I think I'll try to start up with Exodus in May, depending on what happens next year. I have a busy travel schedule, but I would really like to do it. I really like the Exodus story, and I understand it very well. A lot of the stories in Genesis, especially after the first few stories, say up to the Tower of Babel, I had to do a tremendous amount of learning about, which is really good. But I do know the Exodus story, so I'm really looking forward to that.

So, so let's dive right into it and see how far we can get today. So we'll review first. So Joseph's father is Jacob, and Jacob is the patriarch of Israel, essentially the father of the twelve tribes. We might remember that he had a very morally ambivalent pathway through life. It's one of the things that I think is so interesting about the stories in the Old Testament, is that these so-called patriarchal figures are very realistic. It's something that I was also being struck by, that accounts in the New Testament that way. There are lots of things that Christ does that you'd think would have been edited out over time and sanitized, but they're not. And the Old Testament is definitely not a book that's been sanitized, and that's quite interesting that that's the case.

So you sort of see people with all their flaws, and I've been trying to also derive some general conclusions about them, the moral of the story of the Genesis stories. These stories are fundamentally moral, and moral, as far as I'm concerned, has to do with action. Right? Because moral decisions are the decisions that you make when you're structuring action. When you decide to do one thing or another, generally you want to do things that are the best things that you can think of to do, and hence good. But sometimes you also want to do things that are the worse things you can do, you know, because you're angry or resentful or bitter.

So the moral decisions that you make that govern your actions are really the most important decisions that you make in your life. And it's not that easy to figure out how to make moral decisions. We don't have an unerring technology for that, the same way as we do for, say, making decisions about empirical reality, which in some ways seems a lot simpler. Partly because we can work collectively at it, partly because we have a rigorous methodology for deciding what's true and what's not.

So one of the things that's really struck me—like it's an overarching theme, I would say—that emerges out of Genesis, especially after the really ancient stories, say especially after the stories of Cain and Abel and Noah and the Tower of Babel—when you get to the accounts of the historically or historically real people, one injunction seems to be: get the hell out there and do something. You know, one of the major themes for all of the patriarchs that we've talked about—Abraham, say Jacob and Joseph—is move out into the world, regardless of the circumstances at hand.

Now that's in the Old Testament stories, that's basically portrayed as harkening to the voice of God, something like that. Maybe you could think about it as destiny or a psychological calling. And the funny thing, too, is that it's not that these people have an easy time of it when they heed that call. So what's fascinating is that they often run into extreme difficulties right away. And I think that's very interesting, first of all, because life is obviously full of extreme difficulties, and second, it's another example of the failure to sugarcoat things, which is one of the things I think makes a mockery of anti-religious theories that are even quite sophisticated, say like Freud's.

Because Freud thought of religion as a... and it was a wish fulfillment, essentially. And also Marx, who thought about religion as the opiate of the masses...