Scripture Daily

Context No. 3373 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 37:1-7: in context

1Jacob lived in the land of his father’s travels, in the land of Canaan. 2This is the history of the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives. Joseph brought an evil report of them to their father. 3Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a tunic of many colors. 4His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, and they hated him, and couldn’t speak peaceably to him. 5Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it to his brothers, and they hated him all the more. 6He said to them, “Please hear this dream which I have dreamed: 7for behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and also stood upright; and behold, your sheaves came around, and bowed down to my sheaf.”

The seeds of a family tragedy are sown here. Jacob loves Joseph more than his other sons and shows it openly with a special coat, and the brothers hate him for the favoritism, unable to speak a kind word to him. And Joseph, young and perhaps tactless, tells them a dream in which their sheaves bow down to his, which only deepens their resentment.

There is a tangle of faults on every side: a father's unwise favoritism, the brothers' bitter jealousy, a young man's unguarded pride. No one here is entirely blameless, and Scripture does not pretend otherwise. And yet God's purpose was hidden even in that dream, for it foretold a truth the brothers would one day, unwillingly, fulfill. Family wounds and human failings are real, and God does not excuse them, but neither is he defeated by them. He can weave even our tangled jealousies and pride into his larger design, so that the dream they hated came, in the end, from him.

Do I see how favoritism, jealousy, and pride wound a family, and can I trust that God works even through our tangled human failings toward his purposes?

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