The Abridgment

Query. If it is said, “Did not the Exalted cease to provide the magicians and sages of Egypt with the knowledge of interpreting dreams, with which they were familiar, and prevent them from arriving at any conclusion with regards to the interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream, so that it would accord with the statement none could interpret them (Genesis 41:8), so that Joseph’s distinction and advantage over them would prevail?” The answer is that this is impossible, assuming rational soundness, since if this were possible, it would lead to the possibility that one who had long practiced the scribal arts or another of the artistries, and was well-versed in it since his childhood, and had excelled in it and surpassed all of his contemporaries, attempts it one day, while sound of mind and senses, yet cannot carry it out, such that if he were told, “Write ‘In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate,’” or something like that, he would say “I do not know.” We know that a person who is commanded in this way yet claims that he does not know is lying, and it is appropriate that we criticize him: it is a truly absurd possibility. And since the situation of the magicians and sages of Egypt was like that described, in terms of their expertise in interpreting dreams and other knowledge, then it is farfetched that he, the exalted, would have removed from them this knowledge that they earlier possessed. There is no difference regarding this issue between the immediate knowledge that is created in the rational person through [the actual] practice [of a skill], and the proof-based knowledge that the rational being achieves through contemplation. [ . . . ]

And if it is said, why is it the case that with respect to Pharaoh’s dream the situation of the magicians and sages of Egypt is like that of the scribe well-practiced in the scribal arts, to the extent that it is not possible for their knowledge of what they have practiced for many years to be removed from them, and could it not have been a strange dream whose interpretation they could not fathom? The answer is that those who specialize in the interpretation of dreams recorded principles governing what the sleeper sees in his dream: what can exist in waking, and what cannot, and they recorded the impossibilities and their interpretations, such as someone who sees his severed head in a room, and he overturns it, and someone who envisions his Creator, the Exalted, addressing him, and many other types of impossibilities, and there is no doubt that these [=these recorded principles] could provide some recourse in understanding Pharaoh’s dream, either in an explicit text or in some extended interpretation. Thus the most likely explanation is that they provided interpretations for his dream that he did not accept, for it is possible for dream-interpreters to differ just like doctors, which made Joseph’s superiority over them evident.