Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. took this photograph of Butterfield’s mosaic depicting Joseph being sold into slavery. The mosaic is in the chapel of Keble College chapel in Oxford.
START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM
OBSERVE:
The tales of the ancestors of the Israelites continues with the story of Joseph. He is the fourth generation removed from Abraham, the family patriarch, and he is one of eleven sons and one daughter of Jacob as our story begins.
Just a word of backstory. Jacob has returned to Canaan after a twenty-year sojourn at Haran in Mesopotamia (Genesis 31-32). He has managed to avoid reprisals from his embittered brother Esau, and even managed to find reconciliation with him. And his identity has been changed — Jacob’s name is now Israel, after his night-long struggle with the Angel of Yahweh.
However, Israel’s family situation is still… complicated. He has two wives — the sisters Leah and Rachel. And he also has two additional “servant” wives — Bilhah and Zilpah, who are the servants of Rachel and Leah respectively. Each of his four “wives” has borne children to Israel, in a kind of competition between these “sister wives.”
For the sake of simplicity, here are the twelve, with a number assigned to indicate birth order:
Leah was the mother of the oldest, Reuben (1). Leah also gave birth to Simeon (2), Levi (3), Judah (4), Issachar (9), Zebulun (10), and Dinah, the only daughter (11).
Bilhah, Rachel’s servant, gave birth to two sons in Rachel’s effort to compete with her sister Leah — Dan (5) and Naphtali (6).
Zilpah was pressed into service as “breed stock” by Leah when she thought she couldn’t bear any more children. Zilpah bore Gad (7) and Asher (8).
When Rachel finally was able to bear a child, Israel was now an old man. Her son Joseph (12) was the twelfth child sired by Israel up to this point. Rachel bore another son for Israel — Benjamin (13) — and she died in childbirth.
If this all sounds a bit competitive and even dehumanizing, it is. The servants of Leah and Rachel were treated as mere breeders for their mistresses’ strange rivalry.
Our story picks up when Joseph is seventeen years old, working as a shepherd with his ten older brothers. And we again see strong evidence of family dysfunction. Joseph is a tattletale, bringing an evil report on his brothers back to their father. And Israel plays favorites, with predictable results:
Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a coat of many colors. His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, and they hated him, and couldn’t speak peaceably to him.
We speculate that Joseph was also Israel’s favorite son because he was Rachel’s first child. Rachel was the true love of Israel’s life. Joseph and his younger brother Benjamin must have been physical reminders of his beloved Rachel.
Joseph’s brothers highly resented him. And his coat of many colors certainly didn’t help. To make matters worse, Joseph has two extraordinary dreams that suggest he will one day be preeminent over all of his brothers and even his own father — and Joseph has the nerve to blurt out the details of his dreams of superiority to his whole family! Even Israel is taken aback by Joseph’s apparent audacity:
“What is this dream that you have dreamed? Will I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves down to you to the earth?” His brothers envied him, but his father kept this saying in mind (Genesis 37:10-11).
Now, the plot thickens, as the cliche says. Israel’s sons are feeding the flocks in Shechem. Israel is now encamped in Hebron, which is in a valley nestled in the mountains, where Sarah, Abraham, Isaac and Rebekah were buried. Hebron was about sixty-seven miles south of Shechem, which was in the central highlands of Canaan. Presumably it was good pastureland for sheep. (It should be remembered that traveling sixty-seven miles while driving a massive flock would take much longer than driving it on the interstate.)
Israel sends his son Joseph on an errand to find his brothers. Presumably, Joseph has been kept home close to “dad” up to this point. Is Israel sending his son to spy on his brothers, or to supervise them, or simply to check on their welfare? He seems to be simply asking Joseph to determine the well-being of his brothers, and the flock:
He said to him, “Go now, see whether it is well with your brothers, and well with the flock; and bring me word again.”
But when Joseph makes this long trip, he can’t find his brothers. They have moved on. A stranger directs him to seek them at Dothan, which is about eighteen miles to the northwest of Shechem.
We get a pretty clear picture of what happens next. The brothers see Joseph coming from a distance. Perhaps they are high on a hill and see him climbing toward them. And they have plenty of time to talk as they see him coming from afar. They conspire against their hated brother:
They said to one another, “Behold, this dreamer comes. Come now therefore, and let’s kill him, and cast him into one of the pits, and we will say, ‘An evil animal has devoured him.’ We will see what will become of his dreams.”
