Joseph Was Seventeen When He Made His Brothers His Enemies

Praise With One Hand, a Report With the Other

Joseph praised his brothers. He extolled them, admired their strength, celebrated their victories in the field. And in the very same breath he ranked himself above them and said so out loud. He was seventeen years old and had not yet fought with them at Bethchorin, had not stood in the line when the seven armies came to Shechem. He had stayed behind with Benjamin, still too young. He had not earned what they had earned. But he walked among them as though precedence were his by nature, as though the coat and the father's particular affection were not signs of privilege but simply evidence of the obvious order of things.

He brought his father evil reports about them. The Book of Jasher names this directly, without softening it. Not one report. Not a single complaint. Reports, plural, ongoing, a pattern of carrying information to Jacob about what his brothers did in the field and what they said when the father was not listening. The brothers heard everything. They knew what he was doing. They could not speak peaceably to him.

A Coat That Meant What It Meant

Jacob's love for Joseph was not concealed and it was not subtle. The coat of many colors was a public declaration - this one, above the others, this one most. The brothers saw it every time Joseph wore it, which was probably every day. It was Jacob's way of showing what his heart contained, and the heart contained a preference that should have been kept private and was not.

The brothers might have lived with the preference if Joseph had understood the cost of displaying it. But Joseph walked around in the coat and told his dreams. He dreamed his dream about the sheaves bowing down and walked straight to his brothers and told it. The calculation required to predict how that conversation would go was not a difficult one. He did not make it. He dreamed about the sun and moon and eleven stars bowing down and told that dream too, this time with his father present. Jacob rebuked him - even Jacob - and asked whether he really supposed that his father and mother and brothers would come and bow down to the earth before him. The brothers burned with resentment. Jacob kept the matter in his mind and said nothing more about it.

The Field at Dothan

When Jacob sent Joseph to check on his brothers in the field, the brothers saw him coming from a distance and made a plan before he arrived. They had been carrying this for years - the reports, the coat, the dreams told to their faces without apparent awareness of how those dreams landed. The man in the ornamented coat was walking toward them across a field they had worked without him, and they made a plan.

Reuben stopped them from killing him. "Cast him in the pit," Reuben said. The pit was dry. No water in it. Reuben intended to come back later and pull him out. They stripped the coat and threw Joseph in the pit and sat down to eat. Then a caravan of Ishmaelite merchants appeared on the road heading toward Egypt and Judah said: "What profit is it if we kill our brother? Sell him."

They sold him for twenty pieces of silver. They took the coat and dipped it in goat's blood and brought it to their father and said they had found it this way. Jacob believed them. He tore his garments and put on sackcloth and mourned his son many days. His sons and daughters came to comfort him and he refused to be comforted. He said he would go down to the grave mourning his son.

A Day Set Apart to Mourn

The Book of Jasher records that the brothers could not watch what they had done to their father. They sat down to eat and they could hear Jacob weeping in his tent. They instituted a fast day for themselves and their descendants, a day to be observed every year in remembrance of what they had done - what the reports and the resentment and the goat's blood and the sold brother had made of a family. They were the ones who had done it, and they knew it, and they set aside a day to sit with the knowledge of it every year.