'And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his
brethren, that they stript Joseph out of his coat, his
coat of many colours that was on him; And they took him,
and cast him into a pit: and the pit was empty, there
was no water in it. And they sat down to eat bread: and
they lifted up their eyes and looked, and, behold, a
company of Ishmeelites came from Gilead with their
camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to
carry it down to Egypt. And Judah said unto his brethren,
What profit is it if we slay our brother, and conceal
his blood! Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmeelites,
and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our brother
and our flesh. And his brethren were content. Then there
passed by Midianites merchantmen; and they drew and
lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the
Ishmeelites for twenty pieces of silver: and they brought
Joseph into Egypt. And Reuben returned unto the pit; and,
behold, Joseph was not in the pit; and he rent his
clothes. And he returned unto his brethren, and said,
The child is not; and I, whither shall I go? And they
took Joseph's coat, and killed a kid of the goats, and
dipped the coat in the blood; And they sent the coat of
many colours, and they brought it to their father; and
said, This have we found: know now whether it be thy
son's coat or no. And he knew it, and said, It is my
son's coat; an evil beast hath devoured him; Joseph is
without doubt rent in pieces. And Jacob rent his clothes,
and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his
son many days. And all his sons and all his daughters
rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted;
and he said, For I will go down into the grave unto my
son mourning. Thus his father wept for him. And the
Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar, an officer
of Pharaoh's and captain of the guard.'--GENESIS xxxvii. 23-36.
We have left the serene and lofty atmosphere of communion and saintship
far above us. This narrative takes us down into foul depths. It is a
hideous story of vulgar hatred and cruelty. God's name is never
mentioned in it; and he is as far from the actors' thoughts as from the
writer's words. The crime of the brothers is the subject, and the
picture is painted in dark tones to teach large truths about sin.
1. The broad teaching of the whole story, which is ever being
reiterated in Old Testament incidents, is that God works out His great
purposes through even the crimes of unconscious men. There is an irony,
if we may so say, in making the hatred of these men the very means of
their brother's advancement, and the occasion of blessing to
themselves. As coral insects work, not knowing the plan of their reef,
still less the fair vegetation and smiling homes which it will one day
carry, but blindly building from the material supplied by the ocean a
barrier against it; so even evil-doers are carrying on God's plan, and
sin is made to counterwork itself, and be the black channel through
which the flashing water of life pours. Joseph's words (Gen. 1. 20)
give the point of view for the whole story: 'Ye thought evil against
me; but God meant it unto good ... to save much people alive.' We can
scarcely forget the still more wonderful example of the same thing, in
the crime of crimes, when his brethren slew the Son of God--like
Joseph, the victim of envy--and, by their crime, God's counsel of mercy
for them and for all was fulfilled.
2. Following the narrative, verses 23, 24, and 25 show us the poisonous
fruit of brotherly hatred. The family, not the nation, is the social
unit in Genesis. From the beginning, we find the field on which sin
works is the family relation. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau
and Jacob, and now the other children of Jacob and Joseph, attest the
power of sin when it enters there, and illustrate the principle that
the corruption of the best is the worst. The children of Rachel could
not but be hated by the children of other mothers. Jacob's undisguised
partiality for Joseph was a fault too, which wrought like yeast on the
passions of his wild sons. The long-sleeved garment which he gave to
the lad probably meant to indicate his purpose to bestow on him the
right of the first-born forfeited by Reuben, and so the violent rage
which it excited was not altogether baseless. The whole miserable
household strife teaches the rottenness of the polygamous relation on
which it rested, and the folly of paternal favouritism. So it carries
teaching especially needed then, but not out of date now.
The swift passage of the purely inward sin of jealous envy into the
murderous act, as soon as opportunity offered, teaches the short path
which connects the inmost passions with the grossest outward deeds.
Like Jonah's gourd, the smallest seed of hate needs but an hour or two
of favouring weather to become a great tree, with all obscene and
blood-seeking birds croaking in its branches. 'Whosoever hateth his
brother is a murderer,' Therefore the solemn need for guarding the
heart from the beginnings of envy, and for walking in love.
The clumsy contrivance for murder without criminality, which Reuben
suggested, is an instance of the shallow pretexts with which the
sophistry of sin fools men before they have done the wrong thing. Sin's
mask is generally dropped very soon after. The bait is useless when the
hook is well in the fish's gills. 'Don't let us kill him. Let us put
him into a cistern. He cannot climb up its bottle-shaped, smooth sides.
