Genesis 37

The statement “These are the generations of Jacob”

(v. 2) informs us that we’re moving into a new section of the book of Genesis, which will be devoted to Jacob, whom we’ve already met while reading about “the generations of Isaac” (25:19). But the chief actor in the “Jacob” section of Genesis will be Joseph, who is mentioned twice as many times as is his father in the next fourteen chapters. Jacob won’t be ignored, but it’s Joseph who will occupy center stage.

The history of Joseph can be read on at least three different levels. If we read it simply as literature, we discover a fascinating story involving a doting father, a pampered son, some jealous brothers, a conniving wife, and an international food crisis. It’s no wonder that for centuries creative artists have turned to this story for inspiration. In 1742, Henry Fielding patterned the hero of Joseph Andrews after the biblical Joseph, and the next year, Handel produced his oratorio Joseph. Over a period of sixteen years, the German novelist Thomas Mann wrote four novels based on the life of Joseph. In our own day, we have the rock cantata Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and its song “Any Dream Will Do.”

But Genesis 37—50 is much more than a piece of dramatic literature, for when you penetrate deeper, you discover a story abounding with profound theological implications. The hand of God is evident in every scene, ruling and overruling the decisions people make, and in the end, God builds a hero, saves a family, and creates a nation that will bring blessing to the whole world. Behind this story is the heart of the covenantmaking God, who always keeps His promises.

For the Christian believer, there’s a third level to the story, for Joseph is one of the richest illustrations of Jesus Christ found in the Old Testament. Joseph is like Jesus in that he was beloved by his father and obedient to his will; hated and rejected by his own brethren and sold as a slave; falsely accused and unjustly punished; finally elevated from the place of suffering to a powerful throne, thus saving his people from death. The major difference, of course, is that Joseph was only reported to be dead, while Jesus Christ did give His life on the cross and was raised from the dead in order to save us.

Genesis 37 unfolds the destructive dynamics of a family that knew the true and living God and yet sinned against Him and each other by what they said and did. The presence of Joseph in the home didn’t create problems so much as reveal them. Consider the destructive forces at work in this family, forces that God in His grace overruled for their good. Where sin abounded, grace abounded more (Rom. 5:20).

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” (Ps. 133:1) But Jacob’s family didn’t enjoy the blessings of unity because from its inception the home was divided. Jacob’s first two wives were rivals, and the addition of two concubines didn’t diminish the tension. When you have in a home one father, four different mothers, and twelve sons, you have the ingredients for multiple problems. Unfortunately, Jacob came from a divided home and brought the infection with him. Why did the brothers hate Joseph so much?

Joseph had integrity (v. 2). The sons of Bilhah were Dan and Naphtali, and the sons of Zilpah were Gad and Asher, and Joseph apparently was their assistant or apprentice, learning how to care for the sheep. Nobody knew it at the time, but Joseph was destined for greater things, and yet he got his start as a servant (Matt. 25:21).

It wasn’t easy for Joseph to work alongside his halfbrothers because their way of life was different from his. Were the boys robbing their father? Were they getting too involved with the ways of the people of the land? We don’t know what evil things the men were doing, but whatever their sin was, Joseph felt that their father needed to know about it. Joseph also knew what the other brothers were doing and reported that to Jacob.

Did Joseph have the right to inform on his brothers? We’ve always held him in high esteem for his character, but in his youth, was he nothing but a teenage tattletale? He certainly had no authority over his brothers and wasn’t accountable for their behavior, and he was in the fields to work with them, not to spy on them.

Subsequent events proved that, young as he was, Joseph did have common sense and discernment. Thus whatever his brothers were doing must have been terribly wicked or Joseph wouldn’t have mentioned it to his father. Perhaps Jacob suspected that his sons were doing evil things and asked Joseph what he knew. The boy certainly wasn’t going to lie to his father, and when Jacob talked to his sons about their behavior, the men immediately knew who the informer was.

