1–2. And Jacob dwelled in the land of . . . Canaan. This is the lineage of Jacob. The aptness of these verses as a transition from the genealogy of Esau to the story of Joseph is nicely observed by Abraham ibn Ezra: “The text reports that the chieftains of Esau dwelled in the high country of Seir and Jacob dwelled in the Chosen Land. And the meaning of ‘This is the lineage of Jacob’ is, ‘These are the events that happened to him and the incidents that befell him.’” Ibn Ezra’s remark demonstrates that there is no need to attach these two verses to the end of the preceding genealogy, as some modern scholars have argued. The writer exploits the flexibility of the Hebrew toledot, a term that can equally refer to genealogical list and to story, in order to line up the beginning of the Joseph story with the toledot passage that immediately precedes it.

2. assisting. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “he was a lad with the sons of Bilhah.” But the Hebrew for “lad,” naʿar, has a secondary meaning, clearly salient here, of assistant or subaltern. The adolescent Joseph is working as a kind of apprentice shepherd with his older brothers.

brought ill report. The first revelation of Joseph’s character suggests a spoiled younger child who is a tattletale. The next revelation, in the dreams, intimates adolescent narcissism, even if the grandiosity eventually is justified by events.

3. And Israel loved Joseph . . . for he was the child of his old age. The explanation is a little odd, both because the fact that Joseph is the son of the beloved Rachel is unmentioned and because it is the last-born Benjamin who is the real child of Jacob’s old age. It is noteworthy that Jacob’s favoritism toward Joseph is mentioned immediately after the report of questionable behavior on Joseph’s part. One recalls that Jacob was the object of his mother’s unexplained favoritism.

an ornamented tunic. The only clue about the nature of the garment is offered by the one other mention of it in the Bible, in the story of the rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13), in which, incidentally, there is a whole network of pointed allusions to the Joseph story. There we are told that the ketonet pasim was worn by virgin princesses. It is thus a unisex garment and a product of ancient haute couture. E. A. Speiser cites a cuneiform text with an apparently cognate phrase that seems to indicate a tunic with appliqué ornamentation. Other scholars have pointed to a fourteenth-century B.C.E. Egyptian fresco showing captive Canaanite noblemen adorned with tunics made of longitudinal panels sewed together.

5. And Joseph dreamed. As has often been noted, the dreams in the Joseph story reflect its more secular orientation in comparison with the preceding narratives in Genesis. They are not direct messages from God, like His appearance in the dream-visions to Abimelech and to Jacob: they may be literally portentous, but they require human interpretation (here the meaning is obvious enough), and they may also express the hidden desires and self-perception of the dreamer.

6. Listen, pray, to this dream that I dreamed. In keeping with the rule about the revelatory force of a character’s first words, this whole speech shows us a young Joseph who is self-absorbed, blithely assuming everyone will be fascinated by the details of his dreams.

7. And, look. It is standard technique for the dreamer reporting his dream to use the presentative hineh, “look,” to introduce what he has “seen” in the dream. But Joseph repeats the term three times in a single sentence, betraying his own wide-eyed amazement, and perhaps his naïveté. The same attitude is reflected in his exclamatory “arose and actually stood up.”

8. for his dreams and for his words. It is misguided to construe this as a hendiadys (“for speaking about his dreams”) since the sharp point is that they hated him both for having such dreams and for insisting on talking about them.

9. And he dreamed yet another dream. Later (41:32) we shall learn that the doubling of the dream is a sign that what it portends will really happen, but it should also be observed that doublets are a recurrent principle of organization in the Joseph story, just as binary divisions are an organizing principle in the Jacob story. Joseph and Pharaoh have double dreams; the chief butler and the chief baker dream their pair of seemingly parallel, actually antithetical dreams. Joseph is first flung into a pit and later into the prison-house. The brothers make two trips down to Egypt, with one of their number seemingly at risk on each occasion. And their descent to Egypt with goods and silver mirrors the descent of the merchant caravan, bearing the same items, that first brought Joseph down to Egypt.

the sun and the moon and eleven stars. Both Hermann Gunkel and Gerhard von Rad have proposed that the eleven stars are actually the eleven constellations known in the ancient Near East, but these should then be twelve, not eleven, and at least in the biblical record, knowledge of definite constellations is reflected only in postexilic literature. The two parallel dreams operate on different levels of intensity. The agricultural setting of the first one reflects the actual setting—Freud’s “day’s residue”—in which Joseph does his dreaming, and so is attached to the first part of the story, even if the brothers detect in it aspirations to regal grandeur. The second dream shifts the setting upward to the heavens and in this way is an apt adumbration of the brilliant sphere of the Egyptian imperial court over which Joseph will one day preside. From a strict monotheistic view, the second dream teeters on the brink of blasphemy.

10. I and your mother. This particular episode seems to assume, in flat contradiction of the preceding narrative, that Rachel is still alive, though Benjamin has already been born (there are eleven brothers in the dream bowing to Joseph). Attempts to rescue consistency on the ground that dreams may contain incoherent elements are unconvincing, because it is a perfectly lucid Jacob who assumes here that Rachel is still alive.

12. Shechem. As several medieval commentators note, Shechem has already been linked with disaster in these stories.

14. the valley of Hebron. The validity of this designation can be defended only through ingenious explanation because Hebron stands on a height.

