Gad and the Hatred He Could Not Put Down

Most of Jacob's sons admitted they wronged Joseph. Gad is the one who explained what it felt like from the inside, and why it took almost his entire life to stop.

The Testament of Gad, ninth son of Jacob and born of Zilpah, opens the way all the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs open: a dying man gathering his children to tell them what he knows. But where Dan analyzed anger and Simeon confessed to envy, Gad dissects hatred, and his dissection is more clinical and more devastating than either.

He was, by his own account, a valiant man. He kept the flocks at night. When a lion came, or a wolf, or any wild beast, Gad pursued it, seized its foot with his bare hand, hurled it a stone's throw, and killed it. This is the man who confessed: "I wished to lick Joseph out of the land of the living, even as an ox licks up the grass of the field."

The grievance had a specific origin. Joseph was feeding the flocks with them when he fell sick from the heat and returned to Jacob. He told their father that the sons of Zilpah and Bilhah had been slaughtering the best animals and eating them without the judgment of Reuben and Judah. The report was accurate, but only partially. Gad had rescued a lamb from a bear's mouth, killed the bear, and then slaughtered the lamb because it could not survive its injuries. They ate it. Joseph reported this. Jacob believed him.

"Regarding this matter I was wroth with Joseph until the day he was sold," Gad confessed. "The spirit of hatred was in me. I wished not to hear of Joseph with my ears, nor see him with my eyes, because he rebuked us to our faces." He and Simeon sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites (Genesis 37:28). Only God delivered Joseph from Gad's hands, preventing a lawless act that would have destroyed a tribe of Israel.

Now the teaching, which consumed the rest of the testament and most of Gad's hundred and twenty-five years.

"Whatever a man does, the hater abhors him. Though a man works the law of the Lord, the hater praises him not. Though a man fears God and takes pleasure in righteousness, the hater loves him not." Hatred is not merely dislike. It is a system. The hater dispraises the truth. He envies the one who prospers. He welcomes evil-speaking and loves arrogance. And all of this, Gad says, is because hatred blinds the soul completely, not partially. Once the spirit of hatred is in residence, it provides its own interpretation of everything its host sees.

The most devastating line in the testament: "As love would quicken even the dead and call back those condemned to die, so hatred would slay the living, and those who had sinned only slightly it would not suffer to live."

Hatred demands death disproportionate to transgression. Joseph had reported them accurately. The sin was real. But the spirit of hatred transformed a legitimate grievance into a sentence of death without trial. Gad had been right about the facts and catastrophically wrong about the response, and the spirit of hatred provided a logic that made the response feel righteous.

Then the physical reckoning. God brought a disease upon Gad's liver. The prayers of Jacob saved him, but not before eleven months of suffering. Gad understood the symmetry: "By what things a man transgresses, by the same also is he punished. Since my liver was set mercilessly against Joseph, in my liver too I suffered mercilessly, and was judged for eleven months, as long as I had been angry against Joseph." He had burned with hatred for exactly the time it took his own body to burn from within.

The cure, as Gad names it, is equally precise: righteousness casts out hatred, humility destroys envy, because the person who is just and humble is ashamed to do what is unjust, "being reproved not by another, but by his own heart, because the Lord looks on his inclination." External rebuke barely works on a person in hatred's grip. The spirit can deflect it, reinterpret it, confirm its vision of persecution. Only the inner voice of conscience, the one that speaks before the hatred has fully settled, can reach through. The instruction comes from repentance itself, not from another person.

Gad's practical counsel for living among people you have reason to resent is among the most direct in all of the apocryphal literature: "If a man sin against you, cast forth the poison of hate and speak peaceably to him. If he confess and repent, forgive him. If he deny it, do not get into a passion. And if he persists in wrong-doing, even so forgive him from the heart, and leave to God the avenging."

Not forgive if he apologizes. Forgive regardless. Leave the avenging to God. Gad had tried to avenge himself personally, and the result was eleven months of liver disease and a lifetime of regret. The arithmetic of revenge had not worked in his favor.

He commanded his sons to honor Judah and Levi, for from them the Lord would raise up salvation for Israel. Then he drew up his feet and fell asleep in peace. After five years, they carried him to Hebron and laid him beside his fathers.

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs do not survive in Hebrew. They come to us through Greek, Armenian, and Slavonic manuscripts, preserved and copied across centuries. Scholars debate how much of the original Jewish material remains. But the confession at the heart of Gad's testament does not read like a theologian's construction. It reads like a man who had something specific to get off his chest before he died, and spent the last years of his life finding exactly the right words for it.