Joseph Part 1: Introduction

Introduction to The Joseph Story

So we're gonna overview in this first session.

And we are going to do some review. Remind ourselves what are you supposed to already know walking into the story of Joseph and his brothers? 

The story of Joseph and his brothers. These are the 12 sons of Jacob, who is the son of Isaac, who's the son of Abraham, who's the son of a guy named Terah, who's 10 sons away from a guy named Shem, who's the son of a guy named Noah, who's 10 generations away from a set of characters named Adam and Eve.

So that's all the generations in the Genesis scroll. And we're at now a story of 12 sons, and it's the second-to-last son, Joseph, who's the key character who's elevated literally and metaphorically in the opening scene. 

The story of Joseph and his brothers has three you could call them acts using stage play metaphors. And actually the three acts are really intentionally organized in how they transition from one another. 

So here's the overview. Act one.

The story is gonna begin with a 17-year-old Joseph. Quick note, Joseph comes to us from the English translation tradition the name Joseph. In Semitic languages, there's no sound or letter for "juh".

It's the equivalent of in English, we have the letter juh, J, and we have the letter Y, yuh. But in any languages connected back to Semitic root, but also many European languages too just have one letter, which is Y, the letter Y, yuh. So in Hebrew his name is Yoseph. Actually, there's no Js in any of the Hebrew names of the characters in the Bible. It's all ... just put in yuh. So it's Yoseph and the son of Yaaqov.

So it begins with a 17-year-old Yoseph who has some dreams about how he is going to be elevated as the ruler of his brothers and of the universe ruling over the sun, moon, and stars. Well, his brothers are not into these dreams like at all. So he's gonna be kidnapped by them. And one of his brothers, Reuven, is going to try and rescue him, but that plan fails. Instead, it's his other older brother, Yehudah or Judah in English. Yehudah makes a plan to counter Reuven's plan, and that plan is successful 'cause it involves selling Joseph as a slave down to Egypt.

The sons go then and deceive their father about what happened to Yoseph, and their father is brokenhearted.

Next comes a story about that deceptive older brother Yehudah. And it's a story about he, how he is deceptive towards his daughter-in-law.

And that deception is actually going to destroy the future of his family. And so his daughter-in-law counter-deceives her deceptive father-in-law, and through that counter-deception, actually saves the family line from destruction.

Then we go back to the story of Yoseph, and he goes from being in prison down in Egypt to his dreams coming true, being elevated as ruler over Egypt. 

That's act one. And you can see the dreams of his elevation. He goes down into the prison in Egypt, and then he is elevated up as the ruler of Egypt. 

Act two.

There's a famine in the land, food shortage. And so those brothers end up going down to Egypt looking for food, and who do they meet there? The brother that they sold into slavery. And now Yoseph begins his own deceptive scheme to test his brothers. And so he puts his brothers through a whole series of tricky tests to try and recreate the circumstances in which they betrayed him so long ago. And in so doing, he reveals whether or not they've changed. And in fact, they have.

What happens in the center unit is that Yoseph takes one of their brothers, keeps him in prison, sends them back with food. And when that food runs out, their dad Yaaqov says, "Hey, go get more food from Egypt." And they say, "Well, we can't, unless we bring your youngest most beloved son Benyamin." Benjamin. Of course, Benyamin is the younger brother of Yoseph.

And so Yaaqov's like, listen, I've lost two sons already. One, I don't know where he is. And the other one is down in prison in Egypt. And so Reuven pipes up again with a plan. How about this? You can kill my sons if we don't bring Benyamin back to you.

And Yaaqov is like, you're crazy. Like what, more sons dying? Like, that's not what I need around here. But then Yehudah pipes up, and he's got an alternate plan. And that plan is that he will offer his own life as a substitute for the younger Benyamin. And that's what compels Yaaqov to send them down. Notice the interplay of Reuven and Yehudah in the betrayal and also now here in the resolution of the test.

So they go down to Egypt. Yehudah ends up giving this epic climactic speech where he offers his own life into slavery on behalf of Benyamin. And this is the moment that Yoseph knows that my brothers have truly changed. The brother that sold him into slavery now offers himself as a slave in the place of his brother. 

