Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies.

And it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

We'll go ahead and get started.

Where do we get started here?

We'll pick up in Genesis chapter 42, verse 1.

We've gotten off easy in terms of recap the last couple weeks, but we need to do a little

bit more this time, not too much more, because we kind of got through a unit, story unit last time.

So, but things have changed for Joseph, to say the least.

Last time we picked up with Joseph, having been sold into slavery in Egypt,

might have thought that would be as bad as things could get,

but they got worse.

He ended up in prison, and we talked a lot last time about what that meant in ancient Egypt being in prison,

that that's very different than being in even the worst prison in the 21st century in an industrialized country.

But then we saw how through the interpretation of dreams, ultimately Pharaoh's dreams,

Joseph not only got out of prison, but ended up being exalted to the second highest position in Egypt after Pharaoh in order to oversee food storage and food relief for an incoming famine that I do with the dream interpretations.

Dream interpretations for Pharaoh were that there would be seven years of plenty,

followed by seven years of famine.

And so Joseph said, what you need to do is during the seven years of plenty,

we need to be storing up food,

then we could distribute that food during the seven years of famine.

He was put in charge of doing that.

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