וישב יעקב בארץ מגורי אביו בארץ כנען. We have already commented on the meaning of this on 35,27.

אלה תולדות יעקב, the meaning of the word תולדות in our context here is “happenings, developments.” It includes all kinds of traumas Yaakov would experience. Genesis 6,9 similarly introduced what happened to Noach with these words. The philological bridge to the word תולדות when it refers to biological progeny is Proverbs 27,1 כי לא תדע מה ילד היום, “for you do not know what the day will give birth to.”

יוסף בן שבע עשרה שנה, when he was still only 17 years old.

רועה את אחיו בצאן, mark the fact that the Torah wrote בצאן “with the flocks,” instead of הצאן, “the flocks,” for being relatively young he was only allowed to work together with his brothers instead of being allowed to tends flocks all by himself. He was still a trainee.

והוא נער, he was always going with them when they were engaged in tending the flocks.

נשי אביו, the term “wives of,“ emphasises that they were full fledged wives, as had been stated when each of these women became married to Yaakov, i.e. “לאשה.” (compare 30,9; 30,4) Joseph’s keeping company with the sons of these women was in no way something disparaging for him, as he was not only their half brother just as he was a half brother to the sons of Leah, but they were his social equals.

ויבא יוסף את דבתם רעה, he told his father that his brothers hated him, i.e. both the sons of the former servant maids with whom he was being raised, as well as the sons of Leah to whom he felt superior because he enjoyed preferential treatment by his father. As a result, the brothers sought pretexts to treat him meanly. Yaakov was angry at the brothers on behalf of Joseph, interpreting the brothers’ hatred of Joseph as jealousy due to his loving Joseph excessively. (verses 3 and 4). In Bereshit Rabbah 84,7 we are told that according to Rabbi Meir Joseph told his fathers that the brothers were suspect of violating the commandment not to eat flesh from a still living animal, whereas Rabbi Yehudah is supposed to have said that Joseph accused them of treating the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah with disdain, referring to them as “slaves.” Rabbi Shimon is reported as saying that Joseph accused the brothers of casting lustful glances at the local Canaanite girls. Rabbi Yehudah bar Seymon claims that G’d repaid Joseph for all three accusations as we derive from Proverbs 16,11 פלס ומאזני משפט לה', “Honest scales and weights are the Lord’s.” G’d said to him: “you accused your brothers of violating the law of אבר מן החי, you will be a witness that even when they were engaged in a sinful enterprise such as dipping your cloak in blood before presenting it to your father, they first slaughtered the male goat ritually, as is required when they would eat it. You accused them of calling the sons of Zilpah and Bilhah slaves, that is why you yourself were sold into slavery (Psalms 105, 17) You accused your brothers of looking lecherously at the local girls, I will cause you to be tempted by this very phenomenon.” This is why the Torah described the wife of Potiphar attempting to seduce Joseph (39,7)

כי בן זקונים, what was so special about Joseph’s age, seeing all the eleven brothers had been born in the space of 7 years? How much older was Yaakov at the time Joseph was born than, say, at the time Yehudah was born? We conclude therefore, that the meaning of the word זקונים has nothing to do with physical age, but that Joseph appeared to him as especially intelligent, wise, wise well beyond his years. The words of wisdom spoken by Joseph would normally be expected only from the mouth of men who had acquired such wisdom through having lived for many years. This is also the way Onkelos understood the term when he translates it as בר חכים, “a wise son.” Seeing that he considered him so wise he dressed him in especially attractive garments. In this way he gave tangible expression to his special love for him.

ועשה לו כתונת פסים, the word פס is related to the same word in Daniel 5,5 פס ידא, palm of a hand. The cloth was made of differently coloured surfaces similar to garments made of soft wool which are made in a number of differently coloured stripes or sections. The garment looked very impressive, arousing the hatred of the brothers in addition to the fact that they hated him for spreading tales about them to their father. Our sages in Shabbat 10 seize upon this detail to teach us that a father must ever be careful not to arouse inter-fraternal jealousies, seeing that the fortunes of the Jewish people have been so negatively affected on account of five silver coins worth of angora wool which Yaakov spent more on Joseph’s attire than he did on the garments worn by his other sons. The enslavement of the Jewish people in Egypt was brought about as a direct consequence of this jealousy.