So Yoseph at the end of act two reveals his disguise, and the test is over. And it's actually through his disguise and deceptive testing that he rescues his family from destruction. 

That rings a bell, people putting on disguises and testing family members in order to save the family. And you're like, I think that's happened a couple times now in this story,

bringing us to the final act. The whole family, Yaaqov, goes down to Egypt where the ruler Yoseph has created a little wonderful garden good land full of abundant food as a refuge for his family. Oh yes, and it's Yehudah who ends up leading them down.

Yoseph provides food for his family. He provides food for the Egyptians. And then the story ends with Yaaqov, the father, drawing near to his death. And so he gives a blessing upon Yoseph. He elevates Yehudah as the ruler among the brothers, and he gives a non blessing to Reuven.

And then both Yaaqov and Yoseph draw near to death at different times and ask their family to take their bones and bodies up out of Egypt to bury them in the land of Canaan.

And that's the story. So what I'm trying to show in terms of how the story's been designed, you know, this little visual thing in my notes is just a visual abstraction to try and mark the way the story itself has been designed into these chunks. 

And notice how there's symmetries and matching correspondence around all of this. 

The theme of Yoseph as the ruler going down low and then being raised up high is a feature of both the first act and the third act. Notice the repetition of Reuven, who's the firstborn of Yaaqov, versus Yehudah, the fourth born of Yaaqov, and at every act, they have these competitions as it were. So you've got these three brothers prominent among the 12. You've got Reuven who ought to be the firstborn, then you've got Yehudah who keeps being prominent, and then you've got Yoseph, the younger, who keeps being the ruler. There's something going on here 

The firstborn and the second-to-last born end up being put into inverse opposite relationships, which is a theme in the Genesis scroll.

Notice how disguises and deceptions keep playing a role here. Sons deceive a father, daughter-in-laws deceive a father. And that father in-law was actually the son who deceived his father in relation to his brother. It gets, you know, like soap opera real quick here.

This story is about a family fractured by jealousy, anger, and betrayal. But it is also about how those betrayals become the vehicle for the purposes of God in and through this family. - Tim Mackie, The Bible Project

It's actually through these betrayals that God is able to counter and weave a story of rescue and transformation despite what these people keep doing to each other. And it ends with a promise of a ruler who will bring a blessing out of this family for all of the nations by the end of the scroll. 

Later Recollections: The Story of Yaaqov’s Sons

Numbers 13-14: Spies from the 12 tribes are sent to investigate the promised land. Joshua (from Ephrayim of Yoseph) and Caleb (from Yehudah) are the only spies among all the 12 tribes who trust Yahweh; the others die in exile while these two inherit the land.

1 Kings 11:26-40: The 10 northern tribes of Israel are led by Jeroboam son of Yoseph to rebel against Solomon son of Yehudah, and so the tribes divide into two kingdoms. Solomon is jealous and tries to kill Jeroboam, who flees into exile in Egypt (!).

Ezekiel 37:15-22: Ezekiel develops the portrait of Yoseph’s reconciliation with his brothers in Genesis 45-50, and he anticipates the final reconciliation of the brothers. He highlights the tribes of Yoseph and Yehudah as two separate groups that will be one, and their reunion will signal the inheritance of a renewed Eden.

Zechariah 10:6-10: Zechariah sees Israel’s past exile in Egypt as an image of Israel’s present exile, and the division of the brothers as an image of Israel’s scattering that will be reversed by yet another exodus and reconciliation of the family.

1 Chronicles 5:1-2: In this recollection of the family line of Yisrael, the Chronicler (who lives long after the Babylonian exile) reflects back on the reversal of birth order recounted in Genesis 37-50. But he also sees how that reversal anticipates the entire history of rivalry between the tribes of Yehudah and Yoseph narrated in the Former Prophets (Joshua-Kings).

Acts 7:9-29: In Stephen’s final speech before he is murdered, he recounts the story of the Torah and Prophets, focusing specially on two rulers in Israel who were rejected by their brothers: Yoseph and Moses. He sees a deep parallel between both figures, who were chosen by God to rule and deliver, but who were rejected and persecuted by their own family members. Stephen argues that this pattern has repeated itself in the rejection of Jesus Messiah by the leaders of Israel in his own day.

