FOR HE WROTE OF ME
And will you not see, O man, the astounding degree of correspondence between the acts of the Patriarchs and the first fathers of the Israelite nation as recorded in the Pentateuch from the day that Abraham departed from Haran and the flow of sacred history from the time when ever there was a house of Jacob? For Abraham like Jacob and his household later was first at Shechem and Beth-el and then, driven by a famine, went down to Egypt, where Sarah was taken but then freed by great divine plagues; fought a major campaign from Hebron to Dan, but then, prefiguring the lands promised but acquired only in the time of David, on to Hobah, meaning “debt,” north of Damascus; saw the humbling of the Philistines, who later approached him for a covenant, even as these were humbled through David and subservient in the days of Solomon; and offered a ram in sacrifice to the Lord on what became the Temple mount — for mount Moriah is so identified in II Chronicles 3:1. And Isaac experienced further trouble from the Philistines, and they were humbled yet again, though not so severely as at the first, and sued yet again for a covenant. And he truly spent all his years within the borders of the Holy Land, and that within its southern portion, later called Judah, entirely. But Jacob was an exile in a northern land, not Assyria nor yet Babylonia, but a figure of them both, for first he halted at Beth-el, later Bethaven, sight of one of the two calf-shrines of Jeroboam king of Israel (I Kings 12:25-33), the ultimate root of the exile of the people of the northern kingdom, and there he served seven years for Rachel, prefiguring the seventy-year-long Babylonian exile of the Jews, and then yet long other years as a type of the continuing exile of most of Jewry for many years past 538 B.C. (Genesis 29:20; 31:41). And in his exile Jacob serves one Laban, whose name means “white,” for as Haran is a figure of both Assyria and Babylonia, so is Laban, deceiver, exploiter, ever self-righteous, a manifest figure of this latter-day universal Babylon, which has proceeded forth from Europe to every corner of the world. And see how the Scripture here says, “And Laban departed, and returned to his place. And Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him” (31:55-32:1); and even as the situation was much later at the departure of Paul, “And when the brothers knew this, they brought him down to Caesarea, and sent him forth to Tarsus. Then did the church have peace throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria, being built up and, going in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit, became multiplied” (Acts 9:30-31). And the household of the ancients being back now in Canaan, the daughter of Jacob goes out to see the daughters of the land and is defiled, all this a figure of Hellenization and the oppressive anti-Mosaic Hellenistic Syrian rule; and Simeon and Levi avenge Dinah’s wrong, but meet the disapproval and on his deathbed the curse of their father, and Simon the Hasmonean was the first independent ruler of what became a dynasty of high priests (all priests are also Levites) styled, though illegitimately, kings, for they were not of the seed of David, and are condemned in later prophecy in Zechariah 3 and 6:9-15 through Joshua, the contemporary high priest, whose filthy garments are a sign of regal ones and whose fair mitre is priestly (his servants who stand before him are commanded to remove his filthy garments in verse 4, and verse 7 reads, “So says the LORD of hosts, ‘If you go in My paths and if you keep My charge, and you judge My house as well and also keep My courts, then I will give you the right to walk among these who stand by,’ ” that is, the living; and compare 9:11-10:2, but reading in 12-13, “Also today I return answer to you through an announcer of double tidings, for as I will bend Judah for Me and fill the bow with Ephraim, so will I rouse your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece, and make you like the sword of a mighty one”). Now the generations and kings of Esau, who is Edom, and the dukes of that land in the days of the prophet-king Moses are given in Genesis 36, and are in context a figure of the Edomite or Herodian house that ruled in Palestine into the New Testament age.
And so we come to the Joseph account. Praise to the Father, praise to the Son, praise to the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.
