Zebulun Refused to Eat the Day Joseph Was Sold

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The Knives Came Out at Dothan

Simeon and Gad came at their brother with knives out, and they were not bluffing.

"Pity me, my brothers," Joseph said, crying while he said it. "Have mercy on the bowels of Jacob our father. Do not lay your hands on me to spill innocent blood. I have not sinned against you. And if I have sinned, then punish me with a punishment, but do not put your hand on me, for our father's sake."

Zebulun heard all of it from where he stood. He could not hold himself together. He started to weep, and his liver poured out of him and everything inside his belly came loose, and his joints shook so hard that he could not stay on his feet.

Joseph saw which brother was crying. He broke and ran and got behind Zebulun, and stood there, begging the others over the shoulder of the one man who had not gone hard.

Then Reuben spoke. Not kill him. Throw him in one of the dry pits our fathers dug out here, the ones that never came in wet. God had held the water down in those pits since the day they were dug, so that a boy dropped into one of them years later would not drown.

The Meal He Would Not Sit Down To

With the boy in the ground they spread out the food.

Bread and meat, a few paces from the mouth of the pit, ten men eating in the middle of the afternoon while the crying came up out of the rock behind them. Zebulun refused to touch any of it. He stood where he could see the opening.

Judah was watching the same opening, for a different reason. He did not trust Simeon, or Dan, or Gad to stay sitting. Any one of them could get up, walk over, and finish it.

So the brothers looked at the one who would not eat and gave him the job. Watch him, then, since you are watching anyway. Zebulun stood guard over his brother in the pit until the traders came, so when Joseph was sold he had a clear view of it.

Twenty Pieces of Silver and a Row of Sandals

The price was twenty pieces of silver, and it was a low price for a boy who looked like Joseph. He no longer did. Days in a pit with the snakes and the scorpions had taken the color out of his face and left him sallow and sick-looking, and the Midianites paid what he looked like he was worth.

Zebulun took none of it. Simeon and Gad and six of the others split the coins, and none of them would spend the money on food. "We will not eat it," they said. "It is the price of our brother's blood. We will put it under our feet instead. He told us he was going to rule over us. Now we get to see what becomes of his dreams." They went out and bought sandals with it, for themselves, for their wives, for their children, and they walked on the sale for years.

The accounting on those sandals came due in Egypt. At the gate of the governor's house, servants knelt and unfastened the straps and took the sandals off their feet before they were allowed in, and then they were made to lie flat on the ground the way men lie down in front of Pharaoh, and they were spat on while they lay there. Afterward the Egyptians learned what had been done to the governor when he was young, and the brothers had to walk that city with everyone knowing.

Reuben Came Back to an Empty Pit

Reuben had not been there for the sale. He came back for the boy and found the hole empty, and tore his clothes open where he stood.

"How am I supposed to look at my father's face?"

He grabbed the silver and ran after the caravan. He never caught it. The traders had gone off the main road and cut through the country of the cave dwellers, and Reuben came back with the money still in his hands and ate nothing that day either.

Dan had the solution ready. Stop crying, he said, we know what to tell Jacob. Kill a young goat, dip the coat in it, send the coat home and ask him to identify it. Simeon would not hand the coat over. He wanted to put his sword through it, because he was still angry that Joseph was walking around alive somewhere and he had not been the one to end it. The others closed on him and said they would tell their father that he alone had done this thing in Israel. He gave them the coat.

The Oath He Kept for Ninety Years

Before they went home they swore to each other that anyone who told their father would be killed for it, and Zebulun swore with them.

He kept it. He kept it through the years of Jacob refusing to be comforted, through the famine, through the trips down to Egypt, through the moment the governor cleared the room and said who he was. He wept about it in private for years and never once said it out loud. Then he was a hundred and fourteen years old, two years after they buried Joseph, and he called his sons in and told them that in his whole life he could not find a single thing he had done wrong except one. He had known. He had said nothing.

What he told them to do about it was not a rule about envy. Have mercy on people, he said, and on animals too. He had built the first fishing boat himself, hung a rudder off the back and rigged a sail on an upright in the middle of it, and for five years he had brought in fish along the coast and cooked them and handed them out to whoever came by hungry, strangers, sick men, old men. In a hard winter he had stolen a coat out of his own father's house because he saw a man outside with nothing on. Once he had nothing at all to give a man who needed it, so he walked seven furlongs beside him, weeping the whole way, and then he turned around and went home.