Story Time: Joseph, Part 4- Out of the Pit

It's been awhile since I've visited Joseph.  When we last left him (back in February) he was in the pit his brothers had thrown him into.  If you want a refresher on any part of the story, you can check out part 1, part 2, or part 3. 

Part 4
Joseph sat at the bottom of the pit.  How could this have happened to him?  How could his brothers have been so cruel?  What was going to happen to him next?  So many questions, so few answers.
He listened hard to what was going on above him.  He could hear his brothers starting to settle down and eat.  His stomach growled. 
"Hey guys!  Can I have some food?"  no reply from his brothers.  "Please?  I'm hungry..."  still no reply.  It was as if he wasn't there.  Had they already forgotten about him?
Suddenly the sounds above him changed.  What was going on?  He wished he could see or at least hear well enough to know what was happening...
Suddenly a rope was lowered into the pit.  He grabbed on to it and soon he was being pulled up.  He breathed a sigh of relief.  His brothers had come to their sense and were going to let him have some food and life was going to go on, with them hating him as usual and him being his father's favorite.  His head cleared the top of the cistern and his heart stopped.  There were more people there than just his brothers.  There was a whole caravan of people there.  Midianites by the looks of them.  Why were his brother's pulling him up with them there?  Surely they weren't going to...
He was out of the cistern now and his brothers were tying him up.  The Midianites were pointing and talking rapidly amongst themselves.  They seemed pleased.  This wasn't happening, this couldn't be happening.  Surely his brothers weren't selling him to the Midianites.  Not his own brothers!
Before he could process what was happening to him, he was tied behind a camel and walking away from his brothers.  The sun was hot and shone down on him without mercy.  What was going to happen to him?  Where were the Midianites taking him? How could his brothers do this to him?  What about his dreams?  What about them bowing down to him?

That's all for tonight.  Theoretically, now that I'm home I can write more regularly about Joseph...of course this is just a theory and might not be incredibly reliable, but we'll pick up with Joseph again next time.

Story Time: Joseph, Part 3-On the Way to Bad

When we last left Joseph he was on his way to Shechem to check up on his brothers. His brothers were very jealous of him because Jacob loved him more than them. To make things worse, Joseph had had some crazy dreams in which he dominated over his brothers.


Part 3
Joseph walked and walked and walked. Eventually he came to Shechem and began to look for his brothers. He looked in all the usual places, but he couldn’t find them. Such a large herd of sheep (it must have been large because all 10 of his brothers were watching it) is hard to misplace so Joseph must have been rather confused and puzzled. A man saw Joseph looking and asked him what he was looking for. Joseph told him that he was looking for his 10 brothers and their sheep. The man had seen Joseph’s brothers and had even overheard them talking to each other. They had finished grazing at Shechem and moved on to Dothan. Joseph sighed and changed his course. He had to find his brothers. His father had told him to.
He walked on, lost in his own world.
As he walked his brothers noticed him coming and their jealousy rose. As brothers are prone to do, they began to plot about how to get even with him. After all, they were far enough away from their father that he would not know what they were doing. And as things are prone to do, they got out of hand. What may have first started as an innocent prank quickly escalated to a plot to kill Joseph. I am glad that these were not my brothers…I would have been dead many times over by now. I imagine their conversation started innocently enough. “Let’s throw dirt at him” “How about we steal his coat and throw it in the mud” and then somehow, someway, it ended at “Let’s kill that dreamer!”
Thankfully for Joseph, his older brother Reuben did not get caught up in the fervor and provided a voice of reason. “Let’s not kill him.” (good plan Reuben) “Let’s just throw him in this old dry deep hole. That’ll teach him a lesson and we won’t have to kill him. Sound like a plan?” The other nine agreed and Reuben breathed a sigh of relief. That had been too close for comfort.
Joseph got closer.
As soon as he reached his brothers they attacked him. All their anger and resentment and jealousy towards him spilled out. I have never been attacked by ten guys at once, but I can’t imagine it was pleasant. I also don’t imagine that Joseph willingly let himself been attacked. It must have been quite a brawl and very unfair. 10 brothers against 1, and he was younger than all of them to boot, means that the 10 likely won fairly easily.
After they had subdued Joseph they ripped his beautiful coat off of him. This coat (talked about in part 2) represented everything they hated so much about him. After they ripped his coat off, they picked him up and chucked him into the deep dry hole. Joseph hit the bottom with a thump. How could his brothers do this to him? They were his family after all! And what about his dreams? Weren’t they supposed to bow down to him? Surely they would pull him out soon…They certainly wouldn’t leave him there, would they?

