And Joseph answered, “To-day I dreamed that the sun and the moon and eleven stars bowed down to me.”
Even his father did not quite like that. “What,” he said, “shall your mother and I and your brothers bow down to you?”
But his brothers hated him. And once, when four of them so misbehaved themselves that Joseph told his father what they had done, they hated him yet the more.
Now, when Joseph was seventeen years old, his brothers took the sheep one day and led them so far in search of green pastures that their father did not know where they had gone. So he called Joseph. “Joseph,” he said, “you know which way your brothers went; go after them and see if all is well with them and with the flocks, and bring me word again.” So Joseph started out to find his brothers, and here he searched and there he searched, till at last he found a man who knew where they had gone, and there they were. So his brothers looked up, and in the distance, shining in the sun, they saw the coat of many colors, like a walking rainbow. And they said, “There is the dreamer!” And some said, “Come, now, let us kill him and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” And others said, “No, let us not kill him. That will do us no good. Let us sell him; we will get some money.” So when Joseph came near, they laid hold of him, and pulled off his colored coat, and put him down in a deep pit till they should make up their minds what to do with him, whether to kill him or to sell him.
There, then, was Joseph, in the pit, calling and crying; and his brothers sat down to eat their supper. And as they ate, they saw in the distance a caravan of merchants on their camels, riding down from Gilead with bags of spices and balm and myrrh, to Egypt. And as they passed, the brothers hailed them and said, “We have a boy to sell. What will you give for him?” And they pulled up Joseph out of the pit, and the merchants looked at him, and said, “We will give twenty pieces of silver.” So Joseph’s brothers sold him for twenty pieces of silver. And the merchants put him on the back of a camel, and away they went.
Then said the brothers one to another, “What shall we say to father?”
And some said, “Let us kill a goat, and take the coat of many colors and dip it in the blood, and tell father that we found it in a field.” And that they did. They carried the bloody coat to Jacob, and said, “See what we found. Is it not Joseph’s coat?”
And Jacob cried out at the sight of it. “Yes,” he said, “it is my son’s coat. Some wild beast has devoured him. Joseph is no doubt torn to pieces.” And he mourned for him, day after day, and nobody could comfort him.
But the men of the caravan carried Joseph down to Egypt, and there sold him to a man named Potiphar, who