A Favored Son Is Sold

The verb is yashav, settled, and it gives this part of Genesis its Hebrew name, Vayeshev. Rashi caught the irony at once: Jacob wished to dwell at ease, and the trouble of Joseph sprang upon him. Esau’s line was dispatched in a chapter; Jacob’s will take the rest of the book.

This is the last of the book’s “generations” headings, and it runs to the end of Genesis. The “evil report” is dibbah, the word later used for the spies’ report of the land (Numbers 13:32), a slanted account more than a false one. Bilhah and Zilpah are called “wives”, not handmaids.

“Son of his old age” is odd when Benjamin is younger still; Onkelos renders it “a wise son”. The garment is a ketonet passim, a tunic reaching to the palms or ankles. The only other one in the Bible is worn by David’s daughter Tamar, the dress of the king’s daughters (2 Samuel 13:18).

The Hebrew reads that they could not speak to him “for peace”, leshalom. Rashi found something to their credit even here: they did not say one thing with the mouth and another in the heart. Their hostility was at least open.

No earlier dream in Genesis came without God in it: Abimelech (20:3), Jacob at Bethel (28:12) and Laban (31:24) all hear him speak. Joseph’s dreams name no speaker at all. The brothers had hated him for the coat; now they hate him “yet the more”, and the phrase will come again in three verses.

These are Joseph’s first recorded words, and they begin with a plea for a hearing: shim’u-na, hear, I pray you. The Hebrew repeats the root, “the dream which I have dreamed”, a doubling that runs through all of Joseph’s dream speech.

Shepherds dreaming of harvest is less strange than it sounds: Isaac sowed and reaped a hundredfold in 26:12. The dream is about grain, and grain is what will bring the brothers to Egypt, where they “bowed down themselves before him with their faces to the earth” (42:6).

Both questions double their verbs in Hebrew: “reigning, will you reign over us? ruling, will you rule?” Two different words for power are used, malak for a king and mashal for dominion. “His words” may be the dreams, or everything he has reported of them, including the evil report of verse 2.

Eleven stars is the right number now that Benjamin is born. Pharaoh’s dreams will also come in pairs, and Joseph will explain why: “the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice; it is because the thing is established by God” (41:32). Stars already meant descendants in the promise to Abraham (15:5).

“Bow down ourselves to thee to the earth” is almost exactly what the brothers do in 42:6. Jacob himself will bow in 47:31, when “Israel bowed himself upon the bed’s head”. This second dream is told to the father as well as the brothers, and it is the one that earns a rebuke.

“Envied” is qana, the jealousy Rachel felt when she “envied her sister” for her children (30:1). Hatred has turned into something more personal. Jacob’s keeping of the saying uses shamar, to guard, the verb of watching over something one expects to need later.

Shechem is where Simeon and Levi killed every male in chapter 34, about fifty miles north of Hebron. In Hebrew manuscripts the small word before “their father’s flock” carries scribal dots, and the rabbis read them to say the brothers went to feed themselves rather than the flock.

Jacob had said after Shechem, “ye have troubled me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land” (34:30), yet sends his favourite alone to that district. Joseph answers “Here am I”, hinneni, the answer Abraham gave before Mount Moriah (22:1).

“See whether it be well” is literally “see the peace of thy brethren and the peace of the flock”, the same shalom they could not speak to him in verse 4. The vale of Hebron to Shechem is a journey of several days on foot. Joseph once brought word home about his brothers, and is sent to do it again.

“Wandering” is ta’ah, the verb used when Hagar “wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba” (21:14). Joseph is lost in the fields near a city his family has made hostile. The man is not named and never appears again.

Hebrew puts the object first: “my brethren I am seeking”. It is the only sentence Joseph speaks on the whole journey, and it names the men who are about to sell him as the ones he is looking for.

Dothan lies about fifteen miles north of Shechem, beside the pass that carried trade from Gilead through the Jezreel Valley towards the coast and Egypt. That is why a caravan comes by in verse 25. Elisha will later be surrounded by Syrian troops at Dothan (2 Kings 6:13).

