If we look at the story of Joseph as told in the Book of Genesis/Bereshith, we encounter a story-arc of rising virtue that is paralleled in the Hebrew Testament only by the story of Ruth. Joseph begins his life as a spoiled younger son whose youthful vanity and gloating unreflective sense of parental favor arouses the bitter jealousy of his older, more world-worn brothers. This initial proclivity of immaturity propels Joseph into a course of destiny he might never have known, and ironically (or providentially) provides a future avenue of opportunity of which his family might never have been able to avail themselves.
Sold by his resentful brothers into slavery among people of another culture and language (that of Egypt) and made to seem murdered to his parents, Joseph suffers the ultimate humbling of his naive conceitedness. But at the same time, he is thrust into a situation where his native abilities are no longer sidelined by those of his many and more experienced older brothers. In his new context, however humiliating, he discovers his gift of inborn wits.
Joseph is soon faced with choosing between an inner moral code to govern his relationships with other human beings, or to surrender to desire, irrespective of the harm and dishonor it may incur; he chooses the former at every fork in the road of his remarkable destiny. Choosing the path of virtue ironically (or providentially) lands him in prison after being falsely accused by a married woman whose advances he rejects, though not cruelly but out of the conviction of his own moral reasoning. He declares that such an act would be a double act of bad faith: a betrayal of her wedded husband on her part, and a betrayal of trust between Joseph and his master (her husband), who has not only treated him well as a servant but, recognizing Joseph's intelligence, promoted him to the position of steward of his estate. So Joseph chooses not to carry over the fundamental sin his brothers committed against him.
The parallel thread running through the whole storyline of moral tests is Joseph's gifts of intelligence, which always readily emerge in whatever changing (or challenging) situation he faces, and for which he always comes to win respect, recognition and promotion. Yet never does he use his abilities or rising social position in Egyptian society to commit harm or exploitation for self-interest or to satisfy amoral or destructive desires. His talents of psychological interpretation and his sapient grasp of social and political contexts, as well as his intuitive sense of worldly trends, obtain for him exoneration and elevation to the highest position one might win without royal blood: that of vizier of Egypt, a real office corroborated by other ancient sources.
Joseph's conservational sense saves Egypt from famine in the cycling years of crop failure that follow the preceding years of bumper crops, and sets the scene for a moment as morally moving as when the newly widowed Ruth goes beyond the traditions of intertribal filial piety and chooses to cherish and remain staunchly committed to her likewise widowed mother-in-law. In Joseph's story, another act of unexpected compassion occurs. Unrecognized by his brothers, who come to Egypt to trade for surplus grain and thereby save their clan from starvation, Joseph chooses to inwardly forgive them for their betrayal (now years in the past), and then invites them to bring their father and the rest of the family and households to live in Egypt as a haven from the years of drought he senses will follow. It is only after they all return that Joseph humbly reveals his true identity, initiating an unexpected family reunion, replete with tearful forgiveness and passionate apology. Here is moral beauty writ large, and is arguably the finest example of moral growth and the redemptive power of God working through human beings in the whole Hebrew Testament.
There may have been more exalted figures (Moses), more beloved figures (David), and more glorious figures (Solomon), but there is none who faces so many tests of moral integrity and physical survival, and who always chooses not only the most intelligent course of action, but also the id-subsuming option toward greater virtue. Joseph forgoes lust in the form adultery to safeguard his moral refuge in relationships of mutual trust. He forgoes despair in prison to selflessly counsel his cellmates, he forgoes a sense of ethnic alienation to help his foreign masters and a foreign nation from disaster, and he forgoes revenge against his ruthless brothers to show them redemptive mercy and forgiveness, though he does perform a quite forgivable prank on them before revealing his true identity (which you can read about for yourself!).
Joseph's life is one of ups and downs, and a period of long separation from his family which, for all its faults, he finds that he perdurably loves, but he does not allow his de facto orphanhood, his enslavement, his imprisonment, nor his exile in a foreign nation to cause him to decline in moral character, however inwardly sorrowful, desperate and vengeful he might have no doubt felt at times, being human and not some sort of demigod. In fact, his hardships ennoble him, because he discovers in them opportunities to enact the moral beauty of the faith planted in his soul by his parents. There is not such another exemplar of the Hebrew faith, aside from the aforemention Ruth, until the story of Jesus, for even Moses lapses and commits murder (however sympathetic we may be to its special circumstances), David commits adultery and conspires the murder of the husband of his mistress, and Solomon lapses into paganism to please the women for whom he is possessed by desire.
The story of Joseph is important to the Three Abrahamic Faiths that honor it, not only for the intrinsic merits of Joseph's emergence from mocking, irreverent, egocentric adolescence to become a person who steadfastly steered a course of accumulating moral character, but also for the resulting broader impact of his choices as an individual. The story is also important to these three religions because Joseph's honor and proactive morality led to both the preservation of the discerning nation who had originally bought him as a slave, and to the physical deliverance of his kindred and their spiritual redemption through his sincere and openhearted forgiveness. To this day, Yosef (Jewish), Yusuf (Muslim), and Joseph (Christian) remain popular names as cross-cultural cognates, the parents of each faith tradition implicitly hoping for a similar course of wise and moral choices from their offspring, when they encounter the inevitable challenges to be faced in this world as young adults and mature adults.
Joseph is the mythic ancestor of the subsequent moral leaders in the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, Jesus and Muhammad included. Joseph's life set the standard of moral being the way no patriarch before him had. Joseph is a paragon in the face of adversity, winning success the honest way. Oh that those who attain positions of power and influence today would take Joseph as their model. But then, Joseph's rising was as virtuous as the mastery to which it led.
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