ולא יכלו דברו לשלום, any conversation with Joseph did not revolve around peacefully discussed matters of common interest, but concerned only matters of dispute between them.

ויחלום....ויאמר, he dreamed, and wanted to make them feel bad seeing that they had displayed jealousy of his father’s love for him, and had allowed that jealousy to deteriorate into hatred of him. Seeing that eventually, Joseph’s rise to power was due to his handling of the harvest in Egypt, the details of the dream were: והנה קמה אלומתי, the symbol of my success, i.e. my sheaf of grain remained erect, whereas your sheaves bowed down to me. It was a fact that in due course the grain harvest was the cause of the brothers prostrating themselves before Joseph.

ויאמרו לו אחיו, are you planning to lord it over us? If you have dreams of this kind, this only reflects dreams of power you entertain during the day.

על חלומותיו, the plural “dreams,” seeing that only one dream had been reported in detail, suggests there had been at least one more dream of which the Torah did not tell us its content. The other dream may not have directly aroused an intensification of the brothers’ hatred, or, the plural includes already the dream to come that has not been spelled out as yet. The Torah spelled out only two dreams as they were the ones fuelling the brothers’ jealousy of Joseph.

ועל דבריו, and on account of his overbearing manner, and the fact that he spread slanderous remarks about them.

ויחלום, in this dream the meaning is crystal clear. Sun and moon refer to Joseph’s parents, whereas the stars refer to his brothers, seeing there were 11 stars in the dream and Joseph had eleven brothers. All the dreams the content of which the Torah described are to be understood as posing a riddle, a challenge to translate the symbols described in the respective dreams into the matching reality in the “real” world. This is true not only of Joseph’s dreams, but equally of the dreams of the cup-bearer and of the Chief of the bakers whom Joseph met in jail. Also Pharaoh’s dream as related in the Torah, and the dream of Nevuchadnezzar as described in the Book of Daniel follow the same pattern. All of them became reality in accordance with the manner in which they had been interpreted.

ויספר אל אביו, the reason why he told only this dream to his father was because his father appeared in that dream, whereas neither his father nor his mother had been featured in his other dreams.

אני ואמך, I and your mother? Just as the dream could not possibly relate to your mother who has died already, so it cannot very well relate to me either. Therefore, you would do well to dismiss this dream entirely. Our sages, on the other hand, learn from this dream that every dream no matter how accurately it foreshadows an event in the future, contains some element which is not going to come true. (Berachot 55)

הדבר, even though Yaakov had been angry at Joseph he was worried about what the dream might forecast and he remembered it.

וילכו אחיו לרעות צאן, there are dots above the letters of the word את. The sages in Bereshit Rabbah 84,13 suggest that the Torah meant that the brothers were tending themselves, i.e. they distanced themselves from their father in order to escape supervision and to follow their personal inclinations in matters of food and drink and to do in Shechem whatever they felt like doing. They were not afraid at all of the inhabitants of that city whose male population they had killed only a year or two earlier. They had complete confidence in G’d‘s protection. The Canaanite population in the region lived in awe of the sons of Yaakov. They had been afraid of them already at the time when they executed the male population of Schechem for being accessories to the rape of Dinah.

ויאמר...הלא אחיך, don’t you know that your brothers are in Shechem, tending flocks?

הנני; he was not afraid of his brothers even though they hated him, for he thought that their awe of their father was greater than their desire to harm him. His father also did not think that the brothers posed a threat to his favourite son. Surely, if he had even entertained the slightest concern about the brothers harming Joseph, he would never have sent him on this mission. This entire matter was engineered by G’d Who knows the evil machinations of man in order that this would become the external cause of the patriarchs, i.e. their descendants to descend to Egypt and to fulfill the prophecy G’d had already told Avraham about in chapter 15.

ויאמר...ואת שלום הצאן, in Bereshit Rabbah 84,13 the instruction by Yaakov to Joseph that he was to enquire not only about their personal well being, but also about the well being of their property, their flocks, teaches us that one must always display concern not only for the health, etc., of people one meets but also about their economic well being.

מעמק חברון, since when is Chevron in a valley? We always associate it with being located on a mountain! The Torah alludes to a profound understanding between G’d and Avraham who had been interred in Chevron. The Torah now alludes to the prediction by G’d to Avraham, that his descendants would for a long time be strangers in a land not theirs (Genesis 15,13)

וימצאהו איש , after arriving in Shechem and not finding any trace of his brothers, Joseph went in all directions to see if he could find them, and in the process he lost his way.

