Dan Confessed He Had Planned to Kill Joseph

The sale of Joseph into Egypt is one of the best-known stories in the entire Hebrew Bible (Genesis 37:12-36). Most people remember the coat, the pit, the twenty pieces of silver, the caravan of Ishmaelites heading south. What the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs preserve, and what Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews carries forward, is a harder version of the story, told from inside the minds of the brothers who did it.

Dan was the fifth son of Jacob, born of Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid. When he called his children together at the end of his life, he did not begin with his virtues. He began with a confession.

I confess before you this day, my children, that I had resolved to kill Joseph, that good and upright man, and I rejoiced over his sale, for his father loved him more than he loved the rest of us.

Not a general resentment. Not an abstract complicity. Dan had resolved to kill Joseph. He had held the intention in his hands and felt the weight of it. The account of Dan's final words continues with a precision that is itself a form of confession: the spirit of envy and boastfulness goaded me on, saying, Thou too art the son of Jacob. And one of the spirits of Beliar stirred me up, saying, Take this sword, and slay Joseph, for once he is dead, thy father will love thee.

The teaching embedded in this confession is one the tradition returns to many times. Dan is not describing a spontaneous rage. He is describing a voice that came to him with an argument, with logic, with an appeal to his wounded dignity. Thou too art the son of Jacob. It is the oldest flattery in the world: you deserve more than you have received. The gap between what you were promised and what you hold is not your failure. It is someone else's fault. And here is the sword.

The spirit of anger, Dan says, sought to persuade him to crush Joseph as a leopard crushes a kid between its teeth. The image is not accidental. The tradition understood envy as a predatory thing, a force that reduces its host to appetite, that strips the human being of reflection and leaves only the forward lean toward violence.

What stopped Dan was not his own better judgment. He is explicit about this. The God of our father Jacob did not deliver Joseph into my hand, did not let me find him alone, and did not permit me to execute this impious deed, that two tribes in Israel might not be destroyed. Two tribes: Dan, for the murder, and Joseph, for the dying. God protected them both by keeping them apart.

Dan's warning to his children has the quality of a man who knows exactly how close he came. His final teaching on anger does not traffic in abstractions. Evil is anger. It is the grave of the soul. The spirit of anger casts the net of error around its victim, and it blinds his eyes. The spirit of lies warps his mind, and clouds his vision. He is describing what he felt. He lived inside that blindness long enough to come to the edge of murder.

The Testament of Dan, one of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs written between the second century BCE and the first century CE, preserves Dan's explicit instruction: Desist from anger and hate lies, that the Lord may dwell among you, and Beliar flee from your presence. Speak the truth each unto his neighbor, and you will not fall into anger and trouble, but you will be at peace, and the Lord of peace you will have with you, and no war will vanquish you.

There is a particular weight to this teaching coming from Dan. He is not a man who learned about anger from philosophy or from watching others. He is a man who felt the spirit of murder whisper to him with a sword in his hand, who rejoiced when his brother was sold into slavery, who carried that rejoicing as a wound for the rest of his life. The Legends record that Dan would not look at Joseph, would not hear anything about him, for the duration of Joseph's captivity. The bitterness was that deep.

And then Joseph rose to become the second man in Egypt. And the brothers came before him starving, and he fed them, and eventually he wept and revealed himself, and the whole edifice of hatred collapsed into something the Torah calls reconciliation (Genesis 45:1-15). Dan lived long enough to see this. He had to live inside the knowledge of what he had intended and what it had come to instead.

The later tradition about the tribe of Dan, recorded in the remarkable travel account of Eldad the Danite, preserved in ninth-century CE rabbinic literature, describes the descendants of Dan as a tribe that refused to go to war against their brothers. When the king of Israel commanded them to fight Judah, the warriors of Dan refused with an oath sworn on their father's name. By the life of Dan our forefather, we shall never go to battle with our brethren, and we shall not shed their blood without any cause.

They kept the oath their father had nearly broken. They fled the land rather than raise a sword against kin. Whatever Dan had almost done to Joseph, his children became the tribe that chose exile over fratricide.

Dan died and his sons buried him in Hebron. He had confessed. He had warned. He had done what the tradition says is the most the living can do: he told the truth about himself so that his children would understand the enemy from the inside.