Dothan

Joseph sold

Amitai (Tai) Elon

Anchor: Genesis 37:12-36. World English Bible, public domain. Supporting passages are identified separately below.

Where we are

Dothan is a mound in a valley of grain. About twenty kilometres north of Shechem, and ten south of Jenin, the hill road drops into a broad fertile plain, and on its eastern side a long low tel rises out of the fields, Tell Dothan, with a spring at its foot. Route 60 passes close by. There is no park and no sign, and in most seasons the mound is grazed or ploughed around. It looks like what it is, a place where shepherds bring flocks after the harvest.^dothan

That is why Jacob's sons are here. The text says they went to Shechem with the flock, and then moved on to Dothan. After the wheat is cut, the stubble is the best grazing in the hills, and Dothan's plain is the biggest stubble field between Shechem and Jezreel. The brothers are following the pasture north. Joseph comes after them from Hebron, a walk of three or four days, and finds them here, where there are pits.

I want you to see the pits. The hills around are limestone, and every farm in this country had cisterns cut into the rock to hold winter rain. By late summer many are dry. A dry cistern is a bottle-shaped hole with a narrow mouth, and a boy dropped into one cannot climb out. The text says the pit was empty, there was no water in it. Anyone who has looked down one knows what that means.

What happened, in order

Chapter 37 opens with the reasons. Joseph is seventeen, the son of Rachel, loved by his father more than the others, given the long ornamented coat, bringing bad reports of his brothers, and telling two dreams in which sheaves and stars bow down to him. His brothers hate him and cannot speak peaceably to him. That is Genesis 37:1-11, supporting.

Now the anchor. The brothers are pasturing at Shechem. Israel sends Joseph from the valley of Hebron to see how they are and bring word. He goes, gets lost in the fields near Shechem, and a man tells him they have moved to Dothan. He finds them there.

They see him from far off and plan to kill him, throw him in a pit, and blame a wild animal. "We will see what becomes of his dreams." Reuben, the eldest, argues them down to the pit alone, meaning to come back for him. When Joseph arrives they strip the coat off him and put him in the dry pit. Then they sit down to eat.

A caravan of Ishmaelites comes up the road from Gilead carrying spices, balm and myrrh for Egypt. Judah proposes selling Joseph rather than killing him; there is no profit in blood, and he is their brother. They agree. Midianite merchants pass, Joseph is drawn up and sold for twenty pieces of silver, and he is taken to Egypt.

Reuben, who was not there, comes back to the pit, finds it empty, and tears his clothes. The brothers kill a goat, dip the coat in its blood, and send it to their father with the words: examine it, is this your son's coat? Jacob recognises it and draws the conclusion they planned for him. He tears his clothes, puts on sackcloth, and refuses every comfort. He will go down to Sheol mourning.

The last verse follows the silver to its end: the Midianites sell Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, captain of Pharaoh's guard. The next thing the reader hears of Joseph is chapter 39. Chapter 38, in between, is Judah and Tamar.

What they were after, and the turn

The brothers wanted the dreams to stop. That is their own sentence, and it is the truest one in the chapter. It is not the coat, in the end; it is the future the coat announced. They want the world in which they bow to their little brother never to arrive, and killing him seems the surest way. There is nothing here I do not recognise in a family.

Reuben wanted to get back into his father's favour. He is the firstborn who lay with Bilhah in chapter 35 and lost his place. Rescuing Rachel's son would have restored him. His plan fails because he is not there when it matters, and his cry, the child is gone, and I, where can I go, is about himself.

Judah wanted profit, and says so. But watch his sentence closely: he is our brother, our flesh. It is the first time any of them says the word brother about Joseph without hatred. It is a mixed motive, greed and kinship in one breath, and it saves Joseph's life. God will use Judah's mixed motive more than Reuben's better plan. That is worth sitting with.

The turn in this chapter is not a turn toward God. Nobody prays. God is not mentioned once in the anchor. The turn is in what the writer does with a goat and a garment. Jacob deceived his blind father with a goat's skin and his brother's clothes. Now his sons deceive him with a goat's blood and his son's coat, and their word to him, examine it, is the same word Tamar will throw back at Judah in the next chapter when she sends him his own seal and staff, and the same word the narrator uses when Isaac felt Jacob's hands and did not recognise him. The deceiver is deceived by his own tools. The writer says none of this aloud. He just uses the same words and lets you hear.

