Joseph Was Sold Into Slavery and His Bones Walked Out Free

The coat was a mistake. Not because Jacob gave it, but because every brother could read what it meant the moment it appeared. The other sons of the handmaids already knew they were ranked lower. The coat confirmed it in colored wool.

The Legends of the Jews, drawing on sources from Midrash Rabbah and earlier traditions, finds the coat's tragedy encoded in the word itself. The Hebrew Passim hides the initials of everything that will happen to Joseph: Pe for Potiphar, Samek for the merchants who will buy him, Yod for the Ishmaelites, Mem for the Midianites who sell him to Potiphar. The coat already held the story of its owner's ruin before anyone laid a hand on it. Passim also means clefts, and the tradition says the brothers somehow sensed that the Red Sea would one day be split for Joseph's sake, and they hated him for the glory that would come to him even before it arrived.

Joseph did not help matters. He reported his brothers' failings to Jacob, sometimes accurately, sometimes not. When Gad killed a traumatized lamb to spare it suffering, Joseph told Jacob that Gad and the handmaid's sons were wasting livestock. The brothers' resentment had both an emotional root and a practical one: they were watching a younger brother who outranked none of them by birth or labor gain their father's confidence and then use it against them.

Then came the dreams. In the first, their fruit rotted while his stayed sound. He interpreted this to mean their descendants would worship idols while his would produce the Mashiach, the Messiah. The Midrash Rabbah notes that God placed this prophecy in their mouths as a rebuke: they spoke it sarcastically and it came true anyway. In the second dream, the sun and moon and eleven stars bowed down to him. Jacob wrote it down, the text says, because the divine spirit warned him: these things will surely come to pass. He believed it. He just tried not to show how much.

The end of Joseph's life carries the same intensity as the beginning. As he lay dying, he made his brothers swear an oath in layers: they would swear, and then their sons would swear after them, that when God redeemed Israel from Egypt, they would carry his bones out of the land. He did not ask to be taken home immediately the way Jacob had been. He asked to wait. He gave them a code word: pakod, God has surely remembered. He described the redeemer in enough detail that they would recognize Moses when he appeared. He told them the redemption would begin in autumn and complete the following spring. He had spent his entire life reading ahead of the present moment, and he could not stop even dying.

Moses honored the oath three days before the Exodus, while the rest of Israel was gathering its livestock and borrowing Egypt's silver and gold. Moses was still at the river. The Egyptians had sunk Joseph's lead coffin in the Nile, sealed by magicians. Finally Serah, daughter of Asher, who had lived long enough to remember where it rested, guided him to the spot. Moses engraved four images on a clay tablet and cast them into the river one by one, calling Joseph's name each time. When the plate with the human figure broke the surface, the coffin rose with it.

For forty years in the wilderness, two arks traveled together through the desert. One carried the bones of the dead Joseph. The other carried the tablets of the Living God. When travelers along the route asked how the ark of a dead man could walk beside the ark of the Ever-Living, the answer was given without hesitation: the man in that coffin fulfilled what was written in the other one. He had kept every commandment in the tablets. His bones and the Torah's words were companions because in life they had been the same thing.

He was buried in Shechem. "From Shechem they stole him," God said, "and to Shechem they shall return him." The coat, the pit, the merchants, the prison, the palace, the coffin in the Nile, the forty years of wandering with the bones of a man who had asked only to come home. It all completed there, at the place where it had broken.

The tradition does not minimize what was done to Joseph. The pit had no water in it but it had scorpions. The merchants who bought him discussed whether to take him alive or kill him on the road. Potiphar's wife spent a year trying to seduce him before she accused him. The prison he was thrown into for her false accusation was not a polite confinement. The tradition preserves all of this precisely because the contrast is the point: the man who survived every one of these without abandoning the keeping of the commandments was the man whose bones were worth carrying for forty years through the desert. The coffin and the ark walked together because in life, Joseph and the Torah had walked together through everything that was thrown at them.