And his name is Joseph, and he is a figure of the incarnate God, foster-son of that later Joseph, and he is sold by one Judah and calls for the sending forth of Benjamin, true figure of Paul of the tribe of Benjamin, and Paul means “little,” and this was the little one of Jacob’s family. And who in the Old Testament is like Joseph for forbearance and tender pity? And see him how he was a true prophet, and how he exerted himself to the utmost as though to ensure the fulfillment of the holy word that God had given him. And here he is with a coat of many colors, “patches” of color that is, and it is for this that his brothers hate him — and are these patches anything but a figure for the calling of all nations to the Faith of Jesus? And it is a most wondrous thing that complex as the elements of foreshadowing are earlier on in Genesis, the most important event of all, and that one Pentateuchal, is not foreshadowed, namely the giving of the divine Law at mount Sinai. But in truth the Law was not reckoned in Heaven as having been yet fully or truly given until its most fundamental aspect, though it too was concealed as hidden treasure in the wording of the Pentateuch, that is, its inner veiled essence and interior light, was made manifest through Christ. And now he is sent by his father from a place of security and greatness, from the valley of Hebron, to Shechem (which can have the derivative meaning of “portion,” as in the “one portion” of Genesis 48:22), the geographical midpoint of Palestine between the mountains of Ebal and Gerizim (as in Deuteronomy 11:26-32; 27; and Joshua 8:30-35), true figure of fleshly Israel and their affairs; but finding none of his own there to receive him, he was diverted by a man, and he is a type of the Old Testament prophets, to seek for them in Dothan, which is a place name made from the word for decree or law and so, passing by the chosen ethnics and their affairs, filled now with envy and hatred, he comes to the place of the Law, for it is here in the midst of the Joseph account that the true giving of the Law is prefigured and not before. And he is cast into a pit, and the evil ones sit down then to eat, and this pit is a figure of Christ’s tomb. And he is sold for pieces of silver, if not thirty, and so becomes a figure of the body of the Lord, which is His church.
Now Jacob, who is Israel, goes down at the age of 130 years into exile in Egypt, true figure of this great Babylon of servitude and affliction, and as in Revelation 11:8, and as analyzed at length elsewhere, and lives yet 17 years more and dies then, still in exile, but is buried in Canaan, though God had told him in Genesis 46:4 that He would bring him up out of Egypt again, for all this foreshadows the breaking of a covenant, for the whole house of the ancient Jewish people perished in exile, as established elsewhere, and not a man of them lived to return to Palestine, but yet we revere the memory of the ancient children of Israel, and especially as they were during the Old Testament age, and that is foreshadowed by the splendid burial accorded Jacob — but the Law and the covenant relationship have been bestowed on the Israel of God.
But yet see how the antichrist aspect of Christendom is likewise foreshadowed in Joseph (and compare, for instance, the prophecies of James, and how we are, therefore, all of us — that is, the poor — those “twelve tribes which are scattered abroad”) for, though he is taken as a slave, that is to say, lower class figure, to Egypt and falsely and maliciously accused there of evil, being in truth pious and faithful in all things, and then further wrongfully oppressed, yet remaining in righteousness as he was, he is then summoned to rule beside Pharaoh and so, shaving himself in Roman if also Egyptian style, garbed in all the pomp of Babylon and with the daughter of a heathen priest as his bride, he turns manifest class oppressor, seizing all lands but those of the priests alone and reducing the free peasantry of Egypt in precise accord with later European happenings to true and abject serfdom, doomed to expulsion from the land as by enclosure acts to the life of even more intense squalor of the early capitalistic era cities, as per Genesis 47:13-26. And note in 50:15-21 how his brothers, here a type of the mass of extraneous pagans, send one of their number forward — and surely he was Judah, after Reuben, Simeon and Levi whom Jacob had cursed and not blessed in 49:3-7 the eldest of them — and he is a figure for Muhammad of the Muslims, also the Muslims themselves, the people of Muhammad, with a false communication and command for Joseph, and even as Islam in essence truly represents a magnification and vehicle of Judaic influence. And he has two sons by his heathen wife, Manasseh and Ephraim, which are Eastern and Western Christendom, and Jacob in 48:19 promotes the younger over the elder, and so the Eastern lands are now Muslim or Marxist and the West includes all North and South America and yet other regions beyond. And things continue in this manner until Joseph dies, that is until the internal decay and death of supernaturalistic Christian faith has reached its fulness, and until a new king rises up over Egypt, and he is a figure for the individualistic-Enlightenment state form, also Marxism, who no longer regards so much as the memory of Joseph, neither as he was anciently nor even in his later hybrid form — but then, from the midst of a peasant horde trapped as slaves within a mighty civilization, true foreshadow of the lower class of this our own most evil age, for and through the blood of Christ and the blood of all His innocent poor shed since time began, there appears the long awaited figure of the prophet-king.
“And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding, that we might know the true one, and we are in the true one, even in His Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life” (I John 5:20).
Glory be to the Father, glory be to the Son, glory be to the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen!
— Barry I. Hyman
CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY BROTHERHOOD