15. And a man found him. The specificity of this exchange with an unnamed stranger is enigmatic. Efforts to see the “man” as an angel or messenger of fate have little textual warrant. What it is safe to say is that the question and answer in a field outside Shechem reinforce the sense that Joseph is being directed, unwitting, to a disastrous encounter.

17. for I heard them. The Masoretic Text has only “I heard,” but several ancient versions supply the mem suffix to the verb that would indicate “them” as its object.

19. that dream-master. Although time-honored tradition renders this in English simply as “dreamer,” the Hebrew term baʿal haḥalomot is stronger, and thus in context more sarcastic. The baʿal component suggests someone who has a special proprietary relation to, or mastery of, the noun that follows it.

20. let us kill him and fling him into one of the pits. The flinging after the killing underscores the naked brutality of the brothers’ intentions. The denial of proper burial was among the Hebrews, as among the Greeks, deeply felt as an atrocity.

21–22. We must not take his life. . . . Shed no blood. Reuben eschews the two verbs for killing used respectively by the narrator and the brothers and instead invokes language echoing the primal taboo against taking—literally, “striking down”—life and spilling human blood (compare the powerful prohibition in 9:6). In the event, the substitute blood of the slaughtered kid will figure prominently in the brothers’ course of action.

Fling him into this pit. At the same time, Reuben tries not to contradict the violence of his brothers’ feelings toward Joseph and uses the same phrase, to fling him into a pit, with the crucial difference that in his proposal it is a live Joseph who will be cast into the pit. This is precisely the verb used for Hagar (21:15) when she flings Ishmael under a bush in the wilderness.

23. his tunic, the ornamented tunic that he had on him. Only now do we learn that Joseph has the bad judgment to wear on his errand the garment that was the extravagant token of his father’s favoritism. Thus he provokes the brothers’ anger, and they strip him—not part of their original plan—and thus take hold of what will be made into the false evidence of his death as their plan changes.

24. they . . . flung him into the pit. Contrary to the original plan, they do not kill him straightaway. Perhaps they have decided instead to let him perish trapped in the pit.

the pit was empty, there was no water in it. Deep cisterns of this sort—too deep to climb out of—were commonly used for water storage.

25. Ishmaelites. This is a generic term for the seminomadic traders of Arab stock whose homeland was east of the Jordan, but it is also an anachronism, since at the time of the story, the eponymous Ishmael, the great-uncle of the twelve brothers, was still alive (though he would be near the end of his 127-year life span), and the only “Ishmaelites” would be their second cousins.

gum and balm and ladanum. The precise identity of these plant extracts used for medicinal purposes and as perfume is in doubt, but it is clear that they are costly export items.

26. What gain is there if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Judah’s argument for sparing Joseph’s life—which most scholars regard as the manifestation of an originally different version of the story from the one in which the firstborn Reuben tries to save Joseph—is based on the consideration of gain, not on the horror of the taboo against shedding blood that Reuben invokes. To cover up blood means to conceal bloodguilt.

27. for he is our brother, our own flesh. It is, of course, a dubious expression of brotherhood to sell someone into the ignominy and perilously uncertain future of slavery.

28. And Midianite merchantmen . . . pulled Joseph up out of the pit and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites. This is the one signal moment when the two literary strands out of which the story is woven seem awkwardly spliced. Up to this point, no Midianites have been mentioned. Elsewhere, Midianites and Ishmaelites appear to be terms from different periods designating the selfsame people (compare Judges 8:22 and 24), so the selling of Joseph to the Ishmaelites looks like a strained attempt to blend two versions that respectively used the two different terms. And the Midianite intervention contradicts the just stated intention of the brothers to pull Joseph out of the pit themselves and sell Joseph to the Ishmaelites for profit.

29. And Reuben came back to the pit. The contradiction between the two versions continues, since one is driven to assume that Reuben was not present at the fraternal meal during which the selling of Joseph was discussed, though there is no textual indication of his absence.

30. The boy is gone. The Hebrew says literally, “the boy is not.” The phrase could be a euphemism for death or could merely indicate disappearance. It is a crucial ambiguity the brothers themselves will exploit much later in the story.

31. slaughtered a kid and dipped the tunic in blood. Jacob had used both a slaughtered kid and a garment in the deception he perpetrated on his own father.

32. they sent . . . and had it brought. The brothers operate indirectly, through the agency of a messenger, letting the doctored evidence of the blood-soaked tunic speak for itself.

Recognize. When the disguised Jacob deceived his father, we were told, “he did not recognize him.”

33. And he recognized it, and he said . . . “A vicious beast has devoured him.” Jacob’s paternal anxiety turns him into the puppet of his sons’ plotting. Not only does he at once draw the intended false conclusion, but he uses the very words of their original plan, “a vicious beast has devoured him.” It is noteworthy that his cry of grief takes the form of a line of formal verse, a kind of compact elegy that jibes with the mourning rituals which follow it.

36. Pharaoh’s courtier, the high chamberlain. The word for “courtier” in other contexts can also mean “eunuch,” but the evidence suggests that the original use was as the title of a court official and that the sense of “eunuch” became associated with the term secondarily because of an occasional Mesopotamian practice of placing eunuchs in court positions. (The Hebrew saris is a loanword from the Akkadian sa resi, “royal official.”) The second title attached to Potiphar is associated with a root involving slaughter and in consequence sometimes with cooking (hence the “chief steward” or, alternately, “chief executioner” of various English versions). The actual responsibilities of this high imperial post remain unclear.