What the Brothers Said About Joseph Before He Arrived

When the brothers saw Joseph coming across the fields at Dothan, they had time to talk before he arrived. The question was not whether to harm him but how. Genesis 37:18 says they conspired against him to slay him. What it does not say is that they had already gone through several plans and discarded them before settling on the pit.

The first plan, preserved in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, was to set dogs on him. Not to kill him themselves but to let the animals do it, keeping their hands technically clean. This plan was proposed and rejected, though the text does not record why.

Then Simon spoke to Levi directly. "Behold, the master of dreams cometh with a new dream, he whose descendant Jeroboam will introduce the worship of Baal. Come now, therefore, and let us slay him, that we may see what will become of his dreams."

The Legends preserve this line because it contains something the brothers could not have known: the name Jeroboam, the future king who would install golden calves at Bethel and Dan and lead the northern kingdom into the syncretism the prophets called harlotry. The tradition understood Simon's words not as prophecy but as a kind of dark vision, an unwitting disclosure of what Joseph's line would eventually produce. Whether Simon meant anything specific by it or was simply naming Joseph's dreams as something that would produce delusion, the association was preserved.

And God answered Simon's sentence with a sentence of God's own: "Ye say, We shall see what will become of his dreams, and I say likewise, We shall see, and the future shall show whose word will stand, yours or Mine."

The parallelism is deliberate. The brothers spoke their future tense; God claimed the same future tense back. They would see. God would also see. The same event, Dothan and the pit and the sale and Egypt, was simultaneously their plan and God's. What they intended as the death of the dream was the very mechanism by which the dream would be fulfilled.

The Legends place this divine response right at the moment of the brothers' deliberation, before Joseph even arrives at the edge of the field. God is already answering the conspiracy while the conspirators are still refining it. The pit, the sale, the years in Potiphar's house, the prison, the interpretation of Pharaoh's dream, the rise to second in Egypt, the seven years of plenty stored against the seven years of famine that would bring the brothers to their knees before a governor they did not recognize -- all of it was already inside God's answer to their "we shall see."

The Book of Jubilees, written in the second century BCE and discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, adds a dimension the Legends reinforce: the sale of Joseph was the act that brought on the Egyptian bondage, and the bondage was an act of communal atonement. Because the brothers had grieved the affection of their father regarding Joseph his son, it was ordained for the children of Israel that they should afflict themselves on the tenth of the seventh month. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is linked in the Jubilees tradition to Jacob's mourning for Joseph, the grief of a father who wept for twenty-two years over a coat dipped in goat's blood.

Joseph survived the pit and the dogs and the deliberation and the sale because the dream had been given by the One who would eventually vindicate it. He was seventeen years old when they brought him to Egypt. He was sold to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, and the Lord was with him, and the Lord prospered him in all that he did.

The brothers who had said "we shall see what will become of his dreams" would bow before him in Egypt, not once but five times, in the accounting of the tradition. Their sheaves, in Joseph's dream, had bowed. The rotted fruit had bowed before the sound fruit. The idols would eventually give way before the descendant of Joseph's line, the Messiah of Joseph, who the tradition holds will come at the end of days.

All of that was sealed at Dothan, in the moment God claimed the same future tense the brothers had spoken. "We shall see." The story of Israel's four-hundred-year sojourn in Egypt began with a conspiracy at the edge of a field and a divine response so quiet that only the tradition would later think to write it down. The brothers thought they were ending a dream. They were opening the door through which the dream would walk into history.

The Book of Jubilees adds one more piece to the account that the Ginzberg tradition also preserves: the day Joseph was sold became the day the covenant obligation of Yom Kippur was established. Because the brothers had grieved their father so deeply, deceiving Jacob with the blood of a goat on Joseph's coat, the tenth day of the seventh month was set aside forever as a day of communal accounting. Every year, the fast of Yom Kippur reopens the ledger that the brothers thought they were closing when they threw Joseph into the pit. Every year, Israel asks the same question God asked the brothers at Dothan: whose word will stand? And every year, the answer arrives in the same form -- not accusation but return, the soul turning back toward the One who holds both sides of the contest in his hands.