The Prophet Joseph and His Brothers: A Story of Forgiveness

‘Abdu’l-Bahá would draw, in His talks, on the great prophetic narratives of the Hebrew and Quranic Scriptures. Among the stories He would tell most often, the listeners record, was the story of the Prophet Joseph and His brothers — the long arc that runs from the boy thrown into the well at Dothan to the ruler of Egypt who, years later, recognised His own brothers as they came begging for grain in the famine.

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The Master would tell the story in essentially the form preserved in the Quran. The brothers, jealous of their father Jacob’s love for Joseph, had thrown Him into a pit; the caravan-merchants had drawn Him out and sold Him in Egypt; He had risen, by the favour of God, to the office of vizier under Pharaoh; the famine had eventually driven His brothers to come seeking food.

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The Master would dwell, the listeners record, on the moment of recognition. Joseph, knowing them but as yet unknown to them, had tested them; He had wept; He had concealed His tears; He had finally, at the moment His heart could no longer hold it in, revealed Himself.

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The brothers, recognising Him, were terrified. They expected the punishment that their crime had earned. Joseph said, instead, the words that the Master would quote from the Quranic verse:

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> No reproach this day shall be on you. God will forgive you; > for of those that show mercy, He is the most merciful.

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He did not require an apology. He did not impose a penance. He forgave first, before any words of repentance had been spoken; and the forgiveness, the recorders preserve the Master saying, was what permitted the brothers’ repentance to ripen into the full thing it later became.

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The Master would offer the story to those who had been deeply injured — by family, by friends, by the long persecutions of the early Bahá’ís themselves. Joseph’s example, He would quietly say, is the example for the spiritual community. We are to forgive without requiring the penance first; we are to forgive before the wronged self has been satisfied. The forgiveness opens, in the wrongdoer, the very capacity for repentance that no demand could have produced.

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The friends would carry the teaching away. Many of them, the later journals record, would in their own lives meet brothers of their own who had injured them. The Master’s rendering of Joseph would come back to them.

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*Paraphrased from Stories Told by 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 2000); see original for full text.*

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