A note on names: This blog has never been consistent about how biblical names are spelled. For years I used the standard English spelling (which borrows from early German biblical translations) for the most familiar characters and place-names, and transliterations of the Hebrew for all other names. In my last two posts, however, I transliterated every proper name (following it with the English version in parentheses the first time).
TThis week I realized that sometimes the English version of a name is close enough, especially if the only difference is a vowel sound, or if one of its letters is pronounced differently in Mizrahi Hebrew than in Ashkenazi Hebrew. However, I am not going back to using the English version of all the familiar names in the Hebrew Bible. When the English version sounds markedly different from the Hebrew—as in “Jacob” instead of “Yaakov”—I am going to use the Hebrew version (with the English version after the first reference, so everyone can keep track). Here goes!
One person has absolute power over a country or company. Another person has more wealth and status than you do, but is not the ruler. Which one do you fear or admire? Which one do you envy?
This week’s Torah portion, Vayeishev (Genesis 37:1-40:23), begins:
And Yaakov settled in the land of his father’s sojournings, the land of Canaan. These are the histories of Yaakov: Yoseif, at age 17, was tending the flock with his brothers, and he was a naar with the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s women … (Genesis 37:1-2a)
(Yaakov (יַעֲקֺב) is “Jacob” in English; his alternate name is Yisraeil (יִשְׂרָאֵל), “Israel” in English. Yoseif (יוֹסֵף) is “Joseph”, Yaakov’s eleventh son.)
naar (נַעַר) = boy, young unmarried man, male servant, male slave.
We get a clue right at the beginning of the portion: the histories of Yaakov are all about Yoseif.
Job status
In the culture portrayed in the Torah, a man’s firstborn son gets an extra inheritance and extra responsibilities. Wives have more status than concubines, and the first wife has more status than the second. Reuben is the firstborn son of Yaakov and his first wife, Leah, so he should be at the top of the pecking order among the twelve brothers. Yoseif is merely Yaakov’s eleventh son, born to his second wife, Rachel.
Rachel, the woman Yaakov loved the most, died giving birth to Binyamin (“Benjamin”), her second son and Yaakov’s twelfth.1 Now Yaakov dotes on Rachel’s older son, Yoseif.
Yaakov also has two concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah. Once Yoseif is old enough to become a shepherd, like his brothers, he goes out with the four sons of the concubines, rather than with the six sons of Leah. According to Rashbam, “he spent most of his time in the company of those four children who were far closer to him in age.”2
Perhaps Yoseif is called a naar because he is an informal servant to his slightly older brothers. But the midrash3 says that he primps like a boy, even curling his hair and using kohl eyeliner. Other commentators explain that he is a tattletale because he is immature and does not know any better.
… And Yoseif brought dibatam to their father. (Genesis 37:2b)
dibatam (דִּבָּתָם) = slander about them, their slander, their bad reputation.
One way to rise in status is to denigrate your rivals, pushing them down the ladder. It only works if the boss at the top of the ladder believes you, but this is not a problem for Yoseif. Yaakov trusts everything he says, and later dispatches him to a distant pastureland to check on how his brothers are doing and report back.4
On the other hand, Yoseif may not be deliberately pushing his older brothers down the ladder. Maybe he denigrates them when he chats with his father simply because he does not understand them, and he has not yet learned the value of tact and discretion.
Conspicuous consumption
And Yisraeil loved Yoseif most out of all his sons, because he was a son of his old age, and he made him a ketonet passim. (Genesis 37:3)
ketonet (כְּתֺנֶת) = a long tunic/shirt/loose dress worn by both men and women. It was belted with a sash.5
passim (פַּסִּים) = ? Translations include “multicolored” (as in the King James “coat of many colors”), “ornamented”, and “long-sleeved”.
The only other appearance of ketonet passim in the Hebrew Bible is in 2 Samuel 13:18-19, which notes that every unmarried daughter of King David wore one. Yoseif is only an assistant shepherd, but Yaakov gives him a royal garment.
He can afford it. Although Yaakov is a nomad, he has more wealth than many Canaanite kings. He returned to Canaan with servants, huge herds of cattle and flocks of goats and sheep, and the Rolls-Royces of the Ancient Near East: camels, so many that he could give his estranged brother 30 female camels with their colts and still have enough left as mounts for his two wives, two concubines, and twelve children.6
Yaakov is as rich as a king, but he has a ketonet passim made only for his favorite child. And Yoseif’s ten older brothers envy him—not just for his clothing, but for their father’s love.