The verb “conspired” is from nakal, to deal craftily, the word used when Moab and Midian “beguiled” Israel (Numbers 25:18). They know him from afar; the coat, visible across open country, would make that easy, though Genesis does not say so.

“This dreamer” is ba’al hachalomot, literally “the master of dreams”, a mocking title. The pronoun is the rare and pointed hallazeh, “that one there”, which Rebekah used of Isaac when she saw him across the field (24:65).

A pit, bor, is a cistern cut in rock to hold winter rain. The brothers rehearse the sentence “some evil beast hath devoured him” and never need to say it: Jacob says it for them, word for word, in verse 33.

Genesis credits Reuben with delivering him before any rescue has happened; the verb natsal names what he set out to do. His words are literally “let us not strike him a life”. The eldest had just lost his father’s trust over Bilhah (35:22), which some have read as a motive; the text gives none.

“Shed no blood” uses the language of 9:6, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” A pit in the wilderness would let hunger and thirst do what no hand had done, and the brothers could tell themselves they had not killed him.

The verse names the garment twice, “his coat, his coat of many colours that was on him”, slowing on what they tear away. Joseph says nothing in this chapter from here on. Only in 42:21 do the brothers admit that “we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear”.

The word for pit, bor, is the word Joseph will use for his prison in Egypt: “they should put me into the dungeon” (40:15), and Pharaoh brings him “out of the dungeon” in 41:14. Jeremiah was let down into a cistern with no water, only mire (Jeremiah 38:6).

Spicery, balm and myrrh are the same goods Jacob will send to Egypt as a gift in 43:11, “a little balm, and a little honey, spices, and myrrh”. Gilead was famous for its balm (Jeremiah 8:22). The brothers eat bread within earshot of the cistern.

“Profit” is betsa, gain, usually gain got wrongly. The psalmist asks almost the same question in Psalm 30:9, “What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit?” Blood that is concealed recalls Abel’s, which cried from the ground (4:10).

“Our brother and our flesh” is the kinship Laban claimed with Jacob, “Surely thou art my bone and my flesh” (29:14). “Let not our hand be upon him” borrows Reuben’s phrase. Judah will later offer himself as surety for Benjamin (43:9) and as a slave in his place (44:33).

Twenty shekels of silver is the valuation given for a male between five and twenty years old in Leviticus 27:5, a price that fits a youth of seventeen. The weight is not specified here; it is literally “twenty of silver”.

Where Reuben had been is never said. His rending of his clothes is the first time anyone in the Bible tears a garment in grief, and Jacob will do the same five verses later.

“The child is not” is einennu, the word the brothers use in 42:13, “one is not”, and Jacob in 42:36, “Joseph is not”. Reuben calls a seventeen-year-old yeled, a child. The second half turns to himself: “and I, whither shall I go?”, the eldest who must answer to his father.

A kid of the goats will turn up again at once. In the next chapter Judah promises Tamar “a kid from the flock” (38:17) and fails to deliver it. The brothers deceive with a goat, and Judah is deceived over one.

“Know now” is haker-na, discern, please. Tamar will send Judah his seal and staff with the same words, “Discern, I pray thee” (38:25), and he will “acknowledge” them. The brothers send the coat rather than bring it themselves, which spares them from facing Jacob when he first sees it.

“Without doubt rent in pieces” doubles the verb, taroph toraph, torn, torn. Jacob repeats it years later, “Surely he is torn in pieces” (44:28), and the same verb returns in his last words for Benjamin: “Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf” (49:27).

This is the first mention of sackcloth in the Bible, the coarse goat’s hair cloth of mourning. “Many days” turns out to be about twenty-two years, from Joseph’s seventeenth year to the brothers’ second journey into Egypt.

“The grave” is she’ol, and this is its first occurrence in the Bible, the place of the dead. Jacob expects to go down to it still mourning. “Refused to be comforted” returns in Jeremiah 31:15, of Rachel weeping for her children. Only one daughter, Dinah, has been named.

The Hebrew here reads Medanites, a close variant of Midianites. Potiphar is an Egyptian name, Pa-di-pa-Ra, “he whom Ra gave”. His title means literally “chief of the slaughterers”, the head of the executioners or the royal guard, and saris, “officer”, is a court title.