Parshat VaYeshev (Genesis 37-40)
Joseph and His TWO Brothers
This week, what I would like to focus on is the part of Genesis 37 where Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt. Given that the alternative is to be killed by his brothers, that is not as bad as it sounds. Some of his brothers would clearly have been happy to kill him – and we understand why, because in the earlier part of the chapter Joseph has shown himself to be such an annoying kid, and yet somehow he's the one that their father loves the most.
Let’s start by looking at Gen 37:19-21. Jacob has sent Joseph to check on the brothers, and by now they have spotted him. As George Savran points out,[1] the key to understanding what comes next is the seemingly innocuous phrase that introduces v. 19, “They said to one another.”
The Hebrew expression is וַיֹּאמְר֖וּ אִ֣ישׁ אֶל־אָחִ֑יו va-yom’ru ish el aḥiv, literally “and they said, a man to his brother.” These men are brothers, but don’t be fooled by the word; “a man to his brother” is the standard way in Biblical Hebrew to say “to each other.” See (for example) Exod 26:3, where the cloths (Hebrew יריעות yeriot, a feminine noun) of the Tabernacle are connected “a woman to her sister.”
Savran’s point is that the plural verb with a singular subject implies, at least when a long comment follows, that each of the brothers is saying part of it. We are supposed to hear a jumble of voices. Here’s how it would sound (in my version of the conversation):
הִנֵּ֗ה בַּ֛עַל הַחֲלֹמ֥וֹת הַלָּזֶ֖ה בָּֽא Here comes that dream-meister!
וְעַתָּ֣ה You know what?
לְכ֣וּ וְנַֽהַרְגֵ֗הוּ C’mon, let’s kill him!
וְנַשְׁלִכֵ֙הוּ֙ בְּאַחַ֣ד הַבֹּר֔וֹת We can throw him into one of these pits.
וְאָמַ֕רְנוּ חַיָּ֥ה רָעָ֖ה אֲכָלָ֑תְהוּ We’ll say a wild animal ate him!
וְנִרְאֶ֕ה מַה־יִּהְי֖וּ חֲלֹמֹתָֽיו Then let’s see what becomes of his dreams.
You remember those dreams (see vv. 5-11 if you don’t). The implication of them was that one day the brothers were all going to be bowing down to Joseph. That’s why they hated him. But before we return to the moment when they decide to kill him, we must spend a few moments asking who those brothers are.
At the beginning of the story in Genesis 2, Joseph is 17 years old. He is called a נַ֗עַר na’ar, which can mean “a boy,” but here, crucially, he is a na’ar “with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives.” This is the only place Bilhah and Zilpah are given that dignified title; elsewhere, they are identified as the slaves of Rachel and Leah respectively.
To me, the implication is that (1) Joseph is being grouped with the “lesser” brothers, who are (2) being raised in rank to the level of Leah’s sons, but they are still (3) lower than Joseph, who has been put in charge of them. That last point is because the word na’ar ‘boy’ can also refer to an employee, and specifically to one who is in charge of others. (See Ruth 2, where Boaz’s “boy” is the foreman of the harvesters.)
By the time Joseph finds “his brothers” at Dothan in v. 17, it is no longer clear exactly whom we’re talking about. Was it Bilhah and Zilpah’s sons, who hated him for bossing them around? Was it Leah’s sons, who saw him favored by their father even though they were the sons of Jacob’s first wife? Did all the brothers dislike him equally for his obnoxious dreams? Why was Joseph still at home when “his brothers” had taken the flocks to pasture them elsewhere? Where is Benjamin in all this?
I suggested two weeks ago that the task of the book of Genesis was to get Abraham’s descendants down to Egypt so that they could be enslaved there. This week’s story shows that the book is trying to achieve some other tasks as well. I say this because the only brothers other than Joseph who are named in the story are Reuben and Judah, and they are contrasted quite starkly.
V. 21 tells us that Reuben “heard” the brothers plan to kill Joseph and “saved” him from them. How did he do so? By declaring, “We mustn’t kill him” (לֹ֥א נַכֶּ֖נּוּ נָֽפֶשׁ lo nakkennu nafesh). His plan is to have them throw Joseph in a pit and leave him to die. Then (it seems) Reuben will return quietly, rescue Joseph, and send him home to Jacob. The plan does indeed proceed as far as the pit – at which point the brothers sit down for lunch.
But there is another brother with other ideas: Judah. He goes further than Reuben, saying not merely that they must not have Joseph’s blood on their own hands, but that there is no need to kill him at all. They can sell Joseph to the caravan that is just then serendipitously passing by on its way down to Egypt. The annoying teenager will be out of their hair, and they will have a little extra silver to boot.
Even more serendipitously, in v. 28 a bunch of Midianites come along, and they are the ones who pull Joseph out of the pit and sell him to the Ishmaelites. Just after the nick of time, and apparently while the other brothers are still eating, Reuben goes back to the pit expecting to find Joseph there – and he's not.
What Reuben exclaims then is a beautiful example of why you must learn to read the Bible in the original Hebrew. In the English of the King James Version, he says, “The child is not; and I, whither shall I go?” Now, listen to what you are missing: הַיֶּ֣לֶד אֵינֶ֔נּוּ וַאֲנִ֖י אָ֥נָה אֲנִי־בָֽא ha-yeled eiNeNNu va-aNi aNa aNi-va. He has failed to save Joseph after all, and you can hear him wailing.
You all know what happens next. Having stripped Joseph of the fancy cloak that aroused their jealousy – bonus points if you identify the only other person in the Bible who wears such a garment – they doctor it up with goat’s blood and send it to Jacob to leave him with the impression that Joseph has been killed. This is exactly the plan they had discussed before, with one exception: Joseph is alive, not dead.
Both Reuben and Judah spoke up in the story to achieve this very purpose. The narrator told us that Reuben wanted to save Joseph and send him home; he is the obvious “good guy” of the story. Judah is portrayed as “all in” with the plot to get rid of Joseph, and even eager to make a profit out of doing so (see v. 26). He sounds more like a “bad guy.” Yet Reuben is incapable of carrying out his good intentions, and Judah’s apparently bad intentions succeed brilliantly.
The same two brothers will compete again, at the end of Genesis 42 and the beginning of Genesis 43, to be the brother who will manage to bring Joseph’s full brother Benjamin down to Egypt. Again, it is Reuben – Jacob’s firstborn son – who will fail, and Judah – ancestor of the Davidic kings – who will succeed. In fact, until Genesis 46 gives us the genealogy of the family, not one of the other brothers is even named, except poor Simeon, who must cool his heels in an Egyptian prison while Reuben and Judah have their second round of competition.
It is certainly possible to explain duplications of this kind by attributing them to different documents. If I am not mistaken, documentary scholars trace the Reuben stories to E and the Judah stories (perhaps obviously) to J. I am not someone who rejects the existence of these earlier sources out of hand, but I don't think they're the most helpful way to look at the Joseph story. Perhaps later in the series I’ll have an opportunity to discuss my perspective more fully.
For now, what I’ll say is that the competition between Reuben and Judah works beautifully on the storytelling level if we take Genesis, and especially its later chapters, as the story of a family. We also know that Reuben plays no role in the history that will eventually follow, and that Judah plays the major role in that history. We’ll get yet another look at him soon, as what is ostensibly the story of Joseph continues.
[1] George Savran, “Multivocality in Group Speech in Biblical Narrative,” JHS 9 (2010), https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2009.v9.a25.