Joseph

Mann's own work, for the most part, is under this spell as well; and he points this out himself, both repeatedly and clearly, throughout his mythological tetralogy of Joseph and His Brothers — I. The Tales of Jacob (1933), II. Young Joseph (1934), III. Joseph in Egypt (1936), and IV. Joseph the Provider (1943) — where Jacob and Joseph, his heroes, are explicitly associated with the ambiguous, neither-nor, both-and logic of what he calls, 'lunar syntax,'

Campbell argues that Mann's Joseph tetralogy places its patriarch within a 'lunar syntax' of ambiguous, both-and consciousness, explicitly contrasted with the solar, binary logic of Esau and Joseph's warrior brothers.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis

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the wonderful story that Thomas Mann has developed beautifully in his novel Joseph and His Brothers. Here Mann presents the remarkable tales of Jacob and Esau. All the parallels in that Egyptian story of Osiris and Set are found in that account of Jacob and Esau.

Campbell identifies Mann's Joseph narrative as the mythological core of the Jewish mythos, reading Jacob-Esau through the parallel of Osiris-Set and treating the Patriarchal descent into Egypt as the generative movement from which a people emerges.

Campbell, Joseph, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, 2001thesis

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The later, mainly Cabalistic tradition speaks of two Messiahs, the Messiah ben Joseph (or ben Ephraim) and the Messiah ben David. They were compared to Moses and Aaron, also to two roes, and this on the authority of the Song of Solomon 4: 5.

Jung traces the Cabalistic bifurcation of the Messiah into a suffering, mortal Messiah ben Joseph and a triumphant Messiah ben David, situating this doubling within a broader phenomenology of the Self's polarity.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis

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Joseph K. is asked to confess but declares, 'I am completely guiltless.' The entire novel is a depiction of Joseph K.'s efforts to free himself from the court. He seeks help from every conceivable source, but to no avail because he faces no ordinary official court of law. As the reader gradually realizes, Joseph K. is confronted with an internal court, one residing in his private depths.

Yalom reads Kafka's Joseph K. as a depth-psychological portrait of existential guilt denied, in which the 'court' is revealed as an internal tribunal rooted in the character's own unacknowledged responsibility.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis

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Philip the apostle said, 'Joseph the carpenter planted a garden, for he needed wood for his trade. He is the one who made the cross from the trees he planted, and his own offspring hung on what he planted. His offspring was Jesus and what he planted was the cross.'

The Gospel of Philip employs a typological reading of Joseph the carpenter as the unwitting planter of the cross, linking paternal labor to the instrument of redemption in a characteristically Gnostic symbolic reversal.

Marvin W. Meyer, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting

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Joseph, 190, 239–241

Corbin's index confirms Joseph's presence as a named theophanic figure within Ibn Arabi's Sufi imagination, situated alongside Jesus and other prophetic personages in the work's symbolic architecture.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969aside

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