A benevolent Pharaoh had become a replacement father, giving Joseph a new name and a wife. And with that wife he had sired these two sons—sons he named for his sense of pain and alienation from his family, and for his hope of starting a new life in this foreign land: Manasseh, “for God has allowed me to forget all my travail, all of my father’s house”; Ephraim, “for God has given me children in the land of my oppression.”