Later biblical authors see the story of Yoseph, Yehudah, and the division and reconciliation of the family as a forward preview of the entire history of Israel leading up to the messianic age.

These past stories were designed to display a pattern that kept repeating itself through Israel’s history, leading up to the time of Jesus and the apostles.

For the biblical authors, the key to understanding their present and future was found in these narrative about their past. The past anticipates the future, and the present maps onto what has come before and what will come later.

https://bibleproject.com/videos/genesis-12-50/

The Chosen, the Snake, and the Cycles of Genesis

This opening act of the Yoseph and Yehudah story is designed in a symmetrical way to show how the events set in motion by the brothers in chapter 37 are reversed and come full circle in chapter 41.

The key plot conflict revolves around Yoseph’s dreams of becoming ruler of the world and of his family (Gen. 37:2-14), and by the final scene of this act, those dreams start becoming reality (Gen. 41:1-57).

Dreams: Yoseph’s two dreams (ch. 37) // the two dreams of Pharaoh’s servants (ch. 40) // the two dreams of Pharaoh that result in Yoseph’s elevation as ruler (ch. 41)

Robes: Yoseph is given a special robe that symbolizes his father’s favoritism and also his dream of royal rule (ch. 37). That robe is taken away by his brothers and used to deceive Yaaqov (Gen. 37:31-36). // In the central story, Tamar the daughter also uses deceptive clothing to trick her father-in-law into having sex with her, in order to save his family’s future (ch. 38). // Potiphar’s wife also uses Yoseph’s robe to trick her husband (ch. 39). // Yoseph’s royal robe is restored when he is elevated in Egypt in the restoration of his dreams (ch. 41).

Deception: Yoseph is tricked and taken advantage of two times in this section, by his brothers (Gen. 37:15-30) and by Potiphar’s wife (Gen. 39:1-23), both resulting in a series of descents: into a pit, then into Egypt, then into a prison which is later called a pit. // Yaaqov is deceived by his sons, who rob him of his favored son who is now believed to be dead (Gen. 37:33-35). // These two deceptions are mirrored by Tamar’s deception that results in new life for Yehudah’s family and reverses the deaths of the past.

Death of the son: In chaper 37, Yaaqov loses the firstborn son of his beloved wife Rachel. // In chapter 38, Yehudah loses his two firstborn sons, only to have two new sons born to him through Tamar’s deception. // In chapter 41, Yoseph, who is in Egypt because of his brothers’ deception, gets married and has two sons.

The Puzzle of Genesis 38

The sordid story of Yehudah and Tamar in Genesis 38 may at first seem to be a digression from the main plotline of the Yoseph narrative. But this is only a surface-level impression. The core themes are deeply connected to the flow of Genesis 37-41 (royal rule, deception, robes, death of the son, future of the family), and the focus on Yehudah himself is anything but random. Yehudah is key to Yoseph’s sale into slavery in chapter 17. And together with chapter 38, these stories form the counterpoint to the central role Yehudah will play in Act 2 (Gen. 42-45), specifically his humility and self-giving love when he offers his own life in the place of his brother Binyamin (Gen. 44:14-34).

Section 1: Yoseph’s Dreams and Hostile Brothers

Genesis 37:2 CSB

2 These are the family records of Jacob. At seventeen years of age, Joseph tended sheep with his brothers. The young man was working with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought a bad report about them to their father.

The first sentence is, Genesis chapter 37 verse 32a, "And these are the birth generations of Yaaqov, Jacob." Now let's just notice something.

This is the second sentence of what in your Bible is labeled chapter 37.

Our modern chapter divisions and verse divisions, they're immensely helpful. 'Cause like how would you know, how can we all get to the same point without having some kind of notation system?  that's a great strength. 

A great weakness of this system, chapter and verse system, is that it was a much later development in the history of the Bible. The original manuscripts were not written with these. And the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible that we have are from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they don't have any chapter verse notations. And so what chapter and verses do is they're a layer of interpretation that's kind of like a glaze overlaying that can distract you sometimes from what the authors might have been trying to do. 

