Genesis 37:8

The dreams fall on a family that is already divided. Joseph has brought his father an evil report of his brothers (Genesis 37:2), and Jacob, who loves him best, has made him a coat of many colours (Genesis 37:3). By now his brothers “could not speak peaceably unto him” (Genesis 37:4). Joseph is the firstborn son of Rachel, the wife Jacob loved, but he is the second youngest of twelve sons. In a household where authority and inheritance usually followed the order of birth, a younger son who dreamed of ruling his elders was bound to give deep offence.

So when Joseph dreams and tells it, “they hated him yet the more” (verse 5). The verb sânêʼ is the plain word to hate, used of hatred toward a person, and “yet the more” renders yâçaph, to add or to go on doing a thing. Joseph’s own name, Yôwçêph, means “let him add”, and his brothers answer the son named for adding by adding to their hatred. Once they have heard the dream itself, they hate him yet the more “for his dreams, and for his words” (verse 8). Verse 11 names what lies beneath it all: “his brethren envied him.” The verb there, qânâʼ, means to be zealous, and in a bad sense, as here, to be jealous or envious.

Hatred between brothers runs all through Genesis. Cain was very angry when God had respect to Abel’s offering and refused his own (Genesis 4:5), and the rest of Genesis 4 tells where that anger led. Isaac and Ishmael were set against each other, and Jacob himself had deceived Esau (Genesis 27). These quarrels arise inside the very family God chose and to which he made his promises (Genesis 12:1–3), and he carries his promise forward through them.

The Hebrew of “Joseph dreamed a dream” sets the verb châlam, to dream, beside its own noun chălôwm, a dream, so that it reads chalam chalom. This is a common Hebrew way of speaking, and it puts the weight on the dream itself. Chălôwm is the ordinary word for a dream, used both for the dreams of sleep and for dreams through which God speaks. What marks these two as God’s is what follows, because the rest of Genesis brings them to pass.

In the days of the patriarchs God often spoke this way. He came to Abimelech in a dream by night (Genesis 20:3), he warned Laban in a dream, and he gave Jacob the dream of the ladder at Bethel with its promise (Genesis 28:12–15). Joseph himself would later interpret Pharaoh’s dreams (Genesis 41), and Daniel would tell a king that “there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets” (Daniel 2:28). Long before, God had told Abraham of the bondage and deliverance of his descendants years ahead of time (Genesis 15:13–16). He makes his purposes known before they unfold, and he did so for Joseph.

The brothers answer the first dream with scorn. Each of their questions doubles its verb in Hebrew, which the KJV renders “indeed”: “Shalt thou indeed reign over us? or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us?” The first verb, mâlak, means to reign, or to come to the throne as king. The second, mâshal, means to rule. By putting the two side by side they make their contempt plain, because the thought of the younger brother as their king and ruler is absurd to them.

They hated him “for his dreams, and for his words.” The word for “words”, dâbâr, means a word or speech, and also a matter or thing. Their anger fell on what the dreams said and on the way Joseph told them, which to their ears sounded like boasting. Their scornful question is the very thing that would come to pass, for one day these same brothers would bow before him.

Genesis leaves Joseph’s reasons unstated, and the likeliest answers lie in his youth. He was seventeen (Genesis 37:2), perhaps unaware of how deep his brothers’ resentment ran, perhaps simply wanting to share something he believed had come from God, and perhaps made less careful by his father’s indulgence. His request in verse 6 is polite and earnest: “Hear, I pray you”. The verb shâmaʻ means to hear with understanding, and it often carries the sense of paying attention or obeying, so Joseph wants his brothers to listen and take the dream seriously. Even after the first dream stirred their hatred, he told them the second as well (verse 9).

Joseph understood the plain meaning of the dreams well enough. What he could hardly have known was the long road of slavery and prison by which God would fulfil them. There may also be a reason in God’s purpose: a dream from God was meant to be spoken, and Joseph’s telling of it, however unwise, set in motion the very events God intended. The scene also shows that a true word from God can be spoken with more wisdom or with less, and that the manner of its telling affects how it is received.

Joseph learned through what he suffered. When at last he made himself known to his brothers, he could tell them that God had sent him before them to preserve life (Genesis 45:5–8).

