The Little Brother Cometh - Genesis 37:12-18

37:12-17 - Poor Joseph has really kind of been set up here by Jacob because of the blatant favoritism, all his brothers hate him now and it seems like Joseph had no idea how deeply this hatred ran and Jacob surely didn’t have any idea, which really makes me wonder just what exactly was he thinking? In fact, Jacob is so oblivious to his sons’ animosity towards Joseph that he sends Joseph out to check on his brothers when they are tending their flocks in Shechem. Interestingly, TB notes that it was pretty bold of the boys to take their flock to Shechem to feed them when they had just slaughtered and kidnapped almost all of the inhabitants of that city previously as revenge for the rape of their sister Dinah. This might have been why Jacob sent Joseph to check on them, to make sure there wasn’t any trouble between them and the people that they had left behind in the city.

Joseph heads to Shechem to check on his brothers’ well being but when he gets there he finds that they are not there, and a man sees him wandering around and asks what he’s looking for. Joseph answers that he’s looking for his brothers who are feeding their flocks, and the man answered that they were there previously but had moved on to Dothan. Apparently there had been multiple movies made depicting this conversation in which Joseph is not talking to just a man but in fact conversing with an angel. TB assures us that this is just a man, nothing supernatural.

37:18 - As Jospeh approached his brothers on a hill in Dothan, “they saw him afar off… (and) conspired against him to slay him.” I had this same reaction when we were talking about Nephi and his brothers, like why do we have to get to the point of killing someone because they bother us. Jospeh was pompous, he was a turd, but he didn’t pose any threat to his brothers, just like Nephi never posed a physical threat to any of his brothers, yet all these men insisted on trying to kill the troublesome brother. Like at some point couldn’t they all just take a step back and think, “can we just chill out about this for a minute and not actually commit murder?”