CHAPTER II.
JOSEPH SOLD TO THE ISHMAELITES.
We have just seen that Joseph’s brethren, moved by envy, sold him to some Ishmaelite merchants, by whom he was carried into Egypt, and there sold as a slave. Regardless of their brother’s cries, and deaf to all that affection might whisper, the future patriarchs would make him the victim of their hatred; and it is deeply instructive to notice how many sins are contained in this one transaction.
1. There was a sin committed by brothers against a brother. The ties of nature were outraged. Affection was trampled in the dust,—it was in truth cast into the pit beside Joseph,—it had no power in the hearts of those hating and hateful men. Surely such a case occurring in the Bible so soon after the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, was designed by God to show us the terrible ravages wrought by sin in the soul. Just as war, with its bloody work, has often deflowered the fairest regions of the earth, does fierce passion waste the soul of man.
2. There was sin committed against their father. What although the patriarch should suffer uttermost woe when bereft of his favourite son! or what although his heart should break when the tidings reached him that Joseph had been cruelly devoured by a wild beast! It was not to such things that those men would listen: it was to their own malicious hearts; and, cost what it might to their father, their brother must either die or become a slave. You may assure the sinner that the wages of sin is death,—you may tell him that agony for ever is attached to guilt by God’s decree; but all that will not turn the wicked from his way. God must turn us, or we rush unchecked upon ruin.
3. In the sin of Joseph’s brethren there was falsehood, and that to a parent. Those men deliberately plotted to deceive Jacob, by showing him the coat of Joseph dipped in the blood of a kid. They utterly forgot that God saw them; they listened only to their own hearts; and sin was added to sin, that their passion might be indulged. To the crime of murder—the murder of a brother—which some of them were willing to perpetrate, they added that of deception, deep in itself and sad in all its results. Now in all this they were just showing us more and more clearly what iniquity lurks or reigns in the heart of man, till the Almighty Spirit make all things new.
4. In that sin there was spite, and that against a brother. We have seen that there is reason to believe (Gen. xxxvii. 2) that Joseph had formerly blamed some of the practices in which his brethren indulged while they were from under their parent’s eye, and that had provoked their antipathy: “They hated him” when they saw that his father loved him. And here again we see one reason why men have always ranked envy among the vilest and the meanest of the sins.
5. It need scarcely be added that there was cruelty in that crime. Those brothers were deaf to the cries of the stripling; the majority of them were not unwilling to put him to death amid lingering agonies,—that is, to leave him to die of hunger in a pit, unheeded and unrelieved. When we see fools making a mock at sin, and multitudes seeking in it the only pleasure or the only gratification which they know, surely that is because they do not know the dark depths into which it sinks them!
6. And, to name no more, there was in that sin the love of money, which is the root of all evil. Those unnatural brothers, blinded by hatred, and eager to get the offender out of the way, actually sold him for a slave. They valued gold or silver more than their brother’s life, his happiness, or his affection. He might have to wear chains, or carry burdens heavier than he could bear; but what of all that, if their hatred was indulged, and Joseph put out of their sight! Till then they could not be at ease. His deportment was a rebuke to them. He seemed holier than they, and because of that he must suffer; they must contract guilt upon guilt. Now, is not this, in spirit, the very same kind of sin as that which led Satan to tempt and ruin man?
Such are some of the views suggested by this sad transaction—the selling of Joseph. But little did his brothers know that these sins would find them out. Little did they expect that even upon earth they would see in Joseph all that his dreams had predicted,—themselves at his feet, and doing him obeisance with all their heart. And little did they know that God was to be with their brother of a truth, to bless him and make him a blessing. But so it was; and Joseph became a type of Jesus, persecuted by his brothers, but exalted by his God; buried out of sight, yet raised to a throne; the victim of malignity at man’s hand, but beloved of God, and therefore set on high.