[17] So the Holy Word, deeming it unfitting that pure things should have impure things associated with them, provides for the safe-keeping of Joseph’s bones, by which I mean the only relics of such a soul as were left behind untouched by corruption and worthy of perpetual memory (Gen. 50:25).
[18] Those of the latter kind were these; Joseph’s confidence that “God will visit” the race that has vision (Gen. 50:24), and will not utterly hand it over to Ignorance, that blind task-mistress; his discernment between the mortal and the incorruptible portions of the soul and his leaving behind to Egypt those which had to do with bodily pleasures and other forms of unrestrained passion, while concerning the incorruptible parts he made an agreement, that they should accompany those who went up to the cities of virtue, and should be conveyed thither, and had the agreement secured by an oath.
[19] What, then, are the uncorrupted parts? His having nothing to do with Pleasure when she says, “Let us lie together” (Gen. 39:7) and enjoy the good things of mankind: the shrewdness coupled with the resoluteness which enabled him to recognize the products of empty fancies which many accounted to be good, and to distinguish them as mere dreams from those which are really so; and to confess that the true and certain interpretations of things are given under God’s guid ance (Gen. 40:8), while the doubtful imaginations that have no certainty follow the rule and line of the erring and deluded life of men who have not undergone purification, a life that finds its joy in the delights provided by bakers and cooks and butlers.
[20] Other traits of incorruption were these: he was proclaimed not the subject, but the ruler of all Egypt, the domain of the body (Gen. 41:41): he was proud to own himself a member of the Hebrew race (Gen. 40:15), whose wont it is, as the name “Hebrew” or “Migrant” indicates, to quit the objects of sense-perception and go after those of Mind: he gloried in the fact that “here he had done nothing” (ibid.), for to have performed no single act such as the worthless people there admired, but to have utterly hated and eschewed them all,
[21] was conduct that called for no slight praise: he derided lusts and all passions and their gross excesses (Gen. 39:14, 17): he feared God (Gen. 42:18) even though he was not yet ready to love Him: when in Egypt he claimed as his own the life that is real life,