Joseph's Brothers Put God Under a Ban So He Could Not Tell Jacob

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The Boy Who Wore His Father's Face

The reason Jacob loved Joseph more than the rest was not that he came late. It was the face. The boy had his father's features, exactly, the way a copy has an original, and an old man looking at him was looking at himself.

Joseph used his access. He came back from the flocks with reports, and one of them was that his brothers tore limbs off living animals and ate them.

Heaven answered him on the spot. "Be assured, you will be suspected of committing the very act you accused them of committing." Years later, in a hall in Egypt, servants would set his bread apart at his own table because the men eating with him could not sit at a table with someone like him.

Then came the dreams, and he told those out loud too, and after that his brothers could not speak a civil word to him.

A Man in the Field Sent Him On

"Go now, see whether it is well with thy brethren."

Joseph went, and the road ran to Shechem, which was already spoken for. Dinah was ruined at Shechem. Joseph was sold near Shechem. Generations later the kingdom of David came apart at Shechem, in the same hill country, over another man's ambition. Some ground gets used for one purpose.

He could not find them and went wandering in the fields, and a certain man found him there and pointed him toward Dothan. The man was Gabriel.

The archangel of the visions, in a Canaanite pasture, giving a seventeen year old accurate directions to the worst day of his life.

They saw him coming from a long way off. Distance did not help him. It only gave them time to agree.

A Pit With No Water In It

They took him and threw him into the pit. The pit was empty. There was no water in it.

There were snakes in it. Scorpions too, in the dry cracks along the sides, and a boy at the bottom in the dark who could hear them moving and could not see where.

Reuben went off and sat on a hill within sight of the place, waiting for dark, planning to come back down alone and get him out. The other nine sat somewhere else and agreed that he should die.

Then a caravan came past on the desert road.

"Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmaelites."

They pulled him up and walked him to the edge of the desert and sold him for twenty pieces of silver, two pieces to a man. Two pieces of silver buys one pair of shoes. That is what the money went on, and they walked home in it.

The price was wrong for a boy that striking, and the reason was down in the pit. His features had altered in there. The blood had run out of his face and left it white, and the men who did the buying never saw the face Jacob loved. They saw a pale stranger who had stopped being worth an argument.

They Needed a Tenth Man

Somebody said what they were all thinking.

"Let us make a vow of excommunication among ourselves, lest one of us be tempted to tell our father, Jacob."

Then Judah raised the technical problem, in the flat voice of a man who knows the law. Reuben is not here. A vow of excommunication cannot be executed unless ten are present.

They counted heads in the dust. Nine.

So they brought in the Holy One, blessed be He, as the tenth party to the oath, and swore the ban with God standing inside it, bound by it, on their side of it.

Reuben came down to the pit that night. He had been away in sackcloth and fasting, the first man in the world ever to begin repentance on his own account, over what he had done with Bilhah, and the first free hour he had he went to get his brother out.

The pit was empty. He tore his clothes.

"The child is not. And as for me, whither shall I go?"

They told him what they had done and what they had sworn and who was in it with them. And he remained silent.

Heaven tells Jacob things. That is the arrangement, that is what he is, a man who is told. And from that night on, about this one matter, heaven said nothing to him at all.

Identify, Please

They killed a goat, because goat blood passes for a man's, and soaked the coat in it and sent it up to their father with a message that has no verbs of ownership in it anywhere.

We found this. Identify, please. Is it your son's tunic or not.

Those two words went into the ledger. Judah would hear them again in his own life, from Tamar, holding a staff and a seal and asking him to identify, please, whose they were.

Jacob took the coat. "My son's tunic. A savage beast devoured him."

He was right, and he did not know it, and he did not know anything else either. What he said to himself, looking at the cloth in his hands, was that he could not tell what he was seeing. The clear sight he had lived his whole life inside had gone out. The beast that devoured Joseph was waiting for him in a house in Egypt and had a husband and a name.

His sons stood around him and offered comfort, having brought the thing themselves, and he would not take it. He mourned in a house where every adult person knew, and the one who could have told him had been sworn to silence in a field near Dothan by nine men who needed a tenth.