The Story of Joseph's Brothers Genesis 37:1-‐4, 12
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The Story of Joseph’s Brothers Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 The Rev. Dr. Carolyn Browning Helsel August 10, 2014 The Presbyterian Church in Sudbury This summer, I’ve been preaching on the stories in the Old Testament from the lectionary readings in Genesis. We started with Abraham and Isaac, then Rebekah, Esau, Jacob, and then one of Jacob’s wives, Leah. Last week we heard about how Jacob’s name became “Israel,” and this week, our story focuses on the sons of Jacob. Jacob had twelve sons and a daughter. His two youngest sons were Joseph and Benjamin. While the older sons were the children of Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah, the two youngest sons—Joseph and Benjamin—were the children of Rachel, who was the woman Jacob loved dearly. But Rachel died when giving birth to Benjamin, so now, the two youngest sons are all that Jacob has left of his beloved wife. This week and next we’ll be following the story of Joseph and his brothers, this week, focusing on his older brothers, and next week focusing on the character of Joseph. Our story today begins in chapter 37 of Genesis, beginning with the first four verses, and then continuing on from verses 12-28: Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 37Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. 2This is the story of the family of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was shepherding the flock with his brothers; he was a helper to the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives; and Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. 3Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves. 4But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him. [the lectionary skips us past Joseph’s dreams to what happens later with his brothers…] 12 Now his brothers went to pasture their father’s flock near Shechem. 13And Israel [previously known as Jacob] said to Joseph, ‘Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them.’ He answered, ‘Here I am.’ 14So he said to him, ‘Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock; and bring word back to me.’ So he sent him from the valley of Hebron. He came to Shechem, 15and a man found him wandering in the fields; the man asked him, ‘What are you seeking?’ 16‘I am seeking my brothers,’ he said; ‘tell me, please, where they are pasturing the flock.’ 17The man said, ‘They have gone away, for I heard them say, “Let us go to Dothan.” ’ So Joseph went after his brothers, and found them at Dothan. 18They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. 19They said to one another, ‘Here comes this dreamer. 20Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.’ 21But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying, ‘Let us not take his life.’ 22Reuben said to them, ‘Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him’—that he might rescue him out of their hand Carolyn Browning Helsel p. 2 and restore him to his father. 23So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore; 24and they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it. 25 Then they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels carrying gum, balm, and resin, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. 26Then Judah said to his brothers, ‘What profit is there if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? 27Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.’ And his brothers agreed. 28When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt.” This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. To end each of our scripture readings with the phrase “This is the Word of the Lord,” and to have the congregation respond by saying “Thanks be to God,” would make a lot more sense if all the texts we read were clearly, well, religious. Something that has something to do with God, or with Jesus, or a story about God interacting with God’s people—something like that. But the truth is, there is a lot in the Bible that does not sound like it has much to do with anything, let alone God. Take all those long genealogies—who is the son of whom, who is the son of so-and- so, etc. What do the recitations of family history books have to do with God? The Scripture text we read this morning makes no mention of God whatsoever. It’s a story about a blended family, where one child is the father’s favorite. The evil step-brothers are so jealous of their father’s favorite son that they plot to kill him—it’s like a strange blend of Snow-White’s-evil-Step-Mother and Cinderella’s-evil-step-sisters all on steroids and played by men. In Snow White, the evil Step-Mother-Queen tells the huntsman to kill Snow White in the woods because she was so jealous of Snow White’s beauty. Instead, the huntsman sends Snow White into the forest and brings back a pig’s heart to pretend to the evil Queen that he had killed her. In our text this morning, Joseph’s brothers kill a goat and smear the goat’s blood on Joseph’s fancy robe to make it look like Joseph had been killed by a wild animal, when in fact they had sold him into slavery. They are playing the part of the trickster, tricking their father Jacob, getting rid of their brother for good, (or so they thought), by covering up their murderous intentions by putting the blame on a wild animal. It’s like a really strange fairy tale, except without the happy ending…at least not in what we read here. So what does this have to do with God? I ask myself that question sometimes when I’m looking online at the news reports—continuing conflict between Hamas and Israel and the terrible brutality in Iraq of Syrians against Arab Christians, and now the US military’s involvement in sending airstrikes into Iraq and Syria. What does this have to do with God? Carolyn Browning Helsel p. 3 When there is not a happy ending in sight, and the winners appear to be those who have the biggest weapons or who can be the most violent, what does this have to do with God? Where is God in all of this? Part of my struggle with this text this week, was that I was intending to empathize with Joseph’s brothers. I tend to try and play devil’s advocate, a phrase which sounds blasphemous when spoken in a sermon, but I try to take others’ points of view, to try and understand where others are coming from. And I could definitely sense that these brothers had some reason to be ticked off by their brother. I wanted to try and understand the story from their point of view. And right at the beginning, you hear some of that—Joseph was 17, a teenager, and was a helper to his older brothers. He was not appointed leader over his older brothers, but a helper. And Joseph gives a negative report about them to their father—like your new assistant telling the general manager that you’re not meeting your daily quotas. Not the kind of thing younger assistants are supposed to be saying, not if they want to keep their jobs, and in Joseph’s case, he should have been a bit smarter if he wanted to stay in his brothers’ good graces. And now his older brothers were not just the children of the same mother as Joseph, but like I mentioned earlier, they were sons of different mothers, while Joseph was the son of his father’s beloved wife, Rachel. So the brothers that Joseph was tattling on were the sons not of Rachel, nor of her sister Leah, but of their maids, Bilhah and Zilpah. So you’re already talking about guys who are tired of preferential treatment always going to the sons born to Rachel and Leah. This preferential treatment may not always be obvious in the text—all these sons were equally considered Jacob’s sons, and in the inheritance and future of Israel, the twelve tribes of Israel were each descended from the sons of Israel, Jacob’s twelve sons. But even though they shared in some part of the inheritance, the fact that their father treated their younger brother with such favoritism made them furious.