What Does Genesis 37:31 Mean?

Then they took Joseph's robe and slaughtered a Goat and dipped the robe in the blood. The brothers use the robe: the garment that was the emblem of Jacob's favoritism: as the instrument of the deception that replaces it. The special robe that Jacob gave to Mark Joseph above his brothers will now be used to tell Jacob that Joseph is dead. The object of the father's love becomes the tool of the father's destruction. The brothers did not plan this when they stripped the robe at the pit; they improvise with what they have. The robe is available; the goat is available; the combination produces the evidence they need.

The use of a goat's blood on the robe to deceive Jacob is an echo of an earlier scene that Genesis expects the careful reader to recognize. In Genesis 27, Jacob deceived his father Isaac by wearing goat skins on his hands and neck to simulate Esau's appearance, obtaining the blessing by pretending to be his brother. Now Jacob's sons deceive their father with goat's blood on Joseph's robe, manufacturing the appearance of death. The deceiver is deceived using the same animal by different means. The pattern is not accidental; Genesis is consistent in its moral architecture: the deceptions a generation commits return in new forms to the generation that follows.

The slaughter of the goat is a cold-blooded act. It is not passion or panic; it is planning. The brothers sit with the robe and a dead goat and make a deliberate decision about how to manage the next twenty-two years of their father's grief. They are constructing a lie comprehensive enough to last. The lie will cost them: not the discovery of it, which won't come until Egypt, but the living with it. Every time Jacob mourns Joseph in their presence, every time he refuses to be comforted, every time he names the grief that will follow him to Sheol: the brothers will have made it possible.