Joseph Fell Into a Pit and Angels Refused to Leave His Side

The pit had no water in it (Genesis 37:24). The Torah makes sure you know this. Not a well, not a pool. Just a dry hole, with scorpions at the bottom. His brothers sat down to eat after throwing him in. That detail has haunted the tradition for two thousand years.

Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, the early twentieth-century synthesis of rabbinic legend drawn from centuries of midrashic tradition, traces the scene carefully. Jacob had sent Joseph to check on the brothers near Shechem, knowing full well the resentment that had been building since the coat, since the dreams, since everything. Joseph went. He wandered, lost in the fields, until a stranger found him and directed him to where his brothers had moved the flocks to Dothan. The Midrash reads that stranger as an angel. It was not chance that found Joseph in that field. Something was already steering him toward the pit, toward Egypt, toward everything that came after. The story already knew where it was going.

What was going was remarkable. The pit came first, dry and scorpion-infested, with his brothers eating lunch above him. Then Midianite traders appeared, and Judah said: what profit is there in killing him? Sell him. They sold him for twenty pieces of silver, and the caravan took him south toward Egypt. Then Potiphar's house, where Joseph rose through the household faster than anyone could account for, becoming overseer of everything his master owned. And Zuleika, Potiphar's wife, was consumed by a passion for him that the Legends of the Jews says had been predicted by astrologers who had told her she would have descendants through Joseph, which was true, only not the way she imagined it. She grabbed his garment. He ran. The Midrash, with unusual honesty, says he had almost given in, that the face of his father appeared to him at the critical moment and held him back. Not only willpower. A vision of the person he would fail if he broke.

Prison followed the garment she kept as evidence. Then came the butler's dream, the baker's dream, the interpretations that were eerily precise, and then the wait. Bereshit Rabbah 88:7, the fifth-century Palestinian collection, asks the sharpest question in the whole sequence: why did the chief butler forget Joseph? The Torah says simply that he did not remember Joseph, but forgot him. The Midrash Rabbah tradition refuses to let this stand as a neutral fact. It turns the verse into a small catastrophe with a purpose. Joseph had asked a human being to intercede on his behalf, had put his hope for rescue in a court official rather than in the One who had been with him in the pit. The forgetting was a correction. Trust in people delays trust in God. The butler forgot so that Joseph would have to wait for a different kind of rescue, from a different source.

He waited two more years in the dungeon. Pharaoh dreamed. The butler finally remembered the Hebrew interpreter in the prison. Joseph was brought out, shaved, dressed, and stood before the king. He interpreted the two dreams, seven fat cows and seven thin cows, seven full ears and seven withered ears, and before the afternoon was over, he was appointed viceroy of all Egypt. Second only to Pharaoh. Everything that had been done to him had positioned him exactly where he needed to be for what came next.

And then the moment the whole story had been building toward: his brothers standing across a table from him, not recognizing him, and Joseph watching them carefully, testing them. He had arranged a situation where Benjamin, the youngest, would be accused of theft and made a slave. He watched to see what they would do. Judah stepped forward and offered himself in Benjamin's place. The brothers who had sold him for silver now refused to abandon the younger one. Something had changed in them. Joseph could not hold himself in anymore. He cleared the room of Egyptians and wept so loudly that they heard it in the next building. "I am Joseph," he said. "Is my father still alive?"

The rabbis saw one continuous thread from the angel in the field to that moment of weeping. An angel had directed Joseph toward Shechem. An angel had been present in the pit. An angel had stood with him in Potiphar's house and in the dungeon during the two extra years. Not removing every difficulty, not rescuing him from every fall, but present. Joseph did not know he was being accompanied. That may be the most important detail of all. The tradition wanted to preserve the idea that the one who is carried does not always feel the carrying, and that this does not make it any less real.