Reuben's Repentance and the Brothers Who Sold Joseph

The pit had no water, only snakes and scorpions. Reuben had talked the brothers out of killing Joseph outright; throw him in the pit, he told them, but do not lay a hand on him. His plan was to come back after the others had left and pull Joseph out. He never got the chance. By the time he returned to the pit, Joseph was gone, sold to a caravan of Ishmaelite merchants heading toward Egypt. Reuben tore his clothes and said: the boy is not there, and where do I go?

The Angel Who Guided Joseph to the Brothers

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the Palestinian midrash from the eighth century CE, tells the story of Joseph's journey to his brothers with a detail the Torah omits. Joseph had been sent by Jacob to check on the brothers at Shechem. He arrived and found no one. He was wandering in the field, lost, when a man appeared and asked what he was looking for. That man, the midrash says, was the angel Gabriel.

Gabriel told Joseph that his brothers had moved on to Dothan. Joseph followed the direction and found them. Gabriel's involvement in Joseph's story runs through multiple strands of rabbinic tradition: the angel who directed him to his brothers also appears in traditions about Joseph's imprisonment and his rise in Potiphar's house. The implication is that divine providence was operating through the entire narrative, that Joseph's path to the pit and to Egypt was not random but directed.

This creates an immediate problem. If Gabriel directed Joseph to the brothers, then the brothers' conspiracy and Joseph's sale into slavery were part of a divinely guided sequence. The midrash does not resolve this tension so much as hold it: the brothers were fully responsible for what they did, and the outcome served purposes larger than their jealousy.

Where Was Reuben?

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer answers the question that the Torah leaves open. Reuben was absent from the sale because he was engaged in fasting and sackcloth as an act of repentance for his transgression against his father's honor. The background to this is (Genesis 35:22): Reuben had slept with Bilhah, his father's concubine, in what the text presents without further explanation. Jacob heard of it. The Torah says nothing more at that point, but the deathbed curse in (Genesis 49:3-4) makes clear that the act cost Reuben his position as firstborn. He was unstable as water, Jacob said, and would not excel.

The rabbis in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews develop Reuben's character at length. His act against Bilhah was not predatory in the rabbinic reading but a misguided attempt to restore his mother Leah's honor; he moved his father's bed away from Bilhah's tent to his mother's. The intention does not excuse the act. The consequence was the same: he lost the firstborn status and spent years in fasting and repentance that the Torah records only indirectly through the deathbed blessing's condemnation.

Reuben's transgression and its long aftermath is treated with unusual sympathy in the midrashic tradition. He is the son who erred enormously, who understood what he had done, who spent years in the kind of bodily repentance that the tradition considers most sincere: fasting, sackcloth, continuous acknowledgment of the wrong.

Repentance as Absence

The structure of the story is darkly ironic. Reuben's repentance for one act of wrong caused him to be absent when he could have prevented another wrong. His fasting kept him away from the pit at the moment the Ishmaelite caravan appeared. The brother who had tried to save Joseph was not there to save him.

The 3,205 texts of the midrash-aggadah tradition read this absence as part of Reuben's ongoing reckoning. The firstborn who had forfeited his status could not also be the hero who saved the dreamer. The pattern of his life required him to arrive at the wrong moment, to find the pit empty, to tear his clothes in the gesture of mourning that would echo through the rest of his life.

When Reuben said to the brothers: where do I go? he was asking a question larger than the immediate situation. The man who had sinned against his father, who had lost his birthright, who had planned a rescue and arrived too late: where did someone like him go? The question had no good answer. He went where the brothers went, back to Jacob with the coat dipped in goat's blood, participating in the lie that would define the family for the next twenty-two years.

The Confession That Came Too Late

When the brothers stood before the viceroy in Egypt, not yet knowing he was Joseph, and the viceroy accused them of being spies, they said to each other: truly we are guilty concerning our brother, when we saw the distress of his soul when he begged us and we did not listen (Genesis 42:21). Reuben replied: did I not tell you not to sin against the boy? And you would not listen. His conscience had been recording the account for twenty-two years.

The Talmudic discussion of this moment notes with precision that Reuben's rebuke was heard by Joseph himself, the Egyptian viceroy standing before them, though the brothers did not know it. Joseph turned away and wept. He heard his brother say: I told you not to do this. He understood, perhaps for the first time with full clarity, that Reuben had tried to save him. The pit had been Reuben's attempt at rescue, interrupted by an absence that was itself the residue of a different wrong.

Reuben's presence through the Joseph story and the Testament of Reuben from the apocryphal Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written in the second century BCE, together paint a portrait of a man whose life was organized around a single catastrophic failure and the long attempt to repair it. The repair never fully succeeded. But the attempt itself, the decades of fasting and the moment of moral clarity before the viceroy, established Reuben as the tradition's figure of incomplete but genuine repentance, the first person in the Torah to be recorded as having turned back.