This Dreamer Comes

Read

This chapter opens the longest continuous story in Genesis — Joseph's — and it opens badly. Favoritism, jealousy, dreams that sound like arrogance, and a betrayal severe enough to nearly end everything before it starts. Read it as the beginning of a much longer story, and notice how much of this family's old patterns are still very much alive in this new generation.

Walk-through

Loved more than his brothers (verses 1–4)

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. His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, and they hated him, and couldn't speak peaceably to him.

Genesis 37:3

This is Isaac and Esau, Jacob and Esau, playing out again in a new generation — a parent's favoritism turning brothers against each other. The coat isn't just a gift. It's a public sign of favor the other sons can't unsee.

The dreamer (verses 5–18)

Joseph makes things worse, whether he means to or not, by telling his brothers about dreams where their sheaves and even the sun, moon, and stars bow down to him. Even Jacob rebukes him for it. The brothers' resentment hardens into hatred long before Jacob sends Joseph out to check on them in the field.

Let's kill him (verses 19–28)

Behold, this dreamer comes. Come now therefore, and let's kill him, and cast him into one of the pits, and we will say, "An evil animal has devoured him." We will see what will become of his dreams.

Genesis 37:20

Reuben talks them down from murder, suggesting they throw Joseph into an empty pit instead, quietly planning to rescue him later. But while Reuben is away, the other brothers spot a caravan of traders and see another option:

What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, and let's sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not let our hand be on him; for he is our brother, our flesh.

Genesis 37:27

They sell their own brother for twenty pieces of silver, and he's carried off toward Egypt.

Deceived, and mourning (verses 29–36)

The brothers dip Joseph's coat in goat's blood and bring it to Jacob, letting him draw his own conclusion. It's a bitter echo — Jacob once deceived his own father using a goat, disguised as someone he wasn't, to take a blessing. Now Jacob himself is deceived by a goat's blood, believing his most loved son is dead.

I will go down to Sheol to my son, mourning.

Genesis 37:35

Jacob refuses to be comforted. Meanwhile, far away in Egypt, Joseph is sold again — to an official in Pharaoh's household — alive, but utterly cut off from everything and everyone he knew.

Take with you

Favoritism costs this family again, exactly the way it has before. Genesis keeps showing you the same wound reopening across generations until someone finally chooses differently.

Notice the echo of the goat and the deception. What Jacob once did to Isaac comes back around, in a different shape, to Jacob himself. This book keeps tracking consequences long after the original choice.

And hold onto Joseph's disappearance without knowing yet what it means. Jacob believes his son is dead. He has no way of knowing that this loss is the very thing that will one day save this whole family's life.