But that is not our fault. Nobody will ever hear his muffled cries from
its depths. But there will be no blood on our hands.' It was not the
first time, nor is it the last, that men have tried to blink their
responsibility for the consequences which they hoped would come of
their crimes. Such excuses seem sound when we are being tempted; but,
as soon as the rush of passion is past, they are found to be worthless.
Like some cheap castings, they are only meant to be seen in front,
where they are rounded and burnished. Get behind them, and you find
them hollow.
'They sat down to eat bread,' Thomas Fuller pithily says: 'With what
heart could they say grace, either before or after meat?' What a grim
meal! And what an indication of their rude natures, seared consciences,
and deadened affections!
This picture of the moral condition of the fathers of the Jewish tribes
is surely a strong argument for the historical accuracy of the
narrative. It would be strange if the legends of a race, instead of
glorifying, should blacken, the characters of its founders. No motive
can be alleged which would explain such a picture; its only explanation
is its truth. The ugly story, too, throws vivid light on that thought,
which prophets ever reiterated, 'not for your sakes, but for My name's
sake.' The divine choice of Israel was grounded, not on merit, but on
sovereign purpose. And the undisguised plainness of the narrative of
their sins is but of a piece with the tone of Scripture throughout. It
never palliates the faults even of its best men. It tells its story
without comment. It never indulges in condemnation any more than in
praise. It is a perfect mirror; its office is to record, not to
criticise. Many misconceptions of Old Testament morality would have
been avoided by keeping that simple fact in view.
3. The ill-omened meal is interrupted by the sudden appearance, so
picturesquely described, of the caravan of Ishmaelites with their
loaded camels. Dothan was on or near the great trade route to Egypt,
where luxury, and especially the custom of embalming, opened a
profitable market for spices. The traders would probably not be
particular as to the sort of merchandise they picked up on their road,
and such an 'unconsidered trifle' as a slave or two would be neither
here nor there. This opportune advent of the caravan sets a thought
buzzing in Judah's brain, which brings out a new phase of the crime.
Hatred darkening to murder is bad enough; but hatred which has also an
eye to business, and makes a profit out of a brother, is a shade or two
blacker, because it means cold-blooded calculation and selfish
advantage instead of raging passion. Judah's cynical question avows the
real motive of his intervention. He prefers the paltry gain from
selling Joseph to the unprofitable luxury of killing him. It brings in
regard to brotherly ties at the end, as a kind of homage paid to
propriety, as if the obligations they involved were not broken as
really by his proposal as by murder. Certainly it is strange logic
which can say in one breath, 'Let us sell him; ... for he is our
brother,' and finds the clause between buffer enough to keep these two
contradictories from collision.
If any touch of conscience made the brothers prefer the less cruel
alternative, one can only see here another illustration of the strange
power which men have of limiting the working of conscience, and of the
fact that when a greater sin has been resolved on, a smaller one gets
to look almost like a virtue. Perhaps Judah and the rest actually
thought themselves very kind and brotherly when they put their brother
into strangers' power, and so went back to their meal with renewed
cheerfulness, both because they had gained their end without bloodshed,
and because they had got the money. They did not think that every tear
and pang which Joseph would shed and feel would be laid at their door.
We do not suppose that Joseph was meant to be, in the accurate sense of
the word, a type of Christ. But the coincidence is not to be passed by,
that these same powerful motives of envy and of greed were combined in
His case too, and that there again a Judah (Judas) appears as the agent
of the perfidy.
We may note that the appearance of the traders in the nick of time,
suggesting the sale of Joseph, points the familiar lesson that the
opportunity to do ill deeds often makes ill deeds done. The path for
entering on evil is made fatally easy at first; that gate always stands
wide. The Devil knows how to time his approaches. A weak nature, with
an evil bias in it, finds everywhere occasions and suggestions to do
wrong. But it is the evil nature which makes innocent things
opportunities for evil. Therefore we have to be on our guard, as
knowing that if we fall it is not circumstances, but ourselves, that
made stumbling-blocks out of what might have been stepping-stones.
