After the brothers threw Joseph into the pit, they sat down to eat. Then they looked up and saw a caravan. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:25) gives the caravan an unexpected specificity: it was coming from Gilead, with camels carrying wax, resin, balsam and stacte.
The Hebrew Bible mentions these spices rarely and deliberately. Nataph, stacte, is one of the four components of the sacred incense burned twice daily in the future Mishkan (Exodus 30:34). Balsam will become one of the treasures of Solomon's kingdom. Gilead itself will be famous for its healing balm (Jeremiah 8:22).
The sages caught the fragrance first. The Talmud, in Shabbat 10b, notes that ordinarily Arabian camels carried petroleum and tar — noxious, choking loads. God arranged for this caravan, on this day, to be carrying sweet spices instead. A small mercy for a boy being sold into slavery. The last thing Joseph would smell before being led away from his father's land was not the stench of industry. It was incense. It was healing. It was the scent that would one day fill the Holy of Holies.
The Targumist is doing something deeply Jewish with this detail. Even in the moment of greatest cruelty, when a family is breaking apart and a covenant is being betrayed, God's mercy arrives in the form of something almost too small to notice. Not a rescue. Just a fragrance. A reminder that the pit is not the end of the world — because outside the pit, camels are walking past carrying the ingredients of the Temple itself.