Genesis 44:32-34

"For thy servant became surety for the lad unto my father, saying, If I bring him not unto thee, then shall I bear the blame to my father for ever. Now therefore, let thy servant, I pray thee, abide instead of the lad a bondman to my lord; and let the lad go up with his brethren. For how shall I go up to my father, if the lad be not with me? lest I see the evil that will come upon my father."

This is the pinnacle of the Joseph story. Here Judah stood forth as a willing sacrifice to spare the life of his brother, and at a time when he might have supposed that Benjamin could have been guilty. After all, the cup was in his sack. Right here was, "the turning point in the relations between Joseph and his brethren."[10] In this magnanimous action, Judah earned the right to supplant his brother Reuben as the successor to the patriarchal birthright. It was this heart-breaking plea that opened the fountain of tears in the heart of the long-lost brother then upon the throne of Egypt.

What a transformation had occurred in the life of Judah! Standing before his very eyes, Joseph saw that same hard-eyed brother who had once mercilessly sold him as a slave into Egypt standing there pleading with all of his heart to be made a slave forever in the place of Benjamin! Such a scene was never known before. Joseph's heart was simply broken by it, and he burst into cries of weeping that were heard all the way to the palace of Pharaoh. A more pathetic scene can hardly be imagined than that shattering emotional storm that swept over the long-estranged brothers. Judah was the hero of the reconciliation. No wonder Jesus Christ himself would be called "The Lion of the Tribe of Judah." If ever a man earned the right to stand in the ancestry of Jesus and to give his name as one of his titles, Judah did so in that hallowed moment in the palace of Joseph.

Martin Luther said, "I would give very much to be able to pray to our Lord God as well as Judah prayed to Joseph here."[11] It will be noted that in our quotation above, we broke this long paragraph recording Judah's plea into four paragraphs instead of only one as in the ASV. Skinner entitled these successive paragraphs thus:

1. The recital of the interview in which Joseph had insisted on Benjamin being brought down.
   
2. A pathetic description of his father's reluctance to part with him, overcome only by the harsh necessity of hunger.
   
3. A suggestion of the death stroke which their return without Benjamin would inflict on their aged parent.
   
4. The speaker's personal request to be allowed to redeem his honor by taking Benjamin's punishment upon himself.[12]
   

Josephus added to the Biblical record by affirming that, "All of Joseph's brothers fell down before him weeping, and delivering themselves up to destruction for the preservation of the life of Benjamin."[13] However, nothing in the sacred text even hints of such a thing.

"His life is bound up in the lad's life ..." (Genesis 44:30). "This is a figure for inalienable affection, as in 1 Samuel 18:1."[14]

The use of "lad" as a description of Benjamin "does not suggest that Benjamin was a young boy at the time. Judah used the term as a word of endearment, and naturally because he was several years older than Benjamin."[15] This is also the explanation of Joseph's remark back in 43:29, where he called him, "My son."

Morris' comment on this passage is:

In this willingness to give his own life in place of his brother's, for the sake of his father, Judah became a beautiful type of Christ, more fully and realistically than even Joseph himself, who is often taken by Bible expositors as a type of Christ. "Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."[16]

This comment by Morris is pertinent to the fact that the principal theme of all this section of Genesis, beginning back in Genesis 37, is not Joseph at all, despite the prominence he enjoys in the record. These chapters are the [~toledowth] of Jacob, and it is the fortunes of the Chosen Nation which appear so dramatically upon these pages.