This lesson is entitled Joseph and his brothers were continuing the story where we picked up from last time with Jacob and him returning to the Promised Land after being gone for 20 long years, marrying Rachel and Leah and then taking the two maids. I think I said before, they put the fun in dysfunctional. The strife that occurred between the two sisters trying to win Jacob's love as well as to bury him sons. This doesn't go so well if you read between the lines.
Leah is able to have many children and Rachel doesn't. And after 10 boys are born, finally Rachel has Joseph. And Jacob loves Joseph tremendously. And this causes a lot of problems, even more tension and strife in the family.
This preferential love, which really goes back, if you think about it, to Isaac as well as to Rebecca, each of them love one of the two sons. It causes problems. Well, one of the biggest signs I think is easily argued that's going to cause a lot of problems before you even get to the strife that's coming up here in chapter 37. If you remember back in chapter 33 before Jacob runs into Esau, he's not sure if Esau is going to attack or not, if he's still holding a grudge.
Well, he arranges his family in a very peculiar way, putting Leah in the two maids with their children's up front and then Rachel and Joseph are in the back. So if Esau attacks Rachel and Joseph have an opportunity to flee, essentially using the rest of his family as a human shield. So that's not very good at all. And I'm sure everybody noticed that.
Then now it just gets really, really worse. And Joseph, as they all grow up, is hated by his brothers. So let's look at this opening up to chapter 37. Let's read a few verses here and point out how the scenario gets worse and worse as the boys grow up.
Alright, so we're chapter 37, verse 2, the second part of verse 2, does Joseph being 17 years old was shepherding the flock with his brothers? He was a lad with the sons of Belan, Zilpa, his father's wives, and Joseph brought an ill report of them to their father. Stop right there. You can already see he's spying on his brothers and he's tattling on his brothers.
You don't know if he's kind of a goody-touchew here. Certainly as I'm going to argue in the rest of this lecture, Joseph is a very virtuous man and he's an upright, faithful, patient man. And maybe he was like this, he can argue, he was probably like this his whole life. Well, he sees his brothers doing something naughty, something they shouldn't be doing.
And he runs home and tells Daddy. So no sibling likes their brother to be a tattletale and to be a goody-touchew, perhaps, and that's what's going on. So this is not going to ingress you to him with his brothers at all. So he might be virtuous, but he's certainly naive here with tattling on them.
And he goes on to verse 3, now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his children because he was the son of his old age. And not only that, he is the firstborn son to be precise of his beloved wife, Rachel. Rachel is the one he loved, he fell in love with instantaneously at the well, as we discussed before. He's made a long time for the birth of Joseph, and so he is building on him completely.
And it says next, he made him a robe of many colors or your translation might say a long robe with sleeves, the scholars debate the Hebrew on that, but it's commonly accepted. It's a robe of many colors. Well, what is this coat or this robe of many colors from the father from Jacob? Well, it's clearly a sign of favoritism.
Many people have pointed out that it probably is a public sign that Jacob wants to give Joseph the blessing and the birthright. Now this is a huge problem because he's boy number 11. He has technically no right whatsoever to the blessing and the birthright according to custom. And yet here Jacob publicly gives this what would presumably be a very precious coat.
I mean, you just can't go down to Walmart and buy a really beautiful coat of many colors or Nordstrom's remains aware of your shopping. Of course, you're making this by hand. It takes a long time to make such a coat. So it is a sign of the blessing, the authority, the responsibility.
So Jacob is intending on giving Joseph this blessing and birthright. And that is not going to go over well at all. Right? So it goes on in verse four.
When his brother saw that their father loved him more than all his other brothers, they hated him and they could not speak peaceably to him. That word is Shalom. They couldn't speak Shalom to him. Now make matters worse.
When they're growing up here, you know, you got the caravan situation. You can just imagine all the different stories in situations in which Jacob is just showering his preferential love upon Joseph, making his brothers hate him. They can't even speak a peaceable word to him. Then it gets worse in verse five.
You got the story of the two famous dreams. Joseph had a dream and when he told it to his brothers, they only hated him the more. He said to them, here this dream which I have dreamed, Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field and behold my she froze and stood upright and behold your sheaves gathered around it and they bowed down to my chief. And his brothers said, are you indeed to reign over us?
Are you indeed to have dominion over us? So they hated him all the more for his dreams and for his words. So poor Joseph, I don't know if the boy here is completely clueless. If he doesn't realize that his brothers hate him because of all the preferential love and maybe he's rubbing it in, you know, maybe there is a little bit of, I don't know, brotherly spite going on.
I'm not sure. He just clueless. Hey guys, look at the stream that I have and he got the sheaves rising up. Now she that's actually really important to sheaves because as we're going to see when it's fulfilled and his brothers do go down to Egypt, what they're going to request is wheat, right?
