Biblion Bible Commentary
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The pit at Dothan
Genesis 37:12-24
12 His brothers went to feed their father’s flock in Shechem. · WEB
A father sends his favorite to check on the brothers who hate him, and they strip him of the coat before they throw him in.
The errand is ordinary and its details are not. The brothers are pasturing the flock at Shechem — the town where Simeon and Levi killed every male a chapter or two ago, and where the family is presumably not welcome — and Jacob sends Joseph after them alone.
His instruction is see whether it is well with your brothers, which asks the boy who once brought an evil report to go and report again. Whatever Jacob intended, he has sent the informer to inspect them.
Joseph's answer is two words: Here I am. It is the response Abraham gave on the way to Moriah and Jacob gave in the dream at the flocks, and it is the answer of a son who does what he is told.
The passage then slows down for an encounter that seems to serve no purpose. A certain man found him, and behold, he was wandering in the field. Joseph is lost. An unnamed stranger asks what he is looking for, and happens to have overheard the brothers say they were going on to Dothan .
The man is never identified and never appears again. Without him Joseph turns for home, and the entire history of Israel in Egypt does not happen. Genesis puts him in and says nothing about him, which is its usual way with the hinges of a story.
They saw him afar off — the coat would have been visible for some distance — and before he came near to them, they conspired against him to kill him. The decision is taken while he is still walking toward them, cheerfully, on his father's errand.
Their words are quoted, and they are the sneer of men who have been waiting: Behold, this dreamer comes... let's kill him, and cast him into one of the pits... We will see what will become of his dreams.
That last sentence is the irony the whole book is built on. They set out to disprove the dreams, and the pit and the sale and Egypt are precisely how the dreams come true. Twenty-two years later they will bow to him, and it will be because of what they do in the next ten minutes.
Reuben intervenes, and his motive is given: that he might deliver him out of their hand, to restore him to his father. It is the one decent act of his life recorded in Genesis, and it is compromised by being covert — he proposes the pit as a delay rather than confronting them, and then leaves. The firstborn who forfeited his place by sleeping with his father's concubine Genesis 35:22 tries to buy it back by a maneuver, and the maneuver fails because he is not there when it matters.
The attack is described in the order it happened, and the first thing they take is not his life. They stripped Joseph of his tunic, the tunic of many colors that was on him. The garment is named twice in one sentence. It was never about the cloth; it was about what it said, and they take that off him before anything else.
They took him, and threw him into the pit. The pit was empty. There was no water in it. A dry cistern, deep enough that a man cannot climb out. And then, in the next verse, they sit down to eat.
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