What Does Genesis 37:10 Mean?

Then they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Judah said to his brothers, "What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother, our own flesh." Judah's intervention shifts the plan from murder to sale. His reasoning is partially pragmatic (why kill when we can profit?) and partially fraternal (he is our brother, our flesh). The appeal to brotherhood is remarkable coming from someone who has just participated in throwing that brother into a pit. Judah is not arguing from principle; he is arguing from a combination of commercial opportunism and residual family feeling that falls well short of actually rescuing Joseph.

The Ishmaelites passing with their caravan: spices, balm, and Myrrh bound for Egypt: represent the international trade network that connected Canaan to Egypt in this period. Their presence is providential in the structure of the narrative: they appear exactly when the brothers need an alternative to murder, and they are going exactly where Joseph needs to be taken. The God who works through unlikely mechanisms in Genesis is working here through the ordinary commerce of a trading caravan. The brothers sell their brother for twenty pieces of silver: the price of a healthy male slave in the middle Bronze Age.

The sale of Joseph by his brothers to slave traders appears in Genesis 37 and will be described again in Genesis 45:4, where Joseph: now Pharaoh's second-in-command: reveals himself to his brothers. "I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt." The plain statement of what happened: "whom you sold": is the fact that cannot be smoothed over. The brothers did specifically "let him go" or "send him away." They sold him. The transaction is as commercial and as callous as the narrator describes it, and Joseph will remember the exact terms of it.