They're going to see the sheaves of wheat. So the details are very specific because they're looking for wheat in the famine as we're going to see later on later on in the story. So they hate him all the more and then another dream verse nine. It says he dreamed another dream and he told it to his brothers like did you not learn the first time Joseph?
What is going on? And he said, behold, I have dreamed another dream and the sun, the moon, the 11 stars were bowing down to me and when he told it to his father and to his brother's his father rebuked him and said to him, what is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come and bow ourselves to the ground before you and his brothers were jealous of him. This is kind of a ready a red flag.
It's kind of echoes of cane, envy and jealousy. But it's interesting, but his father kept the saying in mind. So again, Joseph, why are you rubbing it in? Are you naive?
Are you truly confounded like you have these dreams? You're just kind of wondering what does this mean? So he tells it to his father at this time and you've got this. I mean, the sun, the moon and the stars, this is very cosmic.
So it's not just the brothers now. The sun, the moon and the stars represent two things. Number one, it represents the entire family of Israel coming to bow down to Joseph to do him honor, right? But not just the family because it's a cosmic imagery that represents all the nations that will come and do a besence to Joseph down the line.
All nations will come and bow before him. And this is going to certainly be fulfilled later on. And Jacob kept the saying in mind. That's really fascinating because Jacob has had a dream himself.
If you remember, Leg Zeppelin's Death Stairway to Heaven, right? If you remember that staircase that he drank where the angels are going up and down the staircase and it came to fruition, God was very faithful to him, God promised and delivered on the promises. So Jacob has experience with divine messages in the form of dreams. So he keeps the saying in mind.
It's not like he doesn't believe it right away. And I think that's pretty darn fascinating about how Jacob kind of rebukes him maybe because he is again making his brothers hate him all the more, but he is very curious how this is going to take place. Okay, so all of this happens. It really sets the stage very nicely for the strife, the tension between Joseph and his brothers.
And then it comes to a head in verse 12, really verse 13, Israel said to Joseph, are not your brothers pastoring the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them. And he said to them, here am I. He said, go now, see if it is Shalom with your brothers and with the flock and bring me word again.
Now, again, what is Jacob naive as well? Is he dense that headed the skull because we just read how his brothers could not speak peaceably to Joseph. And now that is saying, go and see if it is well, Shalom with him. Of course, it's not well with him.
And point something else out. That is sending him to spy out the situation again. He wants Joseph to go figure out the situation, assess the situation and come back and give a report. This is not putting Joseph in a good situation in any way, shape or form.
As Joseph is coming along the horizon, it says in verse 18, they saw him afar off and before he came near to them, they conspired against him to kill him. This is strong echoes of Cain and Abel, right? They're envious, they're jealous, and they want to kill their brother. So it goes on.
They said to one another, here comes this dreamer. You can hear the scoffing in their words, right? And now let's kill him and throw him into one of the pits. And then we shall say the wild beasts devour him and we shall see what comes of his dreams.
So to summarize some of the high points of the story, they do seize him. They strip him of his robe. They throw him into the pit and then they begin to eat in front of him, callously, like while he's down in the dungeon in the pit, right? The well, I should say.
And he's probably crying, screaming to them for mercy. They're just callously eating in front of him. That's an interesting little detail because, you know, in the old world, when you ate, you shared a meal with one another, a salt to share, salt to speak. You're in communion with them, coming with them, your family with them.
So they've excluded him from their family, right? They've excluded him, cast him down into this pit and they're callously eating in front of him while he's assuredly wailing down in the bottom of this well. And so what they decide to do, due to this is interesting in verse 26, Judas speaks up and says what profit is it if we slay our brother and conceal his blood? Let's sell him into slavery.
That way we won't be guilty of murdering our own brother and we could profit. Okay. So this is exactly what happens. They sell him into slavery and a man by the name of Potiphar, a high-ranking official officer in Pharaoh's army, right, buys him and takes him down to Egypt.
Now in the meantime, the brothers go back to Jacob and bring his robe of long sleeves or many colors, dip it in the blood of a slaughtered goat and they deceive their father, making him think that his beloved Joseph is dead. This is very sad poetic irony, right? Because here, yet again, Jacob, the deceiver, is being deceived, right? He's getting a taste of his own medicine.
I pointed out this is one of the negative consequences of Jacob's actions, right, with him deceiving his father and his whole shenanigans with the birthright and the blessing and stuff. He really does become deceived in horrible ways later on, not just with his marriage with Leah, but now the slot is echoing what happened before. He's the use of clothing, the seed with the use of clothing and the slaughter of a goat, now bringing him to great sorrow, right? It's very sad, seeing with tremendous poetic irony here.
All right, and this brings us to Joseph's life in Egypt. He is in slavery for a grand total of 13 years and he's going to hop around if you're familiar with the story, he's going to hop around, but you're going to see something very important with him with his story. Over and over, it's repeated that the Lord was with Joseph.