Joseph was the favorite son (vv. 3–4). Having experienced the sad consequences of favoritism in his boyhood home (25:28) and during his years with Laban (29:30), Jacob should have had more sense than to single out Joseph and pamper him. But Joseph was the son of his favorite wife, Rachel, and the human heart sometimes plays tricks with the mind and makes people do strange things. As Pascal wrote in his Pensees, “The heart has its reasons which reason cannot know.” However, it still wasn’t the wisest way to run the home.

We can’t be sure what the famous “coat of many colours” (37:3) really looked like, although “richly ornamented robe” (niv) is probably as good a translation as any. Apart from verses 23 and 32, the only other place the Hebrew word is found in the Old Testament is in 2 Samuel 13: describing the garment of a king’s daughter. Joseph’s “coat” reached to the ankles and had long sleeves. It was the rich garment of a ruler and not what the well-dressed shepherd needed out in the fields.

However, Jacob had something more important than fashion in mind when he gave Joseph this special coat. It was probably his way of letting the family know that Joseph had been chosen to be his heir. Reuben had forfeited his firstborn status because of his sin with Bilhah (35:22), and his next son, Simeon, had been involved with Levi in slaughtering the men of Shechem. Furthermore, Jacob’s first four sons had Leah as their mother, and Jacob hadn’t intended to marry Leah. The full intent of his heart was to marry Rachel, but Laban had tricked him. Jacob might have reasoned, “In God’s sight, Rachel was my first wife, and Joseph was her firstborn. Therefore, Joseph has the right to be treated as the firstborn.”

If this is the way the brothers viewed the scenario, then it’s no surprise that they hated Joseph. Jacob knew their true feelings and even brought it up when he was on his deathbed. “The archers have sorely grieved him [Joseph], and shot at him, and hated him” (49:23).

Hatred is a terrible sin because it generates other sins, “Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrong” (Prov. 10:12). “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness” (1 John 2:9). Hatred in the heart is the moral equivalent of murder (Matt. 5:21–26). “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him” (1 John 3:15).

The author of a fourteenth-century preacher’s manual wrote that envy was “the most precious daughter of the devil because it follows his footsteps by hindering good and promoting evil.” The author might have added that Envy has a sister named Malice, and the two usually work together (Titus 3:3; 1 Peter 2:1). Envy causes inward pain when we see others succeed, and malice produces inward satisfaction when we see others fail. Envy and malice usually generate slander and unwarranted criticism, and when these two sins hide behind the veil of religious zeal and self-righteousness, the poison they produce is even more deadly.

British wit Max Beerbohm said, “People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.” Should Joseph have told his dreams to the family, or was this just another evidence of his adolescent immaturity? The two dreams couldn’t help but irritate the family and make things worse for him. After all, how could Joseph ever become a ruler, and why would his brothers bow down to him? The whole thing was preposterous. When Joseph reported the second dream, even his father became upset and rebuked him; but privately, Jacob pondered the dreams. After all, Jacob had received messages from God in dreams (Gen. 28:12ff.; 31:1–13); so perhaps it was the Lord who was speaking to Joseph.

Perhaps Joseph might have been more diplomatic in the way he reported his dreams, but surely he was right in sharing them with the family. This wasn’t “adolescent enthusiasm”; it was the will of God. Had the brothers paid attention to these two dreams, they might have been better prepared for what happened to them twenty years later. If Jacob had grasped the significance of the dreams, he might have had the faith to believe that Joseph was still alive and that he would see him again. Of course, since we know the end of the story, it’s easy for us to criticize.

Does God speak to us in dreams today? Or do we get our guidance only from the Spirit of God using the Word of God as we pray and seek God’s will? In the Old Testament, you find a good number of divine communications through dreams, both to believers and unbelievers, but this doesn’t seem to be the norm for New Testament Christians today. God communicated through dreams when He directed Joseph, the husband of Mary (Matt. 1:20–25; 2:12–13, 19–22), but there’s no evidence that anybody else in the gospels or the book of Acts ever received divine guidance through dreams.

