Jacob Said His Way Was Hidden From God Until the Wagons Came

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The Coat Came Back at Evening

They had decided to kill him. Then they changed their minds and sold him instead, to a train of Ishmaelite merchants going south, and the merchants carried him down into Egypt and sold him again, to Potiphar, who was Pharaoh's eunuch and chief of the cooks and a priest of the city of Elew.

Then they took a young goat and cut its throat.

They soaked Joseph's coat in the blood and sent it up to their father on the tenth day of the seventh month. It reached him in the evening. Jacob stood in the doorway of the tent holding the stiffening cloth and nobody had to explain anything to him. "An evil beast has devoured Joseph," he said. He mourned all that night, and by morning the mourning had gone down into his body as a fever.

What He Had Been Promised at Beer Sheva

He had heard something very different once.

Years earlier, walking out of Beer Sheva alone with nothing, he had lain down in a field with a stone under his head and dreamed a ladder set on the ground with its top in the sky. Angels went up it and angels came down it. The ones climbing were the powers of the land he was leaving. The ones descending were the powers appointed over the countries outside it, coming to walk beside him into exile.

Above the whole ladder God stood, and said He would not leave him.

Jacob woke and poured oil over the stone and went on to Haran, and worked fourteen years for two wives and six more for the flocks, and came home limping from a night of wrestling, and buried Rachel on the road to Ephrath. Then the coat came, with the blood on it.

More Than Twenty Years of Believing the Beast

The grief did not thin out. His sons watched him refuse every comfort they offered and could not take it back without confessing what they had done, so they said nothing, year after year, at the same table.

Somewhere in there he said it out loud. "My way is hidden from the Lord, and my cause has passed my God by."

He had been told on that stone that he would not be left alone. He had a bloodied coat folded somewhere in the tent that said otherwise. Both things were true at once and he had no way to hold them together, so he held the coat.

The Sons Came Back With an Impossible Story

Then the famine, and the trips to Egypt for grain, and one afternoon the sons came up the road from the south talking over each other. Joseph was alive. Joseph was governor over all the land of Egypt.

Their father did not believe them. He was beside himself in his mind.

Twenty years of certainty do not come apart because ten men are shouting in a doorway. They had lied to him once with a piece of cloth and he had swallowed it whole in an evening. Now they were telling the truth and he could not get it down. He sat. The words went past him and kept going.

The Wagons in the Yard

Then the wagons came over the rise.

Egyptian wagons, a line of them, sent north for an old man and his household, with painted sides and harness and drivers on salary. Nobody in Canaan owned wagons like that. Nobody could have sent them except a man with authority over Pharaoh's carts.

Jacob walked out and stood next to one of them and put his hand on it, and the life of his spirit came back into him. Something that had stopped moving in him more than twenty years earlier started moving again. "It is enough for me if Joseph is alive," he said. "I will go down and see him before I die."

He left his house on the new moon of the third month and took the road to the Well of the Oath. That is Beer Sheva, the place he had walked out of as a young man with a stick and no wife and no flock and no reason to think anyone was watching him. On the seventh of that month he stopped on that ground and built a fire and offered a sacrifice to the God of his father Isaac.

He had been told there that he would be kept, and he had spent the middle of his life certain that he had not been. He made the offering anyway. Then he climbed into an Egyptian wagon and went down.