And so this is a good example where this little phrase, "and these are the birth generations of," fill in a name. This is a big glowing marker of a macro division that spans the entire Genesis scroll. This phrase appears 10 times.

And those 10 times are marking out the sequence of generations throughout the whole of the book.

So I'm just gonna walk you through them real quick, and it will begin to focus our answer to the question of why this story about the youngest son and his older brother, Judah, and the failed firstborn, Reuben, like, why this here now? 

Why this at the culmination of the Genesis scroll? 

If you search for this Hebrew, this word here, birth generations or generations, what you discover, it's the Hebrew word "toledot." And it's a noun that comes from the root word "to birth," "give birth to." So the birthings.

These are the birthings of, and then the name.

“Birth-generations” = Hebrew toledot / תודלות , which is a noun built from the root “to birth,” meaning “the things that issued from” or “the things that were birthed from"

With this introductory phrase, the final literary movement of Genesis begins and ties this particular block of narratives into the wider themes of the entire scroll. This heading “These are the birth-generations of …” appears 12 times in the Genesis scroll, six in Genesis 1:1-11:26, and six times in Genesis 11:27-50:26. In 10 of those 12 cases, the phrase has the same function, as it introduces the new descendants of each generation, one of whom will be singled out by God’s blessing and election

Right after the seven day creation narrative, you get this phrase, "these are the birthings of the skies and the land." Well that's interesting. The sky and the land give birth to things? Well yes, actually. God summons forth the animals from the ground. He summons forth the plants from the ground. And he, right, he makes humans from the ground. So the skies and the land give birth.

So the pivot sentence between the seven-day creation story and the Eden story is Genesis 2:4, and this is the first appearance. And what follows are the Adam and Eve stories. But the moment they give birth to their two sons and those two sons have a conflict, one son is chosen, the other son is the non-chosen, and that creates a conflict. 

And so what you'll find is a separating of the brothers, and then you'll have lots of genealogies that are tracing the separate lines leading you to Genesis 5 verse 1, A new genealogy that's gonna trace the chosen son's lineage through Adam all the way to Noah, which leads you to the next appearance of the phrase. "These are the birth generations of Noah." Then you get Noah's story. And he just like Adam and Eve, he and his wife birth three sons. Then you get a narrative of his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and a long genealogy that separate out the chosen line from the two non chosen.

And then you'll get a genealogy. "These are the birth generations of Shem," the chosen one. And that leads you down 10 more generations to a guy named Terah. 

So it's a chosen one, some sort of conflict and failure leading to a separation of the brothers, an elevation of the chosen one. Let's finish the line off with the non-chosen, now you know where those guys land. Now let's focus in on the chosen line, and then repeat. Narrative, chosen, failure, separation of brothers, follow the non-chosen off. Okay, put them back there. Back to the narrative. And this happens, you can just see the cycle right here, yep, in Genesis 1 through 11.

This cycle replays itself over the course of Genesis 11 to the end of the scroll, tracing three generations.

So from Shem you get, "these are the birth generations of Terah." That's Abraham's dad.

And you get a whole section of the Abraham stories. Abraham and his wife, and his two wives, are gonna give birth to two firstborn sons, Yishmael and Isaac. Yishmael is the non-chosen, he goes off stage with the genealogy. Isaac and then his son Jacob is put on the center stage. "These are the birth generations of Yitskhaq." And you get the story of the sons that he births, Yaaqov.

Yitskhaq has two sons, Jacob and Esau.

You get their story. Esau's ushered off stage with a long genealogy. "These are the birth generations of Jacob." And here we are.

This whole story is telling you a tale of two seeds. The Chosen and the non-chosen

So there's the seed that God is continuously gonna choose out of each cycle of creation, failure, de-creation, leading to the chosen one who becomes the birth of a new creation. And each one of these chosen ones goes through a melody cycle that we traced a session before last. But that chosen one will always be selected out of an existing, a larger set of siblings. And it begins actually with humans and the snake.

You can just go right on down the line here and you can see all of these descendants here are singled off. 

what's really remarkable is that if you go read these stories, Cain, Japheth, Yishmael, Esau, are all marked as when they're singled off, they go and dwell in the east, and build cities or tent camps in the east. And then pay attention to their genealogies. They all start marrying each other.

