One of the Brothers Refused to Eat After Joseph Was Sold

Zebulun was watching the well.

Behind him, his brothers had spread out a blanket in the field at Dothan. Bread. Olives. A jug of something to drink. It was the most famous picnic in the Torah. Ten men sitting down to eat while their seventeen-year-old brother Joseph cried from the bottom of a pit a few steps away (Genesis 37:25). Zebulun could hear the crying through the stone. He had not taken a bite.

The scene comes from the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a Jewish apocryphal work composed in roughly the second century BCE in Hebrew or Aramaic and preserved in Greek, Armenian, and Slavonic manuscripts. The text is built as twelve deathbed confessions, one per son of Jacob. Each brother tells his children the worst thing he did in his life and warns them against doing it. Zebulun's chapter is the only one in which the confession is a confession of silence.

He had one sin in his whole life, he told his sons on his deathbed at a hundred and fourteen years old. He had promised his brothers he would not tell Jacob what happened in the field that day. And he kept that promise for the rest of his life. That silence, he said, nearly destroyed him.

Go back into the field and watch the scene through his eyes.

Simeon and Gad come at Joseph with knives. They mean it. They are not bluffing. Joseph collapses in front of them and begs through tears. "Pity me, my brothers. Have mercy upon the bowels of Jacob our father. Lay not upon me your hands to shed innocent blood, for I have not sinned against you. If I have sinned, chastise me, but lay not your hand upon me for the sake of Jacob our father" (Genesis 37:21). He is a boy. He is asking for his life in his father's name, because that is the only name he thinks might work on them.

Zebulun watches this and something inside him gives way. "I was unable to bear his lamentations," he told his sons on his deathbed. "I began to weep. My liver was poured out. All the substance of my bowels was loosened. I wept with Joseph. My heart sounded. The joints of my body trembled. I was not able to stand." He says it in the physical language the ancient world used for grief. Liver. Bowels. Joints. Heart. Grief was not a feeling you located in your chest. It was an event that happened in every organ at once.

Joseph, the Testament says, saw Zebulun weeping and fled behind him. He used his sixth-oldest brother as a human shield. For one heartbeat in the field at Dothan, one of the twelve was in the right place.

Then Reuben intervenes with the plan the Torah records. Don't kill him. Throw him in one of the dry pits. Zebulun says the pits were dry because God had forbidden the water to rise, specifically to preserve Joseph for what came later. Bereshit Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, picks up this thread and insists the pit was full of snakes and scorpions that God held back so Joseph would live to become the viceroy of Egypt. The Testament gives you the first draft of that idea. Every physical feature of the field was cooperating in Joseph's survival. Only his brothers were not.

The brothers sit down to eat. The Torah records this with a blandness that has shocked readers for three thousand years. They broke bread over the pit. Zebulun insists he was not at that picnic. "I did not eat," he told his sons. He watched the well. He could hear his brother crying through the stone. He waited for something to change and nothing did.

Then the Ishmaelites arrive, and Joseph is sold, and the coins are divided. Here Zebulun makes his second refusal. He will not touch the money. He names which brothers took it. Simeon, Gad, and six others. He tells his sons what those brothers bought with their twenty pieces of silver. Sandals. The line in the Testament of Zebulun is one of the most quietly devastating details in all of the Jewish apocrypha. "We will not eat of it," the brothers say, "for it is the price of our brother's blood, but we will tread it underfoot, because he said he would be king over us." They walked on Joseph's price for years. Every step was a reminder.

The Testament closes the loop at Pharaoh's court. When the brothers finally stand barefoot before the viceroy of Egypt and bow themselves to the ground, the text says those sandals were stripped from their feet in fulfillment of the law. The punishment fit the price. The men who walked on their brother's life ended up standing in front of him with nothing on their feet.

But the part of the Testament that has haunted every retelling is what comes at the end of Zebulun's speech. He tells his sons that because he had compassion on Joseph in the field, God gave him something in return. "Because of this, in the day when I was sick, I was not oppressed." Every illness that came on him in his long life, he says, came lightly. The Lord looked down, remembered Zebulun's tears at the pit, and spared his body the weight those tears deserved to earn. The man who wept over his brother's cry was given, for the rest of his long life, a body that could absorb pain without being crushed.

Louis Ginzberg, in the twentieth-century synthesis published as Legends of the Jews between 1909 and 1938, passes this Testament reading through the later rabbinic tradition and asks a pointed question. If mercy is the currency by which the brothers are weighed, then Zebulun is not one of ten. He is the one who did not eat.

The rest of them walked on the sandals. He kept watching the well.