If you read the last verse of Chapter 37, it would seem only natural to pick up with the first verse of Chapter 39. “Meanwhile, the Midianites sold Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, one of Pharoah’s officials, the captain of the guard.  Now Joseph had been taken down to Egypt. Potiphar, an Egyptian who was one of Pharoah’s officials, the captain of the guard, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had taken him there.” That would be the perfect and expected sequence – but it is not. Instead, there is this insertion of an incident that appears to have nothing to do with the larger story of Joseph. You would…

William Barstow was an enterprising partner and friend of Thomas Edison as well as an inventor and highly successful entrepreneur in his own right. One night in 1931, Barstow and his wife, Francoise, sat around their table discussing new ideas. They had been wrestling with how to structure a substantial gift that would allow them to make donations without setting up a trust or a private foundation – both of which were primarily reserved for only the wealthiest families in the country at the time. The Barstows worked out an arrangement with the young New York Community Trust to create a vehicle that would give them most of the benefits…