The Brother Who Tried to Save Joseph and Was Rewarded Anyway

There is a principle buried deep in the Legends of the Jews, that great anthology compiled by Louis Ginzberg in the early twentieth century from centuries of rabbinic tradition, and it goes like this: God rewards not only good deeds but good intentions. It sounds like small comfort. It is, in fact, one of the most radical ideas in all of Jewish thought.

To understand why, you have to stand where Reuben stood on the day his brothers threw Joseph into the pit.

The eldest son of Jacob had a plan. While his brothers argued over what to do with the dreamer in the hole -- sell him, leave him, forget about him -- Reuben slipped away. He hid in the mountains above Dothan, waiting for the right moment to come back, draw Joseph out quietly, and return him to their father. He had his reasons. As the oldest, Reuben knew he would be held accountable if anything happened to his youngest brother. But there was something else driving him too. Reuben was a man who carried a sin he could not set down. He had wronged his father Jacob in a way that still burned in him -- he had lain with Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid, his father's concubine -- and he believed that if he could restore Joseph to Jacob, perhaps God would grant him the forgiveness he had been seeking ever since. One good deed, done in secret, to cancel out one great transgression.

He never got the chance. By the time Reuben came back down from the mountains, the pit was empty. The Ishmaelite caravan had already passed through. Joseph was gone. The text in Reuben and the Fires of Gehenna, drawn from the Legends of the Jews, captures the moment with devastating brevity: his good intention was frustrated. Just that. Frustrated.

What happens when a person tries to do the right thing and the world does not cooperate?

According to the tradition Ginzberg preserves, something unexpected: the intention is counted. God does not look only at results. The rabbis who shaped this teaching were living in a world where good efforts routinely came to nothing -- where the righteous suffered, where rescue missions failed, where a man could spend his whole life trying to repair what he had broken and never quite succeed. They needed a theology that could hold that reality without abandoning the idea that trying mattered.

So they told the story of what Reuben received in return for his failed rescue. The city of Bezer, assigned to the tribe of Reuben among the cities of refuge described in Deuteronomy, was designated the first of those cities -- the first place where a person who had accidentally caused another's death could flee and find safety. The parallel is deliberate. Reuben was the first of Joseph's brothers to attempt to save him. So Reuben's tribe received the first city of refuge. First to try to protect the innocent. First to be given a place where the innocent could be protected.

But there is more. The tradition reports a direct word spoken to Reuben by God: as you were the first to endeavor to restore a child to his father, so one of your descendants shall be the first to endeavor to lead Israel back to their heavenly Father. That descendant was Hosea -- the prophet whose entire ministry was a long, anguished plea for Israel to return, to repent, to come back. The book of Hosea, composed in the eighth century BCE during the crisis of the northern kingdom, opens with one of the most piercing images in all of Hebrew prophecy: God commanding the prophet to love a faithless wife, as an emblem of how God loves a faithless people. Hosea's cry -- Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God -- echoes, in this tradition, all the way back to a night when Reuben hid in the mountains above Dothan, trying to figure out how to undo something terrible before it was too late.

He could not undo it. He returned to the pit and it was empty. He tore his clothes. And then he had to go back to his brothers and ask: what do we tell our father?

The fuller account of Joseph's casting into the pit in the Legends makes clear that Reuben's intervention did save Joseph's life, even if it did not restore him to Jacob. Without Reuben's voice arguing against outright murder, the brothers might have killed Joseph where he stood. The pit, with all its snakes and scorpions, was still a kind of mercy compared to what Simon and Gad had in mind. Reuben bought Joseph time. He bought Judah the space to suggest the sale instead. He bought the whole broken machinery of providence a moment to operate.

The tradition does not soften what Reuben had done to his father, or what he failed to do for his brother. The Book of Jubilees, that second-century BCE retelling of Genesis and Exodus preserved in the apocryphal tradition, is even harsher: it reports that the law regarding such transgressions was not yet fully revealed in Reuben's day, and that God therefore showed him mercy, but it makes clear the gravity of what he had done. Reuben lived for years with that weight.

What the tradition holds out to him -- and to anyone who has tried and failed, who has attempted to repair something and found it already gone, who has carried a sin they cannot outrun -- is this: the intention counted. The city of Bezer stood in the land as a monument not to a man who succeeded, but to a man who tried. And somewhere in the lineage that ran from Reuben down through the generations to the prophet Hosea, the impulse to call people home, to say return, to believe that return was possible -- that impulse had its origin in a man hiding in the mountains above a dry pit, waiting for his chance to do the right thing.

He did not get his chance. God gave him credit anyway.