4. Leaving Joseph to pursue his sad journey, our narrative introduces
for the first time Reuben, whose counsel, as the verses before the text
tell us, it had been to cast the poor lad into the cistern. His motive
had been altogether good; he wished to save life, and as soon as the
others were out of the way, to bring Joseph up again and get him safely
back to Jacob. In chapter xlii. 22, Reuben himself reminds his brothers
of what had passed. There he says that he had besought them not to 'sin
against the child,' which naturally implies that he had wished them to
do nothing to him, and that they 'would not hear.' In the verses before
the text he proposes the compromise of the pit, and the others 'hear.'
So there seem to have been two efforts made by him--first, to shield
Joseph from any harm, and then that half-and-half measure which was
adopted. He is absent, while they carry out the plan, and from the
cruel merriment of the feast--perhaps watching his opportunity to
rescue, perhaps in sickness of heart and protest against the deed. Well
meant and kindly motived as his action was--and self-sacrificing too,
if, as is probable, Joseph was meant by Jacob as his successor in the
forfeited birthright--his scheme breaks down, as attempts to mitigate
evil by compliance and to make compromises with sinners usually do. The
only one of the whole family who had some virtue in him, was too timid
to take up a position of uncompromising condemnation. He thought it
more polite to go part of the way, and to trust to being able to
prevent the worst. That is always a dangerous experiment. It is often
tried still; it never answers. Let a man stand to his guns, and speak
out the condemnation that is in his heart; otherwise, he will be sure
to go farther than he meant, he will lose all right of remonstrance,
and will generally find that the more daring sinners have made his
well-meant schemes to avert the mischief impossible.
5. The cruel trick by which Jacob was deceived is perhaps the most
heartless bit of the whole heartless crime. It came as near an insult
as possible. It was maliciously meant. The snarl about the coat, the
studied use of 'thy son' as if the brothers disowned the brotherhood,
the unfeeling harshness of choosing such a way of telling their
lie--all were meant to give the maximum of pain, and betray their
savage hatred of father and son, and its causes. Was Reuben's mouth
shut all this time? Evidently. From his language in chapter xlii., 'His
blood is required,' he seems to have believed until then that Joseph
had been killed in his absence. But he dared not speak. Had he told
what he did know, the brothers had but to add, 'And he proposed it
himself,' and his protestations of his good intentions would have been
unheeded. He believed his brother dead, and perhaps thought it better
that Jacob should think him slain by wild beasts than by brothers'
hands, as Reuben supposed him to be. But his shut mouth teaches again
how dangerous his policy had been, and how the only road, which it is
safe, in view of the uncertainties of the future, to take, is the plain
road of resistance to evil and non-fellowship with its doers.
6. And what of the poor old father? His grief is unworthy of God's
wrestler. It is not the part of a devout believer in God's providence
to refuse to be comforted. There was no religious submission in his
passionate sorrow. How unlike the quiet resignation which should have
marked the recognition that the God who had been his guide was working
here too! No doubt the hypocritical condolences of his children were as
vinegar upon nitre. No doubt the loss of Joseph had taken away the one
gentle and true son on whom his loneliness rested since his Rachel's
death, while he found no solace in the wild, passionate men who called
him 'father' and brought him no 'honour.' But still his grief is beyond
the measure which a true faith in God would have warranted; and we
cannot but see that the dark picture which we have just been looking at
gets no lighter or brighter tints from the demeanour of Jacob.
There are few bitterer sorrows than for a parent to see the children of
his own sin in the sins of his children. Jacob might have felt that
bitterness, as he looked round on the lovelessness and dark, passionate
selfishness of his children, and remembered his own early crimes
against Esau. He might have seen that his unwise fondness for the son
of his Rachel had led to the brothers' hatred, though he did not know
that that hatred had plunged the arrow into his soul. Whether he knew
it or not, his own conduct had feathered the arrow. He was drinking as
he had brewed; and the heart-broken grief which darkened his later
years had sprung from seed of his own sowing. So it is always.
'Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.'
It is a miserable story of ignoble jealousy and cruel hate; and yet,
over all this foaming torrent, God's steadfast bow of peace shines.
These crimes and this 'affliction of Joseph' were the direct path to
the fulfilment of His purposes. As blind instruments, even in their
rebellion and sin, men work out His designs. The lesson of Joseph's
bondage will one day be the summing up of the world's history. 'Thou
makest the wrath of man to praise Thee: and with the remainder thereof
Thou girdest Thyself.'