So, Joseph is in the pit.  Things are bad.  That's where I'm going to leave him for now.  I really ought to be writing my paper, but I didn't want to leave Joseph alone too long.  It was a long journey to Shechem after all. :)

Story Time: Jospeh, Part 2 - Crazy Dreams

Time for part two of my retelling of the Joseph story. When we left Joseph last time we had learned about his siblings (all 11 of them) and the conflicts that existed between Jacob’s wives. We also learned that Joseph and his brother Benjamin were Jacob’s favorite sons.


Part 2
Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other sons. We know that Jacob played favorites with his wives, so it’s no surprise that he also played favorites with his sons. He was very obvious about his favoritism and really didn’t try to hide it. One day he gave Joseph a beautiful coat. The Bible says that it was richly ornamented. Traditionally we called it a coat of many colors. The exact specifications of this coat are unimportant. What is important is that it was a very clear indication that Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other sons. To make matters worse, Joseph was a bit of a tattletale. There is nothing like tattling to make your siblings hate you. Trust me on this one…I’ve only got half as many siblings as Joseph, but I know a thing or two about tattling and sibling rivalry. So, after Joseph tattled on his brothers shepherding skills, they were all hanging out around the “base camp”. Joseph started having dreams. Today there are a variety of views on the importance of dreams. Some people think we can actually learn stuff from the dreams others believe they are just the by-products of our imaginations. However, in Joseph’s time, dreams were mucho-important.
Joseph has this dream and decides to tell his brothers about it. Imagine this: They are all sitting out in the sheepfold, maybe around a small fire for warmth (it gets cold in the desert at night). The conversation lulls a bit as they all drift off to that land that is half way between sleeping and being awake. The time that is perfect for deep, intellectual conversation. The flames of the fire play across their faces. Joseph speaks. “Hey guys. I had this dream the other night. Wanna hear about it?” His brothers grunt noncommittally as boys are apt to do. Joseph takes the noncommittal grunts as an affirmative and begins to tell about his dream. “So, we were all out harvesting the grain one day. All 12 of us were there. We were binding the grain into sheaves (a sheath of grain is basically just a bundle of grain tied around the middle with a piece of fiber. In groups of three or more they can be made to stand upright like little tiny haystacks. Sheaves are then stacked into bigger piles to store for the off season). All of a sudden my sheath left my hands, moved away from me and stood upright. All by itself. Then, the sheaves that each of you were working on also left you and came over by mine. Instead of standing up though, they bowed down to my sheath. It was weird.”
His brothers are more awake now. Their indignation rang out. “What!??!” “You think we are going to bow down to you?” “If we bowed to anybody it would be Reuben. He’s the oldest” “You’re such a dreamer.” “Go to sleep you little twit and don’t get any grandiose ideas about yourself.” Slowly, after making snide comments to each other, silence settles back over the group and one by one they drift off to sleep.
The next night the same thing happened. They were sitting around the fire, drifting off to sleep when Joseph decided to tell them about his other dream. This time, instead of being out in the field binding grain they were up in the heavens. Joseph himself was some sort of celestial body, his brothers were stars and his parents were the sun and moon. Once again everything bowed down to Joseph. Once again his brothers ridiculed him and called him names.
The next morning he decided to tell Jacob about the dream. His father loved him very much. Surely he would not ridicule him for his dream. Wrong. Jacob flipped out. His blood pressure rose. “What are you talking about Joseph? This dream of yours? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you? You are talking crazy. Stop this foolishness.”
His brothers who had overheard this exchange shot self-satisfied looks to each other. Their father agreed. This was foolish talk. His father however tucked this away into the recesses of his mind. He’d seen some pretty crazy stuff. Heck, he’d even wrestled with YHWH himself back in the day. Anything was possible.
Some time passed and Jacob sent his sons, except for Benjamin and Joseph, out to a place called Shechem to find better pasture for the sheep. This added to the jealousy of Joseph’s brothers. They had to go work and Joseph got to stay home. Such a pet.
Some time later Jacob decided to send Joseph to Shechem to check up on his brothers and the flocks. He gave him some provisions for the journey and supplies to bring to his brothers and Joseph went on his way.

That’s all for now.  :) More later.

