To PRACTISE DIVINATION — to read omens. Joseph's steward says of the silver cup that his master 'indeed divines by it' (44:5), and Joseph repeats the claim to the brothers' faces (44:15). The practice is real and Egyptian: LECANOMANCY, reading the shapes made by oil dropped into water in a bowl, is attested across the ancient Near East. ⚠️ It is also flatly prohibited by the Torah later (Leviticus 19:26; Deuteronomy 18:10), which leaves an honest question the text never answers: is Joseph describing what he does, or maintaining an Egyptian persona that includes a magician's reputation? This is the man who told Pharaoh 'not I — God will answer' (41:16), so the second is at least as likely. Genesis reports the claim and declines to comment; the versions all keep it plain (KJV 'whereby indeed he divineth'). ⚠️ Do not confuse this verb with its twin, the ordinary noun nachash, ‘serpent’, which has its own entry: the same three consonants, used by the Bible as two different words. Whether they are related at some deeper level has been argued for a long time and is not settled. Numbers 21:9, the serpent of bronze, is where the noun does its most famous work. ⭐ Numbers 23:23 then puts the noun in the mouth of a professional — there is no omen in Jacob, and no divination in Israel — said by a diviner standing beside his third set of altars. ⚠ Whether the preposition there means IN (Israel keeps no diviners) or AGAINST (no spell can touch them) divides the shelf down the middle, and changes the verse completely. ⭐ And Numbers 24:1 is the sequel: the narrator reports that Balaam stopped going, as time after time before, toward nechashim — the plural of this very noun. He denied the practice in an oracle and then abandoned it in a narrative sentence, in that order. → first discussed at Gen 44:5