When people claim that God has sent them dreams for their instruction and guidance, or the instruction of others, we need to be careful, for dreams can be selfinduced or even influenced by Satan (Jer. 23:25–28). Missionaries have told us about people they’ve met whose first interest in Christ and the Bible came through dreams, but it was the Word of God that finally brought them to the Savior. Certainly God is sovereign and can use dreams to accomplish His will if no other means is available, but His normal way to communicate is through the Spirit teaching the Word (John 14:25–26; 16:12–15).

In the future, Joseph would be involved in interpreting other men’s dreams (Gen. 40—41), but there’s no indication that he understood his own two dreams at that time. As he waited in prison, no doubt the meaning of the dreams became clearer and encouraged him (Ps. 105:16–23). Understanding God’s plan helped give him direction in his dealings with his brothers.

The immediate result of Joseph’s sharing his dreams was that his brothers hated him even more and also envied him in their hearts. He was his father’s favorite, chosen to receive the blessings of the firstborn, wearing a special garment, and now the recipient of strange dreams. Why should he be so special? What would happen next?

Envy is one of the works of the flesh that comes out of the sinful heart of man (Mark 7:22; Gal. 5:21). Because of their envy, Joseph’s brothers sold him to the merchants. (See Matt. 27: and Mark 15: for a parallel to Christ’s sufferings.) Their growing hatred was the equivalent of murder (Matt. 5:21–26), and though they didn’t actually kill Joseph with their hands, some of them had done the deed many times in their hearts.

Questions (vv. 12–17). As we read this section, several questions come to mind. First, why were Jacob’s sons pasturing their flocks fifty miles from home when there was surely good grassland available closer to Hebron? Possible answer: They didn’t want anybody from the family spying on them. Second question: Why did they return to the dangerous area near Shechem when Jacob’s family had such a bad reputation among the citizens there (34:30)? Suggested answer: The brothers were involved with the people of the land in ways they didn’t want Jacob to know about.

But there’s a third question that’s even more puzzling: Knowing that his sons hated Joseph, why did Jacob send him out to visit them alone and wearing the special garment that had aggravated them so much? One of Jacob’s trusted servants could have performed the same task faster (Joseph got lost) and perhaps just as efficiently. The answer is that the providential hand of God was working to accomplish His divine purposes for Jacob and his family, and ultimately for the whole world. “He sent a man before them, even Joseph, who was sold for a servant” (Ps. 105:17). God had ordained that Joseph would go to Egypt, and this was the way He accomplished it.

Conspiracy (vv. 18–24). It took Joseph perhaps three days to get from Hebron to Shechem, but when he got there, he learned that his brothers had moved thirteen miles north to Dothan, which meant another day’s journey. When he came into their range of vision, they immediately recognized him afar off (he was wearing his special garment) and began to make their plans.

The combination of hatred and envy is lethal. It simmers in the heart and waits for the spark that will set off the explosion. The brothers didn’t have to be tempted in order to decide to harm Joseph. All they needed was the opportunity, and it wasn’t long in coming. Their derisive statement, “Here comes that dreamer!” (v. 19) could be translated, “Here comes the dream expert!” In this situation, Joseph’s dreams got him into trouble, but thirteen years later, other people’s dreams would get him out of trouble. “How unsearchable are his [God’s] judgments, and his ways past finding out!” (Rom. 11:33).

Which brother first suggested that they kill him? It wasn’t Reuben, because his counsel was that they throw Joseph into a dry cistern. Reuben planned to come back and rescue his brother, but even if he succeeded, how could he take Joseph back home? Jacob would surely learn the truth about his sons, and his reaction would have created more problems in the family. That Reuben protected Joseph from death is commendable, especially since Reuben was the firstborn son whom Joseph replaced (1 Chron. 5:1).

Indifference (vv. 23–28). It must have given them great pleasure to strip Joseph of his special robe and then drop him into the empty cistern. Cisterns were usually quite deep and had long narrow openings that would be too high for a prisoner to reach. In order to get out, you’d need somebody to lower a rope and pull you up (Jer. 38).