Story Time: Joseph, part 1

Over the last few days I’ve been reading the stories of Joseph. Those of you at Central who have been doing Bible in a Year have been reading the same stuff. Joseph is another one of my favorite stories to tell and I had so much fun doing the telling of Exodus 17:8-15 that I decided to do Joseph as well. Joseph’s story starts in Genesis 29 and goes through chapter 50, with lots of sides stories thrown in for good measure, so, in an effort not to overwhelm you or myself, I’ll tell this story in parts.

Part 1
Joseph’s story starts with his father Jacob (also known as Israel). His story actually starts before then with the story of Jacob’s father, Isaac, whose story starts with the story of his father, Abraham, whose story starts…you get the picture.
Now, for reasons we aren’t going to discuss here (it has to do with deception and trickery and a death threat), Jacob was living away from his immediate family. He was living with a relative named Laban. (Laban was Jacob’s mother’s brother…so his uncle). Jacob had been living with Laban and working for him for some time when he fell in love with his cousin, Rachel who was very beautiful. Laban offered to pay Jacob for the work he had been doing so Jacob and Laban made a deal in which Jacob would work for Laban in exchange for Rachel. This sounds rather crazy today to our Western minds – working in exchange for a wife, and that wife being your cousin – but that is the way things were done there and there was nothing wrong with it. Laban agreed to the deal and seven years later there was a wedding. Laban however was not the most honest person. Either that or his desire for honor overcame his honesty. For whatever reason he did not hold up his end of the deal. When Jacob woke up in the morning after his first night as a married man, his wife took off her veil (he hadn’t seen her yet due to Jewish custom) and instead of beautiful Rachel being there, it was her older sister Leah, who was not as beautiful in Jacob’s eyes. (In Laban’s family it went against custom to give the younger daughter in marriage before the older one was married) Jacob was pretty upset with having been tricked, although it kind of served him right since he had tricked his twin brother out of both his birthright and his father’s blessing, but that’s another story. So Laban and Jacob struck another deal – another seven years of work and then Jacob would get Rachel, the beautiful sister he loved. This time there was no trick and he married Rachel. So after 14 years of work Jacob has married his cousins, the sisters Leah and Rachel. Being married to more than one person was not frowned upon then as much as it is now.
Leah had a servant named Zilpah and Rachel’s servant was named Bihlah. They’ll become more important in a little bit.
Now even though adults tell us they don’t play favorites, they do. Even Jacob did. It was very obvious to everyone that he loved Rachel more than he loved Leah. Now YHWH knew that Jacob didn’t love Leah, so to make up for it, he decided to bless Leah with children, while not allowing Rachel to have children. One after another Leah had four sons: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah.
This frustrated Rachel who had not had any children yet. I can imagine that there was a little bit of sibling rivalry going on between Rachel and Leah. So, since she wasn’t able to have children she gave her servant Bilhah to Jacob so that he could make babies with her. This is another ancient Jewish tradition. Since Bilhah belonged to Rachel, any babies that she had would belong to Rachel. So Bilhah had a son and Rachel named him Dan. Then Bilhah had another son, whom Rachel named Naphtali.
So at this point Leah has four sons (Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah) and Rachel has two sons through Bilhah (Dan and Naphtali).
Leah wants to get in on the action so she gives her servant, Zilpah to Jacob. Just like with Bilhah, any children that Zilpah has will belong to Leah. Zilpah’s first son was named Gad and her second was named Asher.
Now things are really rolling. There’s a battle going on between Rachel and Leah to see who can bear Jacob the most children. At one point they even make a deal with each other along the lines of “if you do this for me you can sleep with Jacob”. I wonder how Jacob felt to be in the middle of all this, but I’m not a man, so I have no idea.
Leah had two more sons and a daughter – Isachar, Zebulun, and Dinah.
Then Rachel got a turn again and gave birth to Joseph, the main character in our story.
A bunch of stuff happened, including Jacob leaving Laban and being reunited with his brother Esau, Rachel stealing Laban’s gods, Dinah being violated and whole bunch of people being circumcised and then killed and some pretty cool meetings with YHWH.  If this was a story about Jacob, I'd tell these parts, but it's about Joseph, so these parts aren't as important for this story.
After all this Rachel finally had another son, Benjamin. Unfortunately, Rachel died while giving birth to Benjamin.
So in total Jacob had 12 sons (in order): Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Isachar, Zeubulun, Joseph, and Benjamin. He also had one daughter, Dinah.
Since Rachel herself had born Joseph and Benjamin, they were Jacob’s favorites, which made them the least favorite of all the others. Which, as you can imagine, caused some problems.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more later!