Genesis 37:2

The chapter before this one lists the descendants of Esau (Genesis 36), and with that list the account of Jacob’s twin brother is finished. Now the story turns to Jacob’s own household. He has come back from his long years in Paddan-Aram, he has wrestled with God at Peniel (Genesis 32:24–32), and he has been reconciled to Esau (Genesis 33). After all that wandering he “dwelt in the land”. The verb yâshab means to sit down, to remain, to settle, and here it describes a man who has taken up residence with his large family in one place.

The verse immediately sets a second word beside that one. This is the land “wherein his father was a stranger”. The father, ʼâb, is Isaac, and the word behind “stranger”, mâgûwr, means a temporary abode or a place of sojourning, and it can speak of a pilgrimage. It is related to the root gur, to live somewhere as an alien. A sojourner in those days lived among a people as a resident alien who owned none of their land and depended on their goodwill, and Abraham described himself in those terms to the sons of Heth. The patriarchs, who lived roughly between 2000 and 1500 BC, kept flocks and moved with them, though they sometimes stayed in one place for a long time, as Jacob does here.

So Jacob is settled, and yet his family’s standing in Canaan is still that of sojourners. Naming Isaac ties Jacob to the generation before him: the son lives on the same promise, in the same land, in the same way as his father.

Verse 2 begins with a heading. The word tôwlᵉdâh means a line of descent, a genealogy, or the record and story of a family, and Genesis uses this same heading to open its main sections, as with the heavens and the earth (Genesis 2:4) and with Adam (Genesis 5:1). Each time it tells us that the account is moving on to a new family line and what became of it.

The heading names Jacob, and the very next word is “Joseph”. The story of Jacob’s family is going to be told chiefly through this one son, because it is through Joseph that God will carry the covenant family forward. His story fills the rest of Genesis and ends with Jacob’s sons in Egypt, the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Joseph is seventeen and is “feeding the flock with his brethren”, doing the ordinary work of a family that lived by its herds. Scripture calls him “the lad”. The word naʻar covers a boy from infancy through adolescence and is often used of a servant, so it presents Joseph as the young one among grown men.

Jacob’s sons were born to four women: his wives Leah and Rachel, and their handmaids Bilhah and Zilpah. Joseph is working with the sons of the two handmaids, who are Dan and Naphtali, the sons of Rachel’s handmaid Bilhah, and Gad and Asher, the sons of Leah’s handmaid Zilpah. In a household like this the handmaids’ sons may have held a lower place than the sons of the wives, and Joseph, Rachel’s firstborn, stands among them as the favoured child. The divisions in the family are already in view before a word is spoken.

“Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children”. The verb ʼâhab means to love, to have affection for someone, and here it is a father’s affection resting on one son above the rest. The verse uses the name Israel, the new name God gave Jacob, and so it shows us the man who bears the covenant name failing as a father in his own house.

The reason given is that Joseph “was the son of his old age”. Bên is the ordinary word for a son, and zâqun speaks of old age: Joseph was born when Jacob was already advanced in years, while his older brothers had been born when their father was younger. He was also the firstborn of Rachel, the wife Jacob loved, who had died giving birth to Benjamin (Genesis 35:16–19). A child of his last years and of his dearest wife was very precious to him.

Jacob knew this kind of home from the inside. In his own childhood “Isaac loved Esau” while “Rebekah loved Jacob” (Genesis 25:28), and the strife that followed took years to heal. Genesis shows brothers set against one another from its earliest pages, in Cain and Abel (Genesis 4) and in Isaac and Ishmael (Genesis 21:8–21). Among the patriarchs the firstborn son ordinarily received the headship of the family and a double share of the inheritance, though a father could set a younger son ahead. Reuben, Simeon and Levi were all older than Joseph, and their father’s open preference threatened their standing.

The brothers “saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren”. The word for love is the same ʼâhab as in verse 3, and their seeing was a bitter awareness of it. Their response is given in three words: “they hated him”. The verb sânêʼ means to hate personally. Their hatred has a cause that can be named, and it fastens on the brother who is loved while the father who showed the partiality goes unblamed.

Scripture knows how strong this passion is. Wrath is cruel and anger is like a flood, yet envy is harder still to stand before (Proverbs 27:4). John takes us back to Cain, who was of the wicked one and killed his brother (1 John 3:12), and he says that whoever hates his brother is a murderer (1 John 3:15). The hatred of this verse is the same kind, and it will soon grow into a plot against Joseph’s life.

Jacob’s favouritism was a fault, Joseph’s report may have been unwise, and the brothers’ hatred was sin. God ruled over all of it. The road that begins here leads Joseph to Egypt, and there God uses him to keep the whole family alive through famine. Joseph himself says so to his brothers at the end of the book: “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive” (Genesis 50:20).

Paul teaches the same truth when he writes that all things work together for good to them that love God (Romans 8:28). The story also ends in mercy between the brothers themselves, when Joseph kisses them all and weeps over them, and after that they talk with him (Genesis 45:15). The brothers who had lost every peaceable word speak with him again.

Joseph’s life is a pattern that points ahead to Jesus. Joseph was the son his father loved, set apart by a special garment, and Jesus is the Son of whom the Father said that he is his beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased (Matthew 3:17). Joseph was hated by his own brothers. Jesus came to his own, “and his own received him not” (John 1:11), and he was despised and rejected of men (Isaiah 53:3). Joseph was sold for a price, and Jesus was betrayed for silver by one of the twelve (Matthew 26:14–16).

The likeness holds to the end. Joseph suffered unjustly in a foreign land and was then raised to great power, and from that place he saved his family and many others from famine. Jesus humbled himself to the death of the cross, and God has highly exalted him (Philippians 2:8–11). God shows his love for us in that Christ died for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8), and the risen Christ is able to save completely those who come to God by him, because he always lives to intercede for them (Hebrews 7:25). At the cross, as in Joseph’s story, God took the worst that human hatred could do and made it the means of salvation.

These four verses are honest about the family God chose. The man who bears the name Israel loves one son above the others, a boy carries tales, and grown brothers nurse a hatred that silences them. God’s covenant rests on his own faithfulness, and it held through every one of these failures.

The passage also shows how small the beginnings of great harm can be. A gift, a report and a refusal to greet a brother are ordinary things, and they are where the pit and the sale into slavery begin. A parent who reads verse 3 can see what open preference does to the children who are passed over, and anyone who has felt envy can see in verse 4 where it leads when it is left alone.

Above all, the passage gives us a God who was already at work before anyone in the story could see it. Jacob settled in Canaan as a man still waiting for what was promised, and God was preparing, through his family’s worst days, the means of saving them. We live as strangers and pilgrims in the same way, and the promises we wait for are held by the same God.