What Does Genesis 37:12 Mean?

Then they took Joseph's robe and slaughtered a Goat and dipped the robe in the blood. And they sent the robe of many colors and brought it to their father and said, "This we have found; please identify whether it is your son's robe or not." The brothers construct their deception with the robe: the very object of Jacob's favoritism becomes the instrument of the cover-up. They dip it in goat's blood and let their father draw his own conclusion. They do not say Joseph is dead; they show the evidence and let the grief do the interpretive work. The passive voice of the deception is calculated: "please identify": as if they merely found a robe and are neutrally reporting it, as if the conclusion of Joseph's death is their father's own discovery rather than their manufactured story.

The goat's blood on the robe is an echo of an earlier deception: Jacob himself used a goat skin to deceive his own father Isaac in Genesis 27: to claim the blessing by pretending to be Esau. Now Jacob is deceived by his own sons using a goat. The deceiver is deceived; the instrument of the deception (the animal's covering) is the same type of creature. The reciprocal justice of the narrative is not accident; it is Genesis's consistent moral pattern: the thing you do catches up with you in the same form.

Jacob's response is everything the brothers anticipate: he identifies the robe, concludes Joseph is dead, and tears his garments in grief. "A fierce animal has devoured him," he says: the brothers' suggested cover story has worked exactly as planned. He mourns his son with a grief that will not be comforted: "I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning." The grief that the brothers orchestrated is not a performance; it is the real grief of a father who has lost the son he loved most. The brothers, who manufactured this grief with the blood of a goat, are watching it happen. They will watch it for twenty-two years.