In the field outside Shechem, Joseph meets a man who tells him his brothers have moved on to Dothan. The Torah calls him simply a man. The sages identified him as the angel Gabriel. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:17) goes further and gives us what the man actually heard.
I heard beyond the Veil, the man says, that behold from today would begin the servitude to the Mizraee. Beyond the Veil — pargod in Aramaic — is a technical term in Jewish mysticism. It is the curtain behind God's throne, the screen through which angels overhear decrees before they touch the earth.
This stranger, in other words, is not a shepherd giving directions. He is a courier from the heavenly court, passing along information he had no right to share with a mortal boy. He had heard that Israel's four-hundred-year Egyptian exile was scheduled to begin today. And he had also heard something else: Hivaee would seek to set battle in array against them — the local Hivites were plotting a reprisal attack. So the brothers, warned by prophecy, had moved to Dothan.
Two kinds of information, one stranger. A man standing at the edge of a field who knows the machinery of history is turning. Joseph, seventeen years old and fresh from the study house, does not recognize him. He only listens, and keeps walking.
The Targumist is teaching that every life has its Gabriel — a strange face that shows up at a crossroads, says the exact phrase that will send us toward our fate, and vanishes. Joseph met his at Shechem. His next stop was the pit.