The Brothers Bought Shoes With Joseph's Blood Money

Twenty Silver Pieces and a Pair of Shoes Each

The Ishmaelite traders rode south with Joseph in their caravan, and the ten brothers of Joseph sat down in the field and ate. The Torah says simply they sat to eat after throwing him into the pit. It does not say what they did with the twenty silver pieces.

The ancient rabbis could not let it go. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the 8th-century Palestinian compilation of rabbinic lore, fills in what the Torah left blank: each of the ten brothers took two silver pieces from the sale and bought himself a pair of shoes. Two silver pieces per brother, two silver pieces per pair, twenty silver pieces for the boy. Joseph was gone, delivered to strangers heading for Egypt, and his brothers covered their feet with the proceeds.

Shoes. The ordinary object makes the transaction more obscene than any extravagant purchase would have. They did not even want his life badly enough to profit from ending it. They wanted shoes.

The Prophet Who Remembered

Amos saw it. Centuries after Joseph had died in Egypt and his bones had been carried back to Canaan, the prophet Amos stood in the northern kingdom and accused Israel of its sins in language that made direct reference to the sale. You sell the righteous for silver, Amos said, and the poor for a pair of shoes.

This was not a generalized critique of economic injustice. The rabbis who read this verse read it as a direct accusation aimed backward through time at the brothers who had sold Joseph. Amos was not only describing a pattern of contemporary corruption. He was naming the original transaction, the founding act of betrayal that the later sins of Israel were repeating.

The prophet stood in the present and accused the past at the same time.

What Yom Kippur Was Actually Atoning For

Legends of the Jews, drawing on the full range of rabbinic reflection on the sale, traces the consequence of the transaction forward to a specific yearly ritual. The atonement service on Yom Kippur, including the two goats, one for God and one sent into the wilderness carrying the communal sins, was understood by some traditions as a perpetual address of what the brothers had done. Two goats, two pieces of silver per brother, the arithmetic of the original sale playing out symbolically every year in the Temple.

The Book of Jubilees, a Second Temple text that places Joseph's sale with precise calendar notation, records that the brothers brought his coat to their father on the tenth of the seventh month, the day that would become Yom Kippur. They had stained the coat with the blood of a goat. On the day the atonement rite was later established, the founding act of the atonement had been performed in the field.

The Ten Martyrs and the Debt Called in Centuries Later

A tradition preserved in Legends of the Jews, and elaborated in liturgy, claims that the Roman execution of ten great rabbinic sages was the cosmic accounting for the sin of the ten brothers. The ten who sold Joseph, the ten who took two silver pieces each and covered their feet: their debt was not erased by time or by the success of the Exodus or by the centuries of Temple service. It accumulated. It accrued. When the Romans captured the ten great sages and tortured them to death, the heavenly court was settling a transaction that had been open for more than a millennium.

This reading is harsh in a way that cuts against any simple theodicy. It says that there are debts of injustice that cannot be forgiven by time or repentance alone, that the casual cruelty of ten men eating bread while their brother was sold down the road can carry forward through generations until someone pays what was not paid then. The ten rabbis who died were not personally guilty of Joseph's sale. They died in the place of those who were.

Joseph Wept at the Reunion for a Different Reason

When Jacob finally came to Egypt and fell on Joseph's neck, Joseph wept. And when the brothers were revealed and stood before Joseph in the palace, he wept again, so loudly that the Egyptians in the outer rooms heard him. The text gives a simple reason: he saw his brothers.

But the tradition in Legends of the Jews reaches for a more specific reason. When Jacob had bowed to Joseph in Egypt, Joseph remembered a bow his father had made long ago in Canaan. Jacob had bowed in front of Joseph's mother Rachel. He had bowed toward the womb that would produce the son who was now being bowed to. The circle of the bow, the gesture that had started in love and passed through betrayal and ended in the reunion hall of an Egyptian palace, came back to Joseph all at once.

He wept because he understood how far the thread had run from its beginning.