Biblion Bible Commentary
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Sold for twenty pieces of silver
Genesis 37:25-36
25 They sat down to eat bread, and they lifted up their eyes and looked, and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels bearing spices and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt. · WEB
A caravan turns murder into a profit, and the sons deceive their father with a goat and a garment exactly as he once deceived his own.
They sat down to eat bread with their brother in a cistern a few yards away. The sentence is placed where it is on purpose, and a much later prophet will describe men like them as those who are at ease and not grieved for the affliction of Joseph Amos 6:6.
Then a caravan appears on the trade road, carrying spices and balm and myrrh down to Egypt, and Judah sees an opportunity. His speech is a masterpiece of self-interest dressed as restraint: What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, and let's sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not let our hand be on him; for he is our brother, our flesh.
Every clause is calculated. It opens with profit. It offers the comfort of clean hands — not let our hand be on him — and it ends with an appeal to kinship in a sentence proposing to sell the kinsman. Judah is not saving Joseph's life; he is monetizing it, and he is doing it in the language of decency. The brothers listen, which they had not done for Reuben.
Twenty pieces of silver is the price, and the law would later set exactly that figure as the valuation of a male between five and twenty Leviticus 27:5. They got the going rate.
Reuben comes back to the pit and finds it empty and tears his clothes, and his cry is characteristically about himself: The child is no more; and I, where will I go? He is thinking about how to face his father.
What they do next is the most precisely just thing in Genesis, and nobody in the scene can see it.
They took Joseph's tunic, and killed a male goat, and dipped the tunic in the blood.
A goat, and a garment, used to deceive a father about which of his sons is which. That is exactly what Jacob did to Isaac — goatskins on his hands and his brother's clothes on his back, standing in front of a man who could not see Genesis 27:15–16. He deceived his father with a goat and a garment; his sons deceive him with a goat and a garment. Genesis does not draw the line. It simply uses the same two props.
And they do not even lie outright. We have found this. Examine it, now, and see if it is your son's tunic or not. They let him do the identifying, exactly as Isaac was made to feel the hands and reach his own wrong conclusion. Jacob supplies the sentence they wanted: An evil animal has devoured him — the very words they had rehearsed in the field Genesis 37:20.
His grief is described at length and it refuses management. He refused to be comforted, and he says I will go down to Sheol to my son, mourning. Sheol is the grave, the common destination of the dead, and what he means is plain from his own belief about what happened — he thinks his son was torn apart by an animal and is in no tomb at all. He is saying that he will go on mourning until he dies. He is wrong about the death and right about the grief, and it lasts twenty-two years.
The chapter's last verse is four words of fact: Joseph is sold in Egypt to an officer of Pharaoh.
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