Week 1: Joseph - the Dreamer

Genesis 37 opens the longest story in the book, and it opens badly. Jacob dresses his favorite son in a long-sleeved robe, and ten brothers who can't bring themselves to speak peaceably to him watch him walk out in it every morning. Joseph dreams twice that they'll bow down to him, and tells them about it both times. So they strip the robe off him, throw him into an empty pit, sit down to eat a meal, and sell him to passing traders for twenty shekels of silver — then hand their father the robe soaked in goat's blood and let the old man reach his own conclusion. God's name never appears in the chapter. Not in the dreams, not in the pit, not in the caravan, not in Jacob's grief. Yet thirteen chapters from now Joseph will look back at this exact week and say that God meant it, and the distance between what anybody in this chapter can see and what God is actually doing is where the whole quarter lives.