What Does Genesis 37:13 Mean?

All his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted and said, "No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning." And his father wept for him. Jacob's refusal to be comforted stands as one of the Old Testament's most human expressions of grief. He does not want comfort; he wants his son. The conventional mourning practices: the gathering of children, the sitting with the bereaved, the words of consolation: cannot reach him. He will die in his grief, he says; he will take it to Sheol with him. The grief is absolute because the love was absolute.

The presence of "all his sons" among those offering comfort is the narrative's darkest irony. The sons who caused the grief are among those trying to comfort its victim. They know what they did; they know their father's grief is the direct consequence of their actions; and they sit with him and offer condolences that cannot be genuine because they know the truth the condolences are built on. The lie they are maintaining requires them to perform grief alongside their father while harboring the knowledge that would end his grief instantly if he knew it.

The twenty-two years during which Jacob mourns Joseph as dead: while Joseph is alive in Egypt: is the domestic consequence of the brothers' sin that runs silently through every subsequent chapter. Jacob's household is a household in mourning for a living man. The grief that will not be comforted will eventually be lifted by the news from Egypt that Joseph lives. But the lifting of that grief, when it comes in Genesis 45, will itself require Jacob to hear what his sons did: replacing his grief for Joseph with grief for what his sons became in that field near Dothan.