Josephs Dreams And Reubens Brethren - Analysis

A bush balladist rewrites Genesis as a case study in selfishness

Lawson’s central claim is blunt: the Joseph story is not a parade of providence but a familiar human mess of favouritism, resentment, and profit-seeking, dressed up afterward as holy destiny. He keeps insisting that the past is not past: hearts of men are just the same, and we still journey yet down into Egypt to buy corn. That last line is the poem’s governing metaphor: people keep walking into systems where they’ll be used, forgotten, or turned into users themselves.

To make that argument, Lawson swaps biblical grandeur for Australian colloquial bite: Joseph is a spoilt kid, the brothers are working men in heat and flies, and “scripture” becomes something like a yarn told in a shed, full of knowing asides. The joke is never just a joke; it’s the poet’s way of dragging sacred narrative down to the level where motives show.

Joseph as the kind of boy who can’t stop performing

Lawson paints Joseph’s character as a performance of innocence that’s really vanity. The coat of many colours is meant as kindness, but it functions as a provocation: it struck the brethren green, and Joseph learns early that attention is power. The narrator calls him mighty cocky with his Lo! and Behold!, as if Joseph has already adopted the rhetorical costume of scripture to sound important.

The dreams aren’t treated as mysterious messages so much as Joseph’s chosen weapon. He itched to rile them, tells the sheaf dream “straight,” then comes back chuckling to announce the sun and moon bowing. Even the narrator’s nitpicky joke about the sun being out at night matters: it’s a way of saying Joseph’s “visions” are less revelation than self-serving theatre.

The brothers’ crime is ugly, but the poem keeps widening the blame

The poem refuses to let the brothers be simple villains. Their plan to absentee Joseph grows out of work stress—sheep, dust, flies, and damned shirks—and out of Jacob’s destructive parenting. Reuben, in particular, is treated as the only one trying to keep a moral line: We will not kill the kid, he says, planning to slip back and rescue him. Even here, Lawson complicates virtue; Reuben’s decency is paired with a cunning soul, and his strategy is half mercy, half practicality.

Then Judah’s idea snaps the story into an economic key: We’ll sell the kid. Lawson’s sarcasm sharpens—they being Jews, they sell him for twenty bits of silver—and whatever one makes of the poem’s ethnic language, the underlying point is that money becomes the clean substitute for murder. Joseph is not only betrayed by hatred; he is converted into cash.

The real villain, again and again, is indulgent power

Lawson returns obsessively to a single engine of harm: the easy-going authority figure who lets injustice happen because it’s convenient. Jacob sends of all others, Joe! into danger with wondrous tact—the tact of blindness. Potiphar is described as a casual man who leaves everything in Joseph’s hands and cares mainly for tucker and his clothes. The jail governor does the same, letting Joseph run things while he smoked his pipe in peace. Egypt, in this retelling, is a world where power works by shrugging.

This pattern culminates in Pharaoh: he’s personally decent—Lawson imagines him careworn, smoothing his brow, asking Jacob How old art thou?—but he still enables Joseph’s rise. Lawson makes that enabling feel contemporary when he says Adventurers fix up our dreams and we elect them too. Authority doesn’t have to be cruel to do damage; it only has to be passive and persuadable.

Potiphar’s wife: a surprising plea under all the bluster

The Potiphar episode is where Lawson’s tone turns most volatile. He mocks Joseph’s preaching and calls his virtue talk glib, suggesting that sanctimony can be another form of ambition: both on the main chance. At the same time, he describes Potiphar’s wife as love-starved and much alone, and he’s willing—at least in principle—to see her not as a cartoon temptress but as a person cornered by status and loneliness.

Yet Lawson also loads her with harsh adjectives—vindictive, vicious—and then, in the Afterword, insists: Dare judge the wife. That contradiction is the poem thinking in public. It wants to condemn sexual power plays and false accusations, but it also wants to resist the easy tradition of making the woman the whole explanation. The speaker’s own anger keeps colliding with his desire to be fair.

Joseph the dream-interpreter becomes Joseph the monopolist

Once Joseph rises, Lawson’s moral accusation hardens: Joseph is not redeemed by suffering; he’s trained by it. In prison he can’t keep his hands off other people’s visions: They cannot keep from things they say belong to God. Later he turns interpretation into leverage, and leverage into policy. The famine section is described like a cold business case: Joseph makes a corner first in wheat, then, when corn is scarce, he grabs money, stock, and land in God’s and Pharaoh’s name. The sacred language becomes a stamp on a theft.

Even the family reconciliation is tainted. Joseph frames everything as providence—It was not you, but God—but the narrator calls it cant and points to the baiting of the brothers: the planted cup in Benjamin’s sack, the showy feast, the deliberate tugging at old Dad’s grey hairs. Forgiveness is presented as another stage-managed triumph, not a moral change.

A hard question the poem leaves hanging

If Joseph can do real cruelty and then narrate it as God sending him, what happens to any story of meaning? The poem’s bleakest implication is that providence-talk may be the most effective disguise power has: a way to make boodling sound like destiny, and revenge sound like salvation.

Afterword: from joking irreverence to a grim, cyclic view of history

By the end, the poem stops sounding like a comic retelling and starts sounding like a verdict. Lawson says Joseph remains a selfish tyrant and a hypocrite, and the family remains crookedly arranged: Reuben bears the brunt, Benjamin gets the preference. The repeating pattern is what matters: Pride and Self keep betraying people until Pharaohs rise that know us not.

Still, Lawson refuses to end in pure bitterness. He imagines Samaritans passing by, and kings like Pharaoh who rule to serve. The final tension is that he believes in kindliness while doubting improvement: the fight is ever grand, but we never reach the Promised Land. The poem’s most honest faith is not in biblical heroes, but in the stubborn, imperfect human capacity to keep trying to be decent inside systems that reward the opposite.