It’s difficult to understand how the men could sit down and calmly eat a meal while their brother was suffering and begging them to set him free (Gen. 42:21). However, hearts that have been hardened by hatred and poisoned by thoughts of murder aren’t likely to pay much attention to the cries of their victim. But then, think of what our Lord’s own nation did to Him! All of us are potentially capable of doing what Joseph’s brothers did, for “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9)

Just then, the men spied a Midianite merchant train moving across the plain, and this gave Judah an idea. They could sell their brother as a slave and at the same time get rid of him and make some money. Since anybody taken to Egypt and sold for a slave wasn’t likely to win his freedom and come back again, there was no danger that their plot would ever be discovered. They forgot that God was watching and was still in control. Jacob had inherited the covenant blessings and this made him a very special person in the eyes of God. The Lord had His divine purposes to fulfill, and “There is no wisdom or understanding or counsel against the Lord” (Prov. 21: nkjv).

Starting with Cain’s murder of Abel, “man’s inhumanity to man” is painfully recorded in both biblical and secular history. We’re made in the image of God, and we belong to the same human family, and yet we can’t seem to get along with one another. Everything from family feuds over lottery winnings to civil wars blamed on ancient injuries gives evidence that the world desperately needs a Savior who can make hearts new.

Reuben was absent when his brothers sold Joseph, perhaps taking care of some problem with the sheep. Maybe he absented himself deliberately so they wouldn’t suspect his hidden plan. When he visited the cistern, he was shocked to find that Joseph was gone. Thus he hurried back to the camp to find out what had happened. Certainly his attitude and actions made it clear to his brothers that his sympathies were with Joseph, for he tore his clothes like a man in mourning.

“He who covers his sins will not prosper” (Prov. 28: nkjv) is God’s unchanging law, but people still think they can defy it and escape the consequences. Among Jacob’s sons, one sin led to another as the men fabricated the evidence that would deceive their father into thinking that Joseph was dead, killed by a wild beast. Jacob would have no problem identifying the special robe, and he would have no way to test the blood. As tragic and treacherous as this deception was, Jacob was reaping what he himself had sown. Years before, he had killed a kid in order to deceive his father (Gen. 27:1–17), and now his own sons were following in his footsteps.

H. C. Leupold has translated 37:32, “And they sent the long-sleeved cloak and had it brought to their father.” Unwilling to confront their father personally, the brothers sent a servant to Jacob to show him the “evidence” and tell him the lie that they had concocted. This was a brutal way to treat their father, but “the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel” (Prov. 12: nkjv).

Prone to jump to conclusions (Gen. 32:6–8), Jacob accepted the evidence, believed the story, and concluded that Joseph indeed was dead. He went into deep mourning, and twenty years later was still grieving over the death of Joseph (42:36). His family tried to comfort him but to no avail. His favorite son was dead, and Jacob would carry his grief with him to the grave.

Years later, Jacob would lament, “All these things are against me” (v. 36), when actually all these things were working for him (Rom. 8:28). This doesn’t mean that God approved of or engineered the brothers’ hatred and deception, or that they weren’t responsible for what they did. It does mean that our God is so great that He can work out His purposes even when people are doing their worst. The greatest example of this is Calvary (Acts 3:12–26). Years later, Joseph would say, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50: nkjv).

God providentially brought Joseph safely to Egypt and saw to it that he was sold to one of Pharaoh’s chief officers. Potiphar is called “captain of the guard” (37:36), which suggests he was head of Pharaoh’s personal bodyguard and in charge of official executions. But the important thing wasn’t that Joseph was connected with such a powerful man in Egypt. The important thing was that “the Lord was with Joseph and he prospered” (39:2).

The workings of God’s providence are indeed awesome, and this ought to be a great source of encouragement to us in the difficult circumstances of life. “He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth. No one can hold back his hand or say to him: ‘What have you done?’” (Dan. 4:35).

Jacob and Joseph never read Romans 8:28, but they experienced the truth of it and saw what the hand of God can do. If the promises worked for them, they will work for us today,for God and His Word have not changed.