Genesis 37:2-36

January 22, 2017

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

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The sermon starts at 18:08 in the audio file.

Or, Hate Is Thicker Than Blood

It’s been said that God works in mysterious ways. God Himself said that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways higher than our ways, and His thoughts higher than our thoughts. While He is always at work, sometimes He reveals what He is going to do beforehand because there’s no way we would have seen it coming like that.

In Genesis 37 Moses turns our attention to the elect line through Jacob. The generations of Jacob is the tenth and final division by toledot that ends only when Genesis ends. Jacob makes it most of the way through these 14 chapters, though most of the focus goes to Joseph and Judah. These generations are less a genealogy and more a family history.

It’s also been said that blood is thicker than water, usually understood to mean that family bonds are strongest. The first chapter of Jacob’s story proves that hate is thicker than blood. It’s surprising to see that evil dominates the introduction to the family with the covenant blessing. Esau’s line, detailed in chapter 36, is where we’d expect to hear about evil. Yet it is the sons of Israel who hated (verse 4, 5, 8), who were jealous (verse 11), who conspired to kill (verse 18), who sold their blood brother into slavery (verse 28), and who lied to their father and played at comforting him (verse 35). The divine commentary in the last chapter is that these men meant it for evil (Genesis 50:20).

There are two sections in chapter 37, the family setting in verses 2-11 and then the family selling in verses 12-36. We see escalating resentment and then enacted rage.

Escalating Resentment (verses 2-11)

Joseph’s brothers “hated him” (verses 4, 5, and 8). Three things breed the bitterness between brothers at ten-to-one odds.

A Bad Report (verse 2)

Immediately after the new heading, These are the generations of Jacob, the attention turns to one of Jacob’s sons. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives. Joseph’s mother, Rachel, had died (Genesis 35:19), and he was closest in age to the sons of the servant-wives (Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher).

Joseph was working with some of the brothers and Joseph brought a bad report of them to his father. We’re not told what happened, or if Joseph slanted some of what happened, as in an badmouthing rumor, a typical feature of this Hebrew word. But who likes a tattle-tale? No one, and at the next mention of watching sheep Joseph isn’t with his brothers. They didn’t appreciate his scuttlebutt.

A Favored Robe (verses 3-4)

How many times has a child declared that he will never do some awful thing that his parents did when he has his own family, only to grow up and to just that? Jacob had personal experience with the problems with paternal favoritism, being the one outside of favor with his father Isaac. Yet Jacob chooses one son to love more, just as he had chosen to love one wife more.

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons, because he was the son of his old age. Actually, Benjamin was born when Israel was older, but at 17 Josep was becoming a man and was more a vision of Israel’s future than a dependent. And he made him a robe of many colors. I don’t have any reason to argue with this translation. The Hebrew adjective is not used many other places and it’s not clear that it relates to colors. It could have been a longer or long-sleeved or ornamented robe. But we’d have to throw away all our flannel-graphs if we changed it now. The LXX translates it as χιτῶνα ποικίλον: a multi-colored tunic, so then the Vulgate and even later the KJV followed suit. It was special in some obvious and exclusive way; the other sons weren’t spoiled like this. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more t[...]