“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).