Joseph Was Sold and His Brothers Could Not Eat

The Torah is efficient about the worst moment. One verse: the brothers saw a caravan of Ishmaelites, and Judah said, what profit is there in killing him, let us sell him. The next verse: they sold him for twenty pieces of silver. Then the caravan passed, and the Torah moves on to Judah and Tamar.

The Book of Jasher does not move on. This ancient Jewish text, referenced twice in the Tanakh and considered by many scholars to preserve early oral traditions, stays with the brothers for every hour after the sale. "Their hearts were smitten on account of him," it says. They repented. They went back to find him. Reuben searched the pit. He called Joseph's name into the empty dark and got no answer. The pit was empty. He assumed the worst, that Joseph had died of fright, or been killed by a snake. He tore his clothing and wept. And there was nothing to undo.

The brothers' remorse, preserved in Jasher chapter 43, is not a theological argument. It is a scene of people who did something they knew was wrong and could not locate the moment where stopping would have been possible. Simeon and Levi had been the driving force. Reuben had been absent. Judah had suggested the sale as the merciful alternative to murder. None of them had meant to reach the destination they reached.

They sat down to eat. They could not eat. The text says this, almost as an aside. They had sold their brother and then sat down to a meal and found that the food would not go down. Jacob was waiting at home. They would have to go back with the coat.

Bereshit Rabbah, the great Palestinian midrashic compilation from around the fifth century CE, examines the stripping of the coat from a different angle. Rabbi Elazar, in Bereshit Rabbah 84, asks why the Torah specifies it was a fine tunic, an ornate coat. He concludes that the brothers stripped him twice: first they stripped him of the coat, and then they stripped him of his dignity. The physical object was the lesser loss. What they took when they stood over him in that pit and decided his fate was something that could not be returned in any coat.

Bereshit Rabbah also interrogates the moment Potiphar buys Joseph. The verse calls Potiphar the chief executioner of Pharaoh. The Midrash notes that this title is not incidental. Potiphar bought Joseph for a purpose that was not domestic service. The Midrash says God struck him so that he was unable to act on it. The man who had survived the pit and the caravan and the sale would now survive Potiphar's household, protected by the same invisible hand that had been steering the entire episode from the beginning.

Legends of the Jews, drawing on various midrashic sources, records that Joseph's ten years in prison were not entirely unjust, at least by the precise moral accounting the tradition applies. He had spoken against his brothers before Jacob. He had reported their actions. The prison was, in some sense, the consequence of that. But it was also the preparation. In prison, Joseph learned to read dreams. He interpreted the baker's dream and the cupbearer's dream. He waited two more years after the cupbearer forgot him, and then Pharaoh had a dream that nobody in Egypt could interpret, and the cupbearer remembered.

When Joseph eventually stood before his brothers in Egypt and revealed himself, the tradition says he showed them his circumcision as proof of his identity. He had been seventeen when they sold him. He was thirty-nine when they stood before him. He told them not to grieve. He told them it was God who had sent him, not them, that the whole long suffering had been navigation toward a necessary destination. He may have believed it. The tradition records it as fact.

During the famine, Joseph refused to feed anyone who would not first renounce their idols. The Egyptians who came to him starving were asked to say: blessed is the one who gives bread to all flesh. Some refused. Joseph waited them out. He had learned, in the pit and in the prison, how to wait. The Egyptians eventually came back. They were hungry enough to say the words. He gave them the bread.