Though now in the deepest of his life’s trenches, God is still with Joseph (Genesis 39:21). His fellow inmates, Pharaoh’s former butler and his former baker, both dream symbolic dreams, and Joseph’s skills as a dream-interpreter are put to use. He predicts that the butler will be exonerated in three days and restored to Pharaoh’s service, and that the baker will be put to death. Joseph’s interpretations come true.

The Crossing of the Red Sea or Parting of the Red Sea (Hebrew: קריעת ים סוף, romanized: Kriat Yam Suph, lit. "parting of the sea of reeds")[1] is an episode in the origin myth of The Exodus in the Hebrew Bible.

Biblical Hebrew has an unusually small vocabulary clustered around an even smaller number of three-letter roots, most of them denoting concrete actions or things, and the Bible achieves its mimetic effects partly through the skillful repetition of these few vivid words.

Let me illustrate by examining a well-known passage, Genesis 7:17–18, in which the flood comes and Noah’s ark is lifted up above the earth. The example involves the Hebrew syntactic tendency to open each sentence in narrative with “and,” to order the words in parallel clauses by coordination (“and” + “and” + “and”), rather than by subordination (“because,” “so,” or “although”). This biblical syntactic feature, known as parataxis, affects the text’s rhythm, its temporal interpretation, its layers of cohesion and ambiguity. Here is Alter’s rendering of this passage: “And the Flood was forty days over the earth, and the waters multiplied and bore the ark upward and it rose above the earth. And the waters surged and multiplied mightily over the earth, and the ark went on the surface of the water.”

Alter’s approaches the Bible as great literature first and foremost — an approach almost inconceivable before the mid-20th century.

Alter says he avoids the phrase “‘like the son of man’ because of its strong, and debatable, tilt toward a messianic interpretation.”