We are witnessing a premeditated crime of murder in the making! Fortunately for Joseph, a cooler head prevails. Reuben, the oldest brother of them all (and the son of Leah), intervenes. He finds an alternative that can spare his much younger brother:
Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood. Throw him into this pit that is in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him”—that he might deliver him out of their hand, to restore him to his father.
Reuben is seeking to appease the envy of his brothers, while still saving Joseph’s life. To be thrown into a dark, damp well would be a chastening experience, to be sure — but at least he would be alive!
They act quickly when Joseph arrives — they strip him of his coat of many colors. Joseph is lucky. The well has no water. He won’t drown!
While Joseph languishes at the bottom of a dark well, the brothers sit down to their meal — perhaps feeling a little festive now that their nemesis has been “brought down a peg.” They can eat, happily knowing their brother is in the pit.
But the plot thickens even more. Apparently Reuben has gone away to tend the flock, or some other task. He is not present when the boys hatch their next conspiracy. A caravan of Ishmaelites riding camels from Gilead with spices and balms and myrrh comes near. We are reminded that the Ishmaelites are related to the sons of Israel — they are distant cousins descended from their mutual grandfather Abraham. Gilead was the mountainous region to the east of the Jordan River.
These Ishmaelites were merchants who were trading and selling their spices in Egypt, the center of political and military power and the cultural center of civilization at that time. These Ishmaelites could be expected to bargain for anything worth selling. Or anyone.
It is Judah who suggests that the brothers shouldn’t kill Joseph. Why not make a profit from this good looking, smart-alecky teenager?
Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, and let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not let our hand be on him; for he is our brother, our flesh.”
The narrative is just a little confusing. Judah’s brothers heed his advice, but the text tells us:
Midianites who were merchants passed by, and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. They brought Joseph into Egypt.
The Midianites were also descendants of Abraham, like the Ishmaelites and the sons of Israel. The Midianites were descendants of Keturah, the woman Abraham married after Sarah died (Genesis 25:1-2).
Did the brothers negotiate with some Midianites to pull their brother out of the well, and then sell him to the Ishmaelites on their behalf? If so, perhaps this gave them some “deniability” so they could say to their father — we had nothing to do with it!
We note the price of the sale of Joseph into slavery — twenty pieces of silver. This was notoriously the price of a slave. And we note that many centuries later, the life of a distant relative of Joseph’s (Jesus) would be sold out for thirty pieces of silver.
APPLY:
Once again, we see the honesty of the Scriptures when it comes to describing even the Biblical patriarchs. The brothers of Joseph, who will become the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel, are deeply resentful of their brother.
From a family perspective, there is a serious lack of emotional health in Israel’s attitudes. He not only is partial to Joseph, he advertises this favoritism by giving him a splendid coat. And Joseph compounds the problem by boasting to his family of his dreams of superiority.
This reminds us that God works through very fallible people in order to accomplish his purposes. We will find, if we follow the tale of the slave Joseph into Egypt, that God uses even these horrible circumstances to bring good out of evil. And perhaps these circumstances will even smooth off some of the rough edges of Joseph’s narcissistic character.
RESPOND:
One needn’t be a student of Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory to conclude that Israel’s family is dysfunctional.
- Thirteen different kids by four different women, who also lived under the same roof (or tent canopy).
- A father who enmeshes one of his sons so deeply that his other sons come to hate their brother!
- A son who is so narcissistic that he brags about his superiority in front of these very brothers!
- And brothers whose moral compass permits them to seriously consider killing their brother, and have no qualms about selling him into slavery!
On the one hand, all this actually reassures me that even as weird and dysfunctional as my family sometimes may be, we’re not as bad as Israel’s family! And Israel was the father of a great nation and a founder of a great dynasty which would be the focus of the entire Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Malachi! And even more comforting, despite all of these rivalries, enmeshments, and conspiracies, God kept his covenant with Israel.
So, when I read about the tale of Joseph and his brothers, I am reminded that this is only a snapshot, a frame, in the greater story. My Dad used to have a sign on his desk — Please be patient. God isn’t finished with me yet. God wasn’t finished with Joseph or his brothers yet.
Lord, families are so meaningful to us, and yet they can be so dysfunctional, and even hurtful! But no matter how painful our childhoods may have been, you aren’t finished with us yet. Help us to trust you even when we feel that we have been betrayed and enslaved by our family systems. Amen.
PHOTOS:
“Joseph sold as a slave” by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.
SOAR Lectionary Bible Study 