They do not envy their father, who owns everything and issues all the orders. That is the unquestioned role of the oldest male in the family. Sometimes in the Hebrew Bible a younger son usurps the place of the firstborn son, but no one challenges the authority of the patriarch. So like Cain, who reacts to God’s unfair favoritism by attacking his brother Hevel (“Abel”) rather than God, the ten older brothers react to their father’s unfair favoritism by attacking Yoseif rather than their father. (See my post Vayeishev: Favoritism.)
At first their attacks are only verbal.
And his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of his brothers. And they hated him, and they could not speak to him peacefully. (Genesis 37:4)
Prophetic dreams
Then their little brother tells them two exciting dreams he has had. In the first dream, his brothers are binding sheaves, and all of their sheaves bow down to his sheaf.
And his brothers said to him: “Will you actually be king over us? Or will you actually rule over us?” And they hated him even more, because of his dreams and because of his words. (Genesis 37:8)
They do not mind their father ruling over them, but Yoseif is supposed to be their equal, or slightly less.
All dreams in the Hebrew Bible are divine communications about the future, never psychological symbols from one’s own unconscious, so Yoseif’s older brothers probably do not blame him for having a grandiose dream. But since they believe that a dream foretells an event that is likely to come true, they envy and resent him even more.
In Yoseif’s next dream the sun, the moon, and eleven stars are bowing down to him.
And he recounted it to his father and his brothers, and his father rebuked him, and said to him: “What is this dream that you dreamed? Will we actually come, I and your mother and your brothers, to bow down to the ground to you?” (Genesis 37:10)
Yaakov assigns the obvious meaning to the symbolism of the dream, even though Yoseif’s mother, symbolized by the moon, is no longer alive.
Vayekanu, his brothers, of him. And his father kept the matter in mind. (Genesis 37:11)
vayekanu (וַיְקַנְאוּ) = and they were jealous, and they were envious, and they were zealous.
One 18th-century commentary, Or HaChayim, explained: “When the brothers had heard this second dream they backtracked from accusing Joseph of wanting to be a ruler over all of them; they agreed that Joseph could not have aspired to rule over his own father. The very fact that he had such a dream, however, indicated that he had received a message from heaven. They were jealous of Joseph having received that communication.”7
Yaakov knows that his older sons resent Yoseif, but it does not occur to him that they hate their little brother so much that they would consider murdering him. According to Sforno, Yaakov “remembered it because he thought that the dream reflected what would in fact occur. In fact, his father was looking forward to the fulfillment of Joseph’s dream.”8
But Yoseif’s older brothers do not want a callow tattletale who does not even know how to handle sheep to rule over them like a king. At first, the only way they can think of to prevent Yoseif’s dream from coming true is to kill him. So when he travels all the way to Datan to check up on them, they seize him and throw him into an empty cistern. While they are eating lunch, ignoring Yoseif’s cries from the pit, they see a caravan bound for Egypt. Then they change their minds, and decide to get rid of him by selling him to the traders as a slave.
Twenty years later, the ten brothers travel to Egypt to buy grain. They do not recognize that Pharaoh’s viceroy is Yoseif.9 He is not a king, but he has power, and they bow down to him.
The ten older sons of Yaakov are all shepherds, and good at their business. Their father spent his whole life as a shepherd and livestock dealer. Naturally when Yoseif becomes an apprentice shepherd, the ten brothers expect him to be the kind of man they are (even if their father does fawn over him too much).
But Yoseif is different from his brothers. They excel at practical, hands-on work. He is an abstract thinker, good at planning and analysis. Today someone with Yoseif’s style of thinking would get a graduate degree and a high-status office job, becoming a member of what we now call the “elites”.
The brothers would not want his job even if they could get it. They like working outdoors, walking through fields under the open sky. But they resent his status, since he is neither their father nor their king. They are all sons of the same man. So why should Yoseif look down on them, wear a fancy suit, and get a high-status job? They envy and resent him so much that they want to destroy him.
“Elites” of the United States, beware!
- Genesis 35:16-26.
- Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir, a.k.a. Rashbam, 12th century, translation in www.sefaria.org.
- Midrash is a type of commentary that adds backstories and/or mystical meanings to the original text.
- Genesis 37:13-14.
- Isaiah 22:21.
- Genesis 30:43, 31:17-18, 32:14-15. At that point, Yaakov has 11 sons and one daughter, Dinah.
- Rabbi Chayim ben Moshe ibn Attar (1696-1743), translation in www.sefaria.org.
- Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno, 16th century, translation in www.sefaria.org.
- Because of his ability to plan ahead and organize, Yoseif becomes Potifar’s steward in Genesis 39:1-5, the prison supervisor in Genesis 39:22-23, and Pharaoh’s vizier in Genesis 41:25-44.
Questioning Torah 