Genesis 42:7
And Joseph saw his brethren, and he knew them, but made himself strange unto them, and spake roughly unto them; and he said unto them, Whence come ye? And they said, From the land of Canaan to buy food. And Joseph saw his brethren, and he knew them, but made himself strange unto them, and spake roughly unto them; and he said unto them, Whence come ye? And they said, From the land of Canaan to buy food.
The brothers came from Canaan to Egypt during the famine with the crowd of buyers to purchase grain for food, and they bowed down before Joseph with their faces to the earth. Joseph knew and recognized his brothers, but he concealed his identity and acted toward them as a stranger. They did not recognize him because his name and appearance had changed. He spoke roughly and sternly to them and asked where they had come from, and they answered that they had come from the land of Canaan to buy food. As they bowed before him, he remembered the dreams he had dreamed about them.
His rough speech took the form of charging them with being spies, a suspicion he repeated and kept up even after they insisted their only errand was to buy food. He acted with this apparent suspicion to test their character, to see whether they still had the same haughty spirit or had changed, and to draw from them information about their home and his father and whether Benjamin was safe. Humbled by adversity, the brothers met the harsh treatment with grief rather than anger and answered that they were no spies but twelve sons of one man, with the youngest still with their father and one gone. He pretended to doubt their story and demanded proof by requiring that their youngest brother be brought to Egypt, proposing to hold them confined while one of them went to fetch him and warning that refusal would mark them as spies. The distress of the encounter brought their past cruelty to Joseph back to their minds and made them fear that their suffering was punishment for that sin.