הגידה נא לי, if you know where they are tending their flocks.

מזה, from this area. We find the expression used in a similar meaning in 38,21 לא היתה בזה, “there was no (prostitute) in this location.”

כי שמעתי אומרים, “that they were saying, etc.”

ויתנכלו אותו, the word אותו here means the same as the preposition בו, “against him.” We find other instances where this preposition is used in connection with this root, as in Psalms 105,25 להתנכל בעבדיו, “to plot against His servants.” The root also occurs in connection with the preposition ל, as in Numbers 25,18 אשר נכלו לכם, “which they conspired against you.” The word basically refers to scheming against someone in one’s heart.

ועתה לכו, the word לכו in this context is an exhortation to act without delay, as we explained on 28,2. [there it referred to the word קום, Ed.]

וישמע...לא נכנו נפש, killing.

אל תשפכו דם, his blood is innocent, i.e. he is not guilty of a capital crime. But throw him into this pit if you are so angry about his dreams and the way he presents them. You may repay him by making him feel pain such as yours, but do not touch him in a way that will lead to his death. When Reuven said: “throw him into this pit,” he did so in order to know where to find him later and to bring him back safely to his father after rescuing him from the pit. He did not mean for Joseph to be harmed in any way.

ויהי..את כתנת הפסים, the letter ה at the beginning of the word הפסים, referring to a specific garment, is justified seeing that we had previously been told את כתנתו, “his tunic,” i.e. the same tunic.

ויקחהו, there is a letter ו missing in this word, making it appear as if only one brother took him. According to Bereshit Rabbah 84,16 this is an allusion to who the brother was who seized Joseph and threw him into the pit. It was Shimon, which was the reason why later on Joseph locked up Shimon as a hostage (42,24 ויקח מאתם את שמעון, he took Shimon from them.)

אין בו מים. If there had been water in the pit, Joseph would have drowned and throwing him into the pit would have been outright murder. The reason why the Torah mentions that there was no water in the pit, having already said that the pit was empty, והבור ריק, could be that there was sticky mud inside it, as for instance in Jeremiah 38,6 where the King’s servants threw the prophet into טיט, meaning a slime pit. That pit is also described as devoid of water, although Jeremiah is described as sinking into the mud. However, it did not cause his death. The allegorical explanation of the sequence of the words in our verse is well known, i.e. though water, one lethal ingredient, was not present in that pit, other potentially worse dangers such as scorpions, etc., were. If this explanation corresponds to the facts, throwing Joseph into such a pit was no better than killing him. The brothers had no way of knowing that G’d would save him by a miracle, i.e. that the scorpions and snakes would not attack him.

נכאת, according to Bereshit Rabbah 91,11, wax.

צרי, according to the view of Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel the word refers to resin, sap found in the trunk of the balsam tree. The word לוט according to Bereshit Rabbah 91,11 is מצטכי, Lotus?.

?מה בצע, “what financial advantage,” as per Onkelos.

כי נהרוג את אחינו, what does this mean seeing Reuven had already prevented them from killing their brother outright? We must therefore understand Yehudah’s words as meaning: “what are we going to do with him? If we leave him in the pit this is just as bad as having killed him.”

וכסינו את דמו, and cover his blood. He meant they had to conceal his death from their father.

לכו, we already explained this expression on verse 20.

אל תהי בו, to be the indirect cause of his death. If we are going to sell him he will not die.

ויעברו אנשים מדינים, these were the Ishmaelites mentioned previously, seeing that both Midianites and Medanites are descendants of Keturah. [Keturah is understood to be Hagar who had her name changed after Sarah’s death when Avraham took her as a wife. Seeing that she gave birth to both Medan and to Midian, (25,2) this made both these sons full brothers to her earlier son Ishmael by the same father. Ed.] Even assuming that Keturah and Hagar were not identical, the three were at least sons of Avraham and therefore half brothers. Their respective families had intermarried so that they could be considered as brothers in the real sense of the word. The close relationship between their respective descendants comes to the fore in Judges 8,24 where after Gideon’s campaign against the Midianites they are described as Ishmaelites, the kind of jewelry they wore identifying them as members of that tribe.

