1. Joseph and his brethren were the children of different parents. Jacob was a polygamist, and his children were by different mothers, who, though living under the same roof, and thus compelled to maintain a semblance of harmony, must often have come into collision, through their over-anxiety to promote the interests of their own offspring. We cannot suppose that Jacob's family, any more than those of Abraham and Isaac, were exempt from the evils which polygamy is calculated to produce, not the least of which is morbid jealousy of each other, a passion which, when unrestrained, may lead to the foulest crimes. Let it be remembered that in those days there was no law against polygamy, and therefore in that act there was no sin; for, says the Apostle, “sin is not imputed where there is no law.” And yet, we observe that, though this was no sin in Jacob, yet the penalty followed, for it was against the constitution of God's world.
It is very hard for our nature to give away a share in affection where we were once supreme. There is a jealousy in these things that the most unselfish of us find it difficult to struggle with. Our right is gone, and we held it by favour. I can understand the feeling of wounded ambition through affection-the bitter sense of being displaced. Well, this would be very poor comfort for us if affection were like ambition. But what we have to try to do is to realize that they are not the same. A true heart, I am sure, never loves one less for taking in another; it is, in a way, all to every one. Surely true human love was intended to give us some idea of God's own, who is all that He can be to every one of us. Displacement or first and second are terms misapplied.1 [Note: Letters of John Ker, 58.]
2. In the one encampment of Jacob there were four divisions, forming not separate households, indeed, but yet far more dangerous, so far as the preservation of harmony was concerned, than if they had been entirely distinct. These were composed of Leah and her sons, Zilpah and her sons, Bilhah and her sons, and the sons of Rachel; and from what we learn elsewhere of Joseph's ten half-brothers, we may be sure that they had little scruple in riding roughshod over the feelings and wishes of any one who seemed in the least degree to stand in their way. This disposition of his brethren, added to his own motherless condition, would send Joseph much in upon himself, and make him, from his precocity in his experience of adversity, a welcome companion to his father.
Joseph could not but come to think of his future and of his destiny in this family. That his father should make a pet of him rather than of Benjamin, he would refer to the circumstance that he was the oldest son of the wife of his choice, of her whom first he had loved, and who had no rival while he lived. To so charming a companion as Joseph must always have been, Jacob would naturally impart all the traditions and hopes of the family. In him he found a sympathetic and appreciative listener, who wiled him on to endless narrative, and whose imaginativeness quickened his own hopes and made the future seem grander and the world more wide. And what Jacob had to tell could fall into no kindlier soil than the opening mind of Joseph. No hint was lost, every promise was interpreted by some waiting aspiration. And thus, like every youth of capacity, he came to have his daydreams. These day-dreams, though derided by those who cannot see the Cæsar in the careless trifler, and though often awkward and even offensive in their expression, are not always the mere discontented cravings of youthful vanity, but are frequently instinctive gropings towards the position which the nature is fitted to fill. “Our wishes,” it has been said, “are the fore-feeling of our capabilities”; and certainly where there is any special gift or genius in a man, the wish of his youth is predictive of the attainment of manhood.1 [Note: Dods.]
3. Joseph was the favourite of his father. Little harm might have come of that if Jacob had not been unwise in the manifestation of his preference. One would think that the recollection of his own experience might have prevented him from falling into such a mistake. He might have asked himself how he had liked the favouritism of his father for Esau, or what good had come out of Rebekah's preference for himself above Esau. But, untaught by the consequences of the folly of his own parents, he repeated the same himself; for he seems in some sense to have set Joseph over the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah. No doubt Joseph was particularly wise for his years; for that, according to some, is the meaning of the phrase, “a son of the old ones,” here translated “a son of old age”; but still, to put the younger over the older was pre-eminently foolish, and could only tend to provoke enmity in those who were thus humiliated. This feeling would be intensified by his giving to Joseph a peculiar dress which was intended to mark his superiority. In our version it is called “a coat of many colours,” as if its peculiarity consisted in its variegated appearance. But modern scholars are of opinion that the words describe “a tunic reaching to the extremities,” or, as in the margin of the Revised Version, “a long garment with sleeves,” and so refer to the shape rather than to the fabric; though from the fact that on one of the Egyptian tombs at Beni Hassan there is a representation of a train of captives who are clad in parti-coloured garments, it is not impossible that the tunic here specified was ornamented with many-coloured stripes. In any case it was meant as a badge of distinction and superiority for Joseph as the heir of the birthright and the favourite of his father, and so the very sight of it embittered the hearts of his brethren against him.
He had twelve sons, and they had an equal need of his affection, and an equal claim to it; but ten of them were impoverished because a favourite son received more than his share. Jacob did not love Joseph too well; that was impossible. His fault did not consist in loving one of his sons more, but in loving the others less. “In the little world in which children live there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as an injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child is exposed to; but the child is small and its world is small.” It was, no doubt, natural for Jacob to have a deep, fond love for Rachel's son, and to decide to make him his heir. Nor is it possible for a father to regard all his children with precisely the same kind of love. Some are brighter, more amiable, more companionable than others, and give him more joy. Some are unbelievers, and he regards them with a love of yearning pity, with a great deep longing for their salvation. Others are believers, and he regards them with a love of pure satisfaction and delight. But he must never cease to hold the balance evenly; and if he loves one at the expense of the others the results are inevitably evil. It has been finely said that “there is no friendship so intimate as that of a good father with a good child”; but if that intimacy implies a forgetfulness or neglect of other natural ties, both father and son are certain to find that nature does not forgive.1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 89.]
