The Torah calls Joseph a na'ar — a youth — when he brings evil reports about his brothers to their father. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:2) gives that single word a whole biography.
Joseph, the Targumist tells us, had come forth from the school. He was seventeen, fresh from the beit midrash, shaped by study and discipline. He had been raised in the tents of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's concubines — meaning he grew up among the sons of the less-favored wives, the half-tribes who felt the sting of second-class status.
What did Joseph see there? He saw his brothers eating the flesh of animals torn by wild beasts — the ears and the tails. The specifics matter. Flesh from a nevelah or terefah was forbidden — a core rule of kashrut, older than Sinai, already practiced by Jacob's household (Genesis 9:4, Exodus 22:30). To eat the ears and tails of a torn carcass was to treat sacred restraint as a joke.
Joseph told his father. Most of us flinch here. We have been taught that tattling is ugly, that Joseph brought his doom on himself. But the Targumist frames the moment differently. Joseph was a boy who had just come from the house of study, and the first thing he saw in the field was his own brothers mocking the very Torah he had been learning.
He did not know how to stay silent. That would be his strength. That would also, eventually, be what sent him into the pit. The Targum is preparing us: Joseph's fate begins not with his coat, but with his refusal to pretend he hadn't seen.