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15. Jacob's Sons.
Jacob had twelve sons.
Their names are: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Dan,
Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Joseph and Benjamin. But Jacob liked Joseph better
than the other sons and gave him more beautiful clothes. Therefore the
brothers envied him. Joseph also had strange dreams. Once, for example,
he dreamt that the sun, the moon and eleven stars were bowing down to
him, so that his father said to him, ‘What kind of dreams are these?
Shall your father, your mother and your eleven brothers come and fall
down before you?’ As if the sun signified to his father, the moon to his
mother, and the eleven stars to his brothers, that they would still
kneel down before him and worship him. - It is quite possible that
something like this could happen. -
Once Jacob sent him out a long way, where his brothers were grazing, to
see how they were doing. Joseph went, but he never came home. He did not
know what misfortune and exaltation he was heading for. The course of
man is not in his power. For when his brothers saw him from afar, they
said, ‘Look, here comes the dreamer!’ At first they wanted to kill him.
But Reuben, the eldest among them, was also the most prudent, as
befitted his years. He said: ‘We don't want to stain our hands with our
brother's blood. We would rather throw him into a pit.’ For he intended
to pull him out again secretly and bring him to his father so that he
might be saved.
So they threw him into a pit to die of hunger. Afterwards, foreign
merchants travelling to Egypt passed by with their camels. So they took
him out of the pit again and sold him to the strangers for twenty pieces
of silver. Then they slaughtered a goat and dipped Joseph's beautiful
coat, the hated one, in the blood and sent it home to his father, saying,
‘We have found this coat; look at it to see if it is not your son's coat.’
When Jacob saw it, he cried out, ‘It is my son's coat; an evil beast has
eaten it; a ravenous beast has torn Joseph in two.’ His daughters came
to comfort him; his sons also came, the wicked ones, and comforted him
with hypocritical expressions. But he would not accept any consolation,
but from that time on he lamented his son as dead, even though he was
alive. This atrocity will not go unpaid by the sons of Jacob.
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