ABSTRACT
Whether Joseph is or is not a blessing to his family, literally the children of Israel, restates the central theme of the stories about him. He did help his family survive the famine and, for a time, the hostility of the local people. Whether the aping of Egyptian customs this required and the forgetting of Israelite law was worth it is the tension the Joseph stories are meant to illustrate and, in part, but only in part, to resolve. The determination of meaning, if there is enough information to do that, depends on having an initial hypothesis of what the stories people are interpreting are about. Only if they know whether and to what extent the expectations generated by a particular theory of meaning are met or violated can they say that the meaning of a text is or is not in accord with the general conceptions set out.