וימשכו, Joseph’s brothers pulled him out of the pit prior to the sale to the Ishmaelites. All this occurred when Reuven was not present. Perhaps, in the interval he had returned to his father. [a distance of 120 km, hardly likely, as Reuven would have had to come back another 120 km. to retrieve Joseph who would have died from thirst in the interval if not from other causes. Ed.] It is more likely that Reuven had a flock of his own to look after in that general region.

וישב, he returned from wherever he had gone to his brothers, going back to the pit to see if he could rescue Joseph without his brothers finding out, and to return him to his father. There is a discussion in Bereshit Rabbah 84,19 as to where Reuven had been in the interval. According to some, it had been his turn to attend to the needs of his father, whereas according to Rabbi Eliezer he was engaged in doing penance, etc., for having slept with Bilhah, his father’s concubine.

וישב, he did not know that the brothers had sold him but thought that he had been stolen from the pit.

וישחטו שעיר עזים, they said that its blood resembled the colour of human blood.

וישלחו, some of the brothers were the messengers who delivered this tattered blood-spattered tunic. Some commentators believe that the word is derived from Job 36,12 בשלח יעברו, “they will die by the sword.” According to this, the brothers imitated the incisions made by the sharp teeth of wild beasts so that Yaakov would think that Joseph’s fate had been that he had been devoured or at least killed by such a marauding animal.

הכר נא, According to Bereshit Rabbah 84,19 G’d repaid Yehudah for his use of the phrase הכר נא when tricking his father into making a false deduction, by Tamar challenging him with the very same expression הכר נא, which embarrassed him into admitting that he was the father of the fetus that Tamar his daughter-in-law was pregnant with (38,25)

ויקרע יעקב, he mourned him excessively because he had loved him so inordinately. Besides, he blamed himself partially for his fate for having sent him on what turned out to have been a dangerous mission.

ויקומו...וכל בנותיו, his daughter and daughters-in-law who were like daughters to him. In Bereshit Rabbah 84,21 Rabbi Yehudah is quoted as saying that a female twin had been born with each of Yaakov’s sons and they married their respective half-brothers. Rabbi Nechemyah, in commenting on the words וכל בנותיו, says that actually Yaakov had only one daughter, i.e. Dinah, but that he wished he had already buried her (as the fact that she had been raped was something he found it hard to live with) [Rashi on that Midrash. Ed] At any rate, we need not take the text so literally, as most people describe their sons-in-law as sons, and their daughters-in-law as daughters.

שאלה, until the grave, i.e. “I will mourn him for the rest of my life.” The meaning of the words

על בנו, instead of the pronoun ending ויתאבלו, is to describe Yaakov’s attitude henceforth, i.e. “I will go join him in his grave.” Compare Samuel II 12,23 where David uses such language explaining that in order to be reunited with the baby son he had just lost he would have to join him in his grave, as the baby would not come back to him and be resurrected. Or, compare the standard expression used by the Torah when people die and they join their ancestors in the grave or hereafter, i.e. ויאסף אל עמיו “he was gathered in to his people” (Genesis 25,17 et al).

ויבך אותו אביו, the reason why the Torah adds the unnecessary word אביו, “his father,” is to demonstrate the serious nature of losing a son who had been constantly the one at his father’s side. The remarkable thing about Joseph had been that although the Torah had described him as occupied tending sheep with his brothers, most of the time he had spent in attending to the needs of his widowed father, whose beloved wife Rachel, Joseph’s mother, had died when Joseph had only been about 6 years old. Whenever an occasion would arise which would have required the services normally rendered by his son Joseph, his absence would rekindle Yaakov’s grief over his fate. According to our sages in Bereshit Rabbah 84,21 the superfluous word אביו refers to Yaakov’s father Yitzchok, who was still alive at the time Joseph was sold, seeing that Yaakov had been born when Yitzchok was 60 years old, in other words Yitzchok only died when Yaakov was 120 years of age. At the time of Joseph’s sale Yitzchok was 168 years old seeing that the separation between Yaakov and Joseph lasted for 22 years, the same length of time as Yaakov had been separated from his father Yitzchok.

והמדנים, we already explained who they were and what they did on verse 28.

שר הטבחים, as per Onkelos, Pharaoh’s chief executioner.