The first dream went to the brothers. The second Joseph told his father as well, since it concerned him, and “his father rebuked him” (verse 10). The verb gâʻar means to rebuke or scold. Jacob’s first question, “What is this dream that thou hast dreamed?”, is full of disbelief, and the second sets out what offends him: “Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?” The head of the family and all his house are to lie on the ground before his own young son. Jacob had himself received a dream from God at Bethel, so his rebuke comes from what this one would mean for the order and peace of his household, and from the presumption it looked like on Joseph’s part.

“But his father observed the saying” (verse 11). The verb shâmar properly means to hedge about, to guard, and so to keep, watch or attend to. Jacob held on to the matter and turned it over in his mind. “The saying” is dâbâr, the same word as Joseph’s “words” in verse 8, and here it means the whole matter of the dreams. So in one verse the brothers envy and the father keeps. Luke says something like it of Mary, who “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). Jacob had known God’s dealings for many years, and though he rebuked his son, he kept the saying for the day when it would be understood.

The brothers’ envy went the other way. “Who is able to stand before envy?” asks the proverb (Proverbs 27:4), and another says “envy the rottenness of the bones” (Proverbs 14:30). Within a short time their envy brought them to plot Joseph’s death and to sell him to traders bound for Egypt (Genesis 37:18–28).

The dreams came true years later, by a road no one in the family could have foreseen. In Egypt Joseph was thrown into prison (Genesis 39:20) and then raised to rule the whole land under Pharaoh (Genesis 41:40–44). When famine drove his brothers there to buy grain, they “bowed down themselves before him with their faces to the earth” (Genesis 42:6). On their second journey they bowed to him again (Genesis 43:26).

The testing of the brothers and Joseph’s reconciliation with them fill Genesis 42–45, until Joseph makes himself known to them in Genesis 45. A psalm sings of all of it as God’s doing: “He sent a man before them, even Joseph, who was sold for a servant ... Until the time that his word came: the word of the LORD tried him” (Psalm 105:16–19).

At the end of the story Joseph says to his brothers, “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). Their sin was their own, and God ruled over it. “A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). “Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: the remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain” (Psalm 76:10). Paul writes that all things work together for good to them that love God (Romans 8:28). The story that begins with these dreams runs from Genesis 37 to Genesis 50, and through it God preserves the family of Israel in a time of famine and keeps his covenant with Abraham.

Joseph’s road from rejection to exaltation foreshadows Christ. Joseph was the beloved son of his father, and at Jesus’ baptism the Father said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). Joseph’s brothers hated him for his dreams of rule, and Jesus “came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). He spoke of the hatred of those who had seen his works (John 15:24–25), and Isaiah had foretold that he would be “despised and rejected of men” (Isaiah 53:3). His own townspeople met his claims by asking, “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” (Matthew 13:55), much as Joseph’s brothers asked whether he would reign over them. Joseph was sold for a price, and Jesus was betrayed for thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:14–16) and suffered unjustly (1 Peter 2:21–23).

Envy and malice brought both of them low, and God used it for salvation. Jesus was “delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23), and God exalted him to his right hand (Acts 2:33). Joseph’s exaltation saved his family from famine. Christ’s exaltation makes him the author of eternal salvation (Hebrews 5:9), the bread of life (John 6:35) and the one name under heaven by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12). Through him God has reconciled us to himself (2 Corinthians 5:18–19), as Joseph was reconciled with the brothers who sold him. He is the Lamb of God (John 1:29), and heaven worships him as the Lamb that was slain (Revelation 5:12–14).

Joseph’s brothers bowed before him in Egypt, and every knee will bow before Christ. Paul traces his path from humbling to exaltation and ends, “That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth” (Philippians 2:8–11).

God told Joseph where his life was going before any of it happened, and then led him there through hatred, slavery and prison. The dreams were true on the day the brothers mocked them, and they stayed true in the pit and in the prison, until the day the brothers bowed. That is who God is: what he says, he brings to pass, and the opposition of men becomes part of the way he does it.

These verses also lay envy bare. The brothers’ hatred began with a father’s favour, grew with every dream and every word, and in the end reached for murder. Scripture records it plainly, so that we can know envy for what it is when it rises in us.

And in Jacob we see how a believer can meet a word from God that he does not yet understand. He spoke sharply at what offended him, and still he kept the saying. In time he saw it fulfilled, and God’s purpose for his whole family with it.