Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up your head, and restore you unto your place: and you shall deliver Pharaoh's cup into his hand, after the former manner when you were his butler.
All Commentaries on Genesis 40:13 Go To Genesis 40
Ambrose of Milan
AD 397
I do not choose to speak of the dream of the other man. You surely remember my words, that even then I avoided its interpretation in the case of one from whose end I shy away, at whose death I shudder. Rather, let us speak of him who thought he was happy since he was chief butler and believed that this was the summit and crown of all power, that he would give the cup to the king. This was his glory, this was his grandeur in this world. When he was deprived of this he felt sorrow, and when he was restored to it he rejoiced. But this is a dream, and all worldly power is a dream, not a reality. To be sure, he saw by way of a dream that his preeminent position was restored to him. Isaiah also says that people of this kind are such as take delight in prosperity in this world. One who eats and drinks in his sleep thinks he is filled with food and drink, but when he awakens, he begins to be more hungry. Then he understands how insubstantial were that dreamer’s food and drink. Just so, one who is asleep in this world and does not open his eyes to the mysteries of God, as long as he is in a deep corporeal sleep, supposes that such worldly power is of some importance, seeing it, as it were, in his dreams. But when he has awakened, he discovers how insubstantial the pleasure of this world is. Look now upon that true Hebrew, the interpreter not of a dream but of reality and of a signal vision. He came from the fullness of divinity and the liberty of heavenly grace into this prison of the body. The allurement of this world could work no change in him, no corrupt and worldly pleasure could subvert him, and although tempted he did not fall. Although attacked, he did not attack; at the last, when he was grasped by his bodily garment by the adulterous hand of the synagogue, as it were, he stripped off the flesh and ascended free of death. The harlot made false accusation when she could not hold him; but the prison did not frighten him, and hell did not hold him. Yes, he delivered others even from that place where he had descended as if for punishment. Where the bonds of death were drawn tight for him, even there he loosened the bonds of the dead.
