Jacob's Sons Searched Egypt's Streets for the Brother They Sold

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The Beds in Bilhah's Tent

Rachel died on the road to Ephrath and Jacob moved his sleeping mat into the tent of Bilhah, who had been Rachel's servant. Reuben, the firstborn, the son of Leah, walked into that tent and moved the beds back. He did not lie with Bilhah. He shifted the furniture so that his father would sleep where his mother slept, and he did it in the open, and word of it reached Jacob before nightfall.

Jacob did not shout. He sat with it. "One has come out of me who is profane," he said. "Ishmael came out of Abraham. Esau came out of Isaac. Now this."

The Spirit of Holiness answered him aloud. "Fear not. They are all righteous. Not one of them is profane."

Jacob counted his sons after that, and there were twelve of them, and one of the twelve was a boy in a striped coat whose brothers would strip him beside a dry pit and sell him to a caravan going down to Egypt for silver, and then dip the coat in goat's blood and carry it back to their father.

The Register at the Gate

More than twenty years later, Joseph ran the grain of Egypt. Every sack in the kingdom moved by his hand, and every stranger who came through a city gate was written down before he was fed. Joseph had put notaries at the gates for that purpose. They sat with their tablets and stopped each traveler and took two things from him: his name, and his father's name.

The lists came up to Joseph daily. He read them the way a man reads a net he has set himself, and for years the net came up empty of what he was fishing for.

Then the rains failed in Canaan, and the failure went on, and a starving old man in Hebron sent ten of his sons south to buy food.

Ten Names in a Single Morning

They came through the gate in the same hour and gave the clerks the same father. Reuben son of Jacob. Simeon son of Jacob. Levi son of Jacob. Ten times down the tablet, the same second name.

The list reached Joseph before the brothers reached the granaries. He knew where they were, he knew how many they were, and he knew which one of the twelve was missing from the line.

They Looked Where a Sold Man Ends Up

The brothers did not go to the grain. They split up first and went through the city in pieces, one man to a quarter, and they walked the streets and crossed the public squares and pushed into the lodging houses where men with no name and no money sleep. They asked after a Hebrew sold as a boy more than twenty years back, sold cheap.

They had come down to buy wheat for their father's household. They spent the first day of it hunting through the worst streets in Egypt for a brother they had left in a pit, because a man cannot buy bread in the country he sold his brother into and not look for him.

They found nothing. No one in the lodging houses had heard of him. No slave answered to the name. By evening the ten of them had walked the city end to end and come up with the same emptiness the notaries had been handing Joseph for years.

They Bowed to the Man They Could Not Find

So they went where the grain was, which was the house of the governor, and they were brought in, and they put their faces on the ground in front of the man who sold wheat to the world.

He had a scribe's list in his hand with their names on it and their father's name written ten times down the column. He let them stay on the floor. He asked them, through an interpreter, in a language he had learned as a slave, where they had come from.

They said Canaan. They said they had come to buy food. They did not say what they had been doing all day in the lodging houses, and he did not tell them that he already knew.