Reading Joseph's assertion to his brothers in , "God sent me before you to preserve life," the Mishnat Rabbi Eliezer taught that when a person seeks to injure an enemy, the person bars the enemy from getting any cure, but God is not so. God provides the cure before the blow, as it says in , "I would heal Israel even as the iniquity of Ephraim is uncovered." So in the days of Joseph, God did not inflict famine on the Tribal Ancestors until God had sent Joseph before them.