The Eastern lens

A Western reader is shocked that the brothers sit down to eat with Joseph in the pit. An Eastern reader is shocked too, but differently: eating bread together is fellowship, a bond, and they are making that bond over their brother's cries. Judah's "our flesh" is the language of clan obligation, the one rule that should have held. Twenty pieces of silver is a slave's price for a boy in the old law codes, roughly; they sold their flesh at market rate. And the coat. In a household the garment marks rank; stripping it is stripping the rank before the body is touched. Jacob is not shown a body. He is shown a rank, bloodied, and he reads it as they meant him to.^honour

Look for him

Stephen, in Acts 7:9-10, says the patriarchs, moved with jealousy, sold Joseph into Egypt, and God was with him and rescued him from all his afflictions. That is the only place the New Testament retells this scene. Christian preachers from the early centuries have gone further and read Joseph as a figure of Jesus: the beloved son sent by his father to his brothers, rejected, sold for silver, and raised to save them. The echo of twenty pieces here and thirty in Matthew 26 is a preacher's echo; no apostle draws it. I offer the pattern honestly as the church's reading, older than most of our traditions, and not as a claim the text makes. What Genesis itself will say, at the end of the story in chapter 50, is Joseph's own line: you meant evil against me, God meant it for good.

The later story of this ground

Dothan returns once, and it is one of the strangest scenes in the Bible. In 2 Kings 6 the king of Aram sends horses and chariots by night to surround Dothan and capture Elisha. His servant wakes to see the army and is terrified. Elisha prays that his eyes be opened, and the servant sees the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire around the prophet. Elisha then leads the blinded army to Samaria, tells the king to feed them rather than kill them, and the king sends them home. The same valley where a boy was sold by the men who should have protected him is the valley where an unseen army protects a man of God. I do not think the writer of Kings missed that. In the book of Judith, outside the Hebrew canon, Dothan is named again as the place near which Holofernes camped.

Where the writer stood

We do not know the hand. The Joseph story reads as a single, tightly built narrative, different in texture from the patriarchal episodes before it, and many scholars treat it as a composed novella rather than a stitched tradition. The writer stood somewhere that knew Egypt well and knew the caravan road from Gilead to the coast. The two names for the traders, Ishmaelites and Midianites, are argued below and are the main clue that more than one telling lies behind the text.^hayes

What is contested

Who sold Joseph. Verse 27 has Judah proposing to sell him to the Ishmaelites; verse 28 has Midianites drawing him from the pit and selling him to the Ishmaelites; verse 36 has the Midianites selling him in Egypt; and in 39:1 it is the Ishmaelites again. Source critics see two versions, one with Reuben and Midianites, one with Judah and Ishmaelites, woven together. Traditional readers note that Judges 8:24 uses the two names for the same people. A third reading has the Midianites steal Joseph from the pit before the brothers can sell him, which would mean the brothers never actually took the silver. I give you the seam; I do not sew it.

The coat. The Hebrew ketonet passim is a long-sleeved or ornamented tunic; "many colours" comes from the Greek and Latin translations. The only other person to wear one is Tamar, David's daughter, in 2 Samuel 13, where it marks a royal virgin. Rank, not rainbow.

The site. Tell Dothan was excavated by Joseph Free between 1953 and 1964 and the identification with biblical Dothan is accepted. The excavation was never fully published, which is a loss; what is known is a long occupation from the Early Bronze Age through the Iron Age, which fits both Joseph and Elisha.^dothan

Standing here today

Tell Dothan is beside Route 60 between Nablus and Jenin, in a part of the hills where the roads are not always open and the rules change. Check before you go. If you can stop, walk into the fields and look for cistern mouths in the rock; they are everywhere in these hills. Do not go down one.

If you cannot stop, the plain is visible from the road, and that is enough. See a valley of grain after harvest, a low mound, and a road running north-east towards the Jordan and Gilead, the road the caravan came down. The traders were not looking for a boy. They were carrying spices to Egypt and came upon a bargain.

If your own family has sold you, or you have sat down to eat while a brother cried from the pit, this is your stop. The story does not end here. But it stays here a long time, and Jacob mourns for twenty-two years before he learns the truth. The book lets him.

A prayer from this stop

God who was not named at Dothan, you were there. Keep us from hating the dreams you give to others. Where we have sold our own flesh, bring us to the day of saying so. Where we sit by a dry pit, open our eyes to the mountain full of fire. And what we meant for evil, mean for good, as you did for him.

Illustration

Licensed public photo, or a studio plate labelled as an illustration: the Dothan plain after harvest with the tel low on its eastern side; a cistern mouth in limestone in the foreground. No reconstruction of the brothers or the caravan.

Source notes