The old man counted his losses aloud. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 42:36 preserves Jacob's lament word by word: "Of Joseph you said, An evil beast hath devoured him; of Simeon you have said, The king of the land hath bound him; and Benjamin you seek to take away: upon me is the anguish of all of them."
A father's ledger of sorrow
Jacob's tally is devastating. Joseph — devoured (or so he believes). Simeon — imprisoned. Benjamin — about to be risked. All three of the sons he most wants to protect are, or will be, gone. The Aramaic paraphrase, which reached its final form in the Land of Israel around the seventh or eighth century CE, preserves the exact rhetoric of the grief: he quotes his sons' own words back to them. They had told him an evil beast devoured Joseph (Genesis 37:33). Now they are telling him a king has bound Simeon. He has learned not to trust the patterns of his sons' reports.
What Jacob does not know
The tragic irony is that Jacob is wrong about the first item on his list. Joseph is not dead. He is the king of the land his sons keep returning to. The rabbinic tradition reads this verse as the emotional low point of the Joseph cycle: Jacob, broken by what he believes is a second loss, refuses to release Benjamin. His sons have no way to move him without confessing what they did twenty-two years ago, and they are not ready.
The takeaway
Grief is sometimes built on a false premise. Jacob is mourning a son who is alive and administering the very grain he is eating. Not every sorrow is what it appears to be.