Genesis37chapter 37

Genesis 37:1

Jacob settles in the country God promised him and the verse still calls his father a stranger in it. Hebrews says these all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off. The only ground any of the three patriarchs ever owns in the land is the cave at Machpelah, bought for four hundred shekels in chapter 23, and a parcel at Shechem bought for a hundred pieces in chapter 33, and the brothers are feeding flocks on that second plot eleven verses from here.

Genesis 37:2

This is the eleventh and last of the headings that divide Genesis, running from the generations of the heavens and the earth at 2:4 down to one household. Each heading narrows the frame, and this one narrows it so far that the generations of Jacob open with a single son rather than a list. Missler built his reading of the book on these divisions. What follows the heading is a seventeen year old working alongside the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah and carrying their evil report back to his father.

Genesis 37:3-4

This is the third generation of the family to prefer one child openly. Isaac loved Esau and Rebekah loved Jacob at 25:28, Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah at 29:30, and now he loves Rachel's son above the rest and puts a marked coat on him so that everyone can see it. Clarke reads the garment as a long robe striped with colours, the dress of a man who is not sent out to the fields. Every time the preference is shown, the house splits.

Genesis 37:5-8

Joseph dreams and tells it, and the hatred rises a step with each telling. The brothers need no interpreter for sheaves in a field, and they answer with the question the book has been raising since Abel, shalt thou indeed reign over us. Joseph is the eleventh son, and the sheaves of ten elder brothers bow to his, which is the line that ran from Abel over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, and Jacob over Esau.

Genesis 37:9-11

The same message comes a second time on a larger scale, sun and moon and eleven stars, and Genesis states its own rule about that at 41:32, that the dream was doubled because the thing is established by God. Dreams carry the book from here on, after Abimelech at 20:3, the ladder at 28:12 and Laban at 31:24, and ahead of a butler, a baker and a Pharaoh. Jacob rebukes the telling and then keeps the saying, which is what a man does with words he cannot yet place. Rachel had already died in chapter 35, and Clarke names that difficulty about the moon rather than smoothing it over.

Genesis 37:12-14

Shechem is the field Jacob bought for a hundred pieces of money at 33:19, and it is also the town where Simeon and Levi killed every male in chapter 34. Into that place the father sends the favourite son alone, to see whether it be well with his brethren, and Joseph answers Here am I, the word Abraham used on the mountain at 22:1. Joseph's bones are carried back out of Egypt and buried in that same purchased parcel at the end of Joshua.

Genesis 37:15-17

The account slows down to record a stranger who meets Joseph wandering in a field and points him on to Dothan. Nothing hangs on the man's name and the text does not give one, yet without him Joseph turns for home and the rest of the book does not happen. Later readers have made a great deal of the figure, and Genesis says only that a certain man found him.

Genesis 37:18-19

The plot is settled at a distance, before he arrives and before a word passes between them, which Wesley calls malice thought out rather than temper. Their name for him, this dreamer, is in Hebrew master of dreams, and JFB hears it as a sneer at a man they took for a pretender. Genesis opened with one brother killing another in a field at 4:8, and it comes nearest to repeating that here.

Genesis 37:20

Older Christian writers read the whole of Joseph's life as a figure of Christ, and the New Testament never once says so, which is why it stands here as their reading rather than as a claim the text makes. Ambrose worked the parallels out at length in On Joseph the Patriarch, Cyril of Alexandria drew the same lines, and Wesley notes at verse 26 that Joseph was sold at the suggestion of a Judah for twenty pieces of silver. What the verse itself says is that the brothers meant to end the dreams by killing the dreamer. Selling him into Egypt is the thing that brought the dreams to pass.

Genesis 37:21-22

Reuben is the firstborn, and he had already forfeited his standing by lying with his father's concubine at 35:22, which Jacob throws back at him on his deathbed at 49:4. Here he moves to save the boy and get him home to his father, and he does it by steering his brothers rather than by standing against them. The plan fails, and the birthright goes to Joseph's two sons while the rule goes to Judah.

Genesis 37:23-24

The first thing they take is the coat, because the coat is the thing they hate. Garments carry the plot through this whole stretch of the book: Jacob put on Esau's clothes to steal a blessing at 27:15, this coat is about to be dipped in blood, Judah's pledge changes hands in chapter 38, and Joseph loses a second garment to Potiphar's wife at 39:12. Then they put him in a pit that the writer stops to describe as empty, with no water in it.

Genesis 37:25-27

They eat a meal while their brother is in the pit, and Clarke says the one detail describes the men better than any adjective could. The caravan that comes into view is carrying spicery and balm and myrrh down to Egypt, which is the road Abram took in the famine of 12:10 and the road the whole family takes at 46:3. Judah proposes a sale, and the reason he gives, he is our brother and our flesh, is offered as a reason not to kill him rather than a reason to let him go.

Genesis 37:28

Twenty shekels is the sum the law later fixes as the valuation of a male between five and twenty years old, at Leviticus 27:5. The buyers are Ishmaelites, sons of the elder brother who was passed over for Isaac at 17:19, and they carry a younger son down into Egypt. Joseph goes down alone and goes down first, and his father and brothers follow him nine chapters later, when God tells Jacob at 46:4 that He will go down with him and bring him up again.

Genesis 37:29-30

Reuben comes back to an empty pit and rends his clothes, and his cry is four Hebrew words that Clarke keeps in the original because English will not carry them, the child is not, and I, whither shall I go. He is the eldest, and it is the eldest who has to answer to the father for the boy. Jacob rends his own clothes five verses later, over evidence that his sons manufactured.

Genesis 37:31-33

Jacob deceived his blind father with the skins of goat kids and his brother's garment at 27:16, and now his sons deceive him with a goat's blood and his son's garment. They tell him no lie outright; they hand him the coat, ask him to say whether it is his son's or not, and let him reach the conclusion himself. Gill notes the old rabbinic observation that goat's blood was chosen because it looks most like a man's. In the next chapter a kid promised to Tamar at 38:17 never arrives, and the pledge left in its place undoes Judah, the man who proposed this sale.

Genesis 37:34-36

Jacob mourns many days and refuses comfort from sons who know exactly where the boy is, and Clarke says plainly what that cruelty amounts to. His own words, I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning, are answered by the book in a way he cannot have meant, since he does go down to his son, into Egypt and alive, in chapter 46. The chapter closes with the sale to Potiphar, so the reader is told Joseph is living in the same breath in which the father is told he is dead.