Ishmaelites get intermarried with the descendants of Esau.

And then they are intermarrying or making pacts with descendants of Japheth. And so it truly is a tale of two seeds.

So you're tempted to think, oh, so this is like the story of the good guys and the story of the bad guys.

But occasionally, the chosen one acts like the non-chosen one, like the time that Abraham and Sarah sexually abused their Egyptian slave. You have the chosen abusing the non-chosen. And so what does God do with Hagar and Yishmael? He saves them and says, "I will bless them and make them into a great nation." What happens when the chosen one is straight up born acting like a snake? He comes out snatching the heel, trying to grab the heel of his brother, and he is a deceiver from birth. And depending on how you read a story, a deceiver or a trickster to the day he dies.

And his brother, Esau, he's no better, but he comes off looking a lot better than his brother. And so what happens when the first are last and the last are first.

And so there's this interesting interplay where God is constantly, the heroes come from both lines and the bad people come from both lines.

And so this begins to teach you something that we're not, like we have no A team here. Like you just have the B team and the C team and the D team. And what God will do is generously choose those for his purposes, but it's going to put the chosen in a very precarious situation where they will have to face choices and tests as to how they respond to the status and responsibility they've been given. This is very interesting. It's not a binary chosen and non-chosen, because the non-chosen can marry into and sometimes save the chosen. 

Tamar is a Canaanite, she's a descendant of Ham, but yet she saves the family of Judah.

So I was really, paying attention to where characters' family lines are traced back to, is a big part of the messaging of the story. This start to create categories in your mind? So this will all become really helpful at key moments in the story of Joseph.

“The Genesis story moves from (1) the skies and the land (5:1-6:8) to (4) Shem (11:10-26)) to (5) Terah (11:27-25:11) to (6) Yitzhak (1:1-2:3) to (2) humanity (2:4-4:26) to (3) Noah (25:19-35:29) and finally to (7) Ya'akov (37:2-50:26) … The seven divisions move from larger to smaller unit until the readers arrive at the central vehicle through which God will accomplish redemption—the nation of Israel represented by its twelve patriarchs. The toledot structure ensures that the narrative does not wander aimlessly but focuses attention on the line of promise commissioned to carry out God’s purposes in the world.”

Emadi, Samuel (2018). Yoseph, Covenant, and Typlogy. Tyndale Bulletin, Volume 69.1. 50.

This compositional design shows the narrator’s focus on tracing the lineage of the chosen family. This obsession with a particular family line is rooted in the early Genesis narratives about humanity’s calling to rule creation. Once that calling is forfeited, the promise narrows in on the seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15-16) who will undo what was lost in Eden. The design of Genesis shows that tracing the line of this promised seed is of ultimate importance to the author. And in the Yoseph story, that promise leads us to two prominent sons: Yoseph and Yehudah.

Joseph’s Dream

Bibliography

BibleProject. “Joseph.” BibleProject Classroom. Accessed March 17, 2026. https://bibleproject.com/classroom/joseph.

Bible Hub. “What is Joseph’s Robe’s Significance?” Bible Hub. Accessed March 17, 2026. https://biblehub.com/q/What_is_Joseph_s_robe_s_significance.htm.

Moisés Silva and Merrill Chapin Tenney, in The Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible, A-C (Grand Rapids, MI: The Zondervan Corporation, 2009), 75.

Jeffries M. Hamilton, “Adullam (Place),” in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1:81.

David Mandel, in Who’s Who in the Jewish Bible (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2007).

Shabda History. “Egyptian Seven Cows.” Shabda History. April 15, 2026. https://history.shabda.co/articles/egyptian-seven-cows/.

Thoralf Gilbrant, “שָׁלוֹם,” in The Old Testament Hebrew-English Dictionary (WORDsearch, 1998).

Douglas Mangum, Miles Custis, and Wendy Widder, Genesis 12–50, Logos Research Commentaries (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2026).

John M’Clintock and James Strong, “Shaving (1),” in Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1880), 9:623.

Marvin R. Wilson, “Barbers & Beards,” in Dictionary of Daily Life in Biblical & Post-Biblical Antiquity (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2014), 1:139.