4. The common view, indeed the almost universal view, regarding Jacob's preference for Joseph, is, that Joseph was as fully worthy of Jacob's love as he fully possessed it, and that his brethren's envy was altogether causeless. Probably, however, Joseph was at this time pretty much what would be called now a spoiled child; but he was a spoiled child with many fine qualities and great capabilities. What follows of his history seems a special design of Providence to undo the spoiling, and to bring out by adversity the noble character underneath. By the circumstances of his birth, from his earliest day both Rachel and Jacob doted upon him, and how could he escape spoiling? There are, indeed, two distinct flaws in Joseph's character at this period of his life.
(1) The youth so good and pure in other respects, descended to the office of a talebearer; behind his brothers' backs the tale was told; he who should have shielded their character from shame was the first to reveal their ill doings. He “brought unto his father their evil report.” He is engaged in the very suspicious employment of family spy, carrying reports to his father against his brethren.
I notice what you say in your letter about the sin of evil speaking. It is a sin very difficult indeed to deal with, but yet very dangerous to give way to. And it is apt, if not guarded against, to become quickly a habit, and then you commit it more easily and almost unconsciously. By all means strive and pray against such a sin. Not only does joining in it lower the general tone, but it injures your own soul.
There is nothing influences our own character more than the use of words. Nothing, for instance, so fosters a spirit of self-exaltation and mars our humility as a censorious way of speaking against others. It is because of this influence on character that our Blessed Lord says of our words, “By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.”
Let it be your resolution at Christmas and the New Year to guard against and overcome this sin. I need not add how often such speaking leads us to be inconsiderate and unkind in our estimate of others. We think or speak against their weaknesses, forgetting that we, too, have our own weak points-that they have many excellences, perhaps, in which we are deficient.
Let the Spirit of Love rule in our hearts, which “thinketh no evil,” which “hopeth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things.” The Spirit of Love, that is our Christmas lesson; “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”1 [Note: J. P. F. Davidson, Letters of Spiritual Counsel, 161.]
(2) Matters were made still worse by his dreams. He told them with the utmost simplicity, but they carried their interpretation on their face, and the repetition of the same forecast, under different symbolism, intensified the provocation. He must have foreseen that the telling of the dreams could only excite their hostility the more, so there seems to have been a half-wilful gratuitous annoyance of his brethren on the calculation that he could screen himself from their anger behind his father's partiality. His brethren were in no mood to do obeisance to him, and even his father, though he resolved to keep watch and see if God had really been revealing the future to his son, blamed him for what seemed to be his pride. It is not said in the record that his dreams were prophetic, and some have preferred to believe that they came like any ordinary visions, taking their shape from the general current of Joseph's thoughts when he was awake. That is not an impossibility, but it may be nearer the mark to say that they came in the way of Divine revelation, and were among the early links in that chain of providences which ultimately led the family of Jacob to Egypt, where they could better grow into a nation than they could among the Canaanites. But, however that may have been, the very telling of them inflamed the hatred of his brethren against him, and moved them to take measures to put him out of the way.
One morning, soon after the turn towards the improvement had been reached, he told me of a dream from which he had just awakened. As he told it to me in the half-darkened room, the voice enfeebled by illness, I, afraid of forgetting it, tried to write it down word for word, and it was this: “I thought,” he said, “that I was climbing up the side of a steep mountain, and I knew that it was the mountain of Fame-Fame in the greatest sense of the word, all that is worthy of the best endeavour. It was so steep that I had to cut each step that I took, and I knew as I went on that the path I made closed up behind me, so that no one could follow where I went; and I could not find the track of any one who had gone before me. From the foot of the hill I had seen quite clearly the paths made by other men-some rough, some smooth; but when I began myself to climb, I could not see them at all; they were all hidden under tangles of thorns and briars.
“While I was still labouring on, making my path, I was suddenly lifted up and allowed for a few minutes to be on the very top of the mountain, so that I could see the whole distance laid out before me. It was more ethereal than I can describe, of a beauty that can only be imagined in a dream. I was looking over a sort of parapet, and there were pillars of some building beside me; and, though I heard voices, I could not lose one moment of the beauty by turning to see who spoke; but I was aware somehow that these people had reached the summit, and were to remain there for ever, themselves a part of that great beauty, giving out to it from their own being. And I said to myself, this is the sort of fame for which I have given my life.
“I hope,” he added, “I shall be able to keep that vision before me; I think I shall, now I have told you.”1 [Note: George Frederic Watts, ii. 142.]
So I from all things bright and brave,
Select what brightest, bravest seems,
And, with the utmost skill I have,
Contrive the fashion of my dreams.
Sometimes ambitious thoughts abound,
And then I draw my pattern bold,
And have my shuttle only wound
With silken threads or threads of gold.
Sometimes my heart reproaches me,
And mesh from cunning mesh I pull,
And weave in sad humility
With flaxen threads or threads of wool.
For here the hue too brightly gleams,
And there the grain too dark is cast,
And so no dream of all my dreams
Is ever finished, first or last.
And looking back upon my past
Thronged with so many a wasted hour,
I think that I should fear to cast
My fortunes if I had the power.
And think that he is mainly wise,
Who takes what comes of good or ill,
Trusting that wisdom underlies
And worketh in the end-His will.2 [Note: Alice Cary.]
