Why Only Joseph Can Defeat Esau

Every nation that harmed Israel has a reckoning coming. But not every tribe of Israel gets to deliver it. That distinction, quiet but explosive, sits at the heart of a teaching preserved in the Yalkut Shimoni, a 13th-century collection of midrashim compiled in Germany by Rabbi Shimon of Frankfurt, drawing on sources that stretch back to the Talmudic period.

The verse that triggered it comes from Jeremiah 49:20 and 50:45: Surely the shepherd boys will drag away the evil ones. Jeremiah is prophesying the fall of Edom, the nation descended from Esau, Israel's twin and ancient adversary. But who are the shepherd boys? Rabbi Samuel son of Nachmani gives the answer in this teaching from the Yalkut Shimoni: the descendants of Rachel, specifically Joseph and Benjamin. Only they hold the moral authority to bring Esau down. And the reason is everything.

Imagine the scene as the rabbi constructs it. The other tribes come forward to confront Esau. They present their grievance: you pursued your brother. You hunted down our ancestor Israel. We have a claim against you. And Esau listens, and then turns the accusation back on them. You pursued Joseph. You sold him into slavery. You told your father he was dead and watched the old man weep for decades. What exactly makes you different from me?

The tribes have no answer. Because Esau's accusation is correct.

But if Joseph steps forward, the calculation changes entirely. Joseph did not just survive what his brothers did to him. He transformed it. When he revealed himself in Egypt, he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it in the next room. Then he said: do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me. God sent me here ahead of you (Genesis 45:5). He was requited with evil and returned good. Esau cannot say the same about his relationship with Jacob. Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentil stew and spent the rest of his life blaming someone else for it.

The moral logic is precise. You can only prosecute a wrong you yourself have not committed. The tribes who sold Joseph cannot prosecute Esau for pursuing Jacob. But Joseph, who was betrayed and did not betray in return, can stand before Esau and say: why did you pursue your brother? And Esau will have no answer.

This is why Jeremiah's prophecy uses the image of shepherd boys. In rabbinic tradition, Jeremiah was himself a man who understood what it meant to stand alone with a righteous grievance that no one wanted to hear. According to the Legends of the Jews, Jeremiah resisted God's call precisely because he knew what happens to prophets: Moses was nearly stoned, Elijah was mocked, Elisha was taunted. The tradition eats its own messengers. Jeremiah knew this and went anyway.

The image of the shepherd boys dragging away the strong is an image of reversal. The powerful brought low by those who seem insignificant. This was not abstract consolation for the communities that read it. The Yalkut Shimoni was compiled during the period of Crusade and persecution in medieval Europe, when the descendants of Edom, in rabbinic shorthand for Rome and for the powers that came after, held life-and-death authority over Jewish communities. The teaching did not pretend the reversal was imminent. It said only that when it came, it would come through the tribe that already knew how to return good for evil.

The prophet Isaiah confirms the image: Behold, they are become like straw, fire consumes them; they cannot save themselves from the power of the flame (Isaiah 47:14). The great cedars brought down. The strong ones made as fuel. But not by force. By the logic of a moral history that Esau cannot escape.

Joseph's brothers once stripped him of his coat of many colors and threw him into a pit. He came back as the man who fed them during the famine and refused to call the account even. That refusal is not weakness. In this teaching, it is the source of his ultimate authority. The one who does not repay evil with evil becomes the only one God trusts to administer the final reckoning.