THE GREAT HALL OF JOSEPH’S PALACE was filled with dignitaries and government officials. Clerks fluttered about with unsigned documents. The Fan Bearer on the Viceroy’s Right and the Fan Bearer on the Viceroy’s Left stood holding their tall black-and-white ostrich-feather fans upright on either side of Joseph’s throne. The fan bearers’ function was purely ceremonial, even on warm days like this. It would have been beneath their dignity to actually wave the fans.
The brothers, frightened and dejected, were escorted into the hall by a phalanx of guards. When they came within twenty-five feet of the dais where Joseph’s throne stood, they stopped and prostrated themselves before him, palms and foreheads pressed against the cold marble slabs of the floor. The dignitaries and government officials looked at them with disgust. There was whispering and hushed laughter.
“How could you do this?” Joseph said. The interpreter echoed his tone of grave displeasure. “Don’t you know that a man like me sees what lies hidden?”
“What can we tell you, my lord?” Judah said, lifting his head to speak. “How can we claim that we are innocent? God has uncovered our crime.”
Judah saw no point in denying the theft. How the cup had found its way into Benjamin’s pack—whether it was by supernatural intervention or whether Benjamin had suddenly lost his wits—was irrelevant, though how Benjamin could even have gotten near the cup, with all those soldiers standing at attention around the dining table, was more than Judah could comprehend. He believed they were all innocent of this crime, but that didn’t make them innocent. For more than two decades he had been waiting for the other crime to be punished. God is subtle in His ways, but He is not careless, and He brings all things to their balance in His own sweet time. Sooner or later there is always a balancing, as Judah had learned abruptly in the almost fatal mistake he had made with Tamar, which had shaken him to the core.
Now, devastating as it was to contemplate the possible consequences of this theft, he felt a strange relief about it. God was certainly at work here. He was showing them all what they had been too immature, too craven, to realize when they had succumbed to their jealousy and rage. How could they have been so brutal as to shut their father’s grief out of their minds when they attacked his favorite son? Well, once again God was holding their father’s grief before them, this time about Benjamin. It was horrible to behold. They would have to relive it when they went home, only this time it would be even worse. And the fault would be Judah’s alone.