What Does Genesis 37:35 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." Thus his father wept for him. The gathering of the sons and daughters to comfort Jacob is the chapter's darkest irony. The sons who caused the grief: who stripped the robe and dipped it in blood and asked their father to identify it: are now the ones offering comfort for the grief they manufactured. They are performing the role of the grieving family around a bereaved patriarch, and the performance requires them to mourn a brother who is alive and to comfort a father they have destroyed.

Jacob's refusal to be comforted is the most human thing in the chapter: he does not want comfort; he wants Joseph. "No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning." His resolution: to carry the grief to his own death, to descend to the underworld still mourning: is the formal refusal of all the ordinary mechanisms by which grief is managed over time. He will not move through it; he will take it with him. This is not theatrical; it is the emotional reality of a father who loved one son above all others and believes that son dead. The grief that cannot be comforted is the grief that has no idea the beloved is still alive.

The final phrase: "thus his father wept for him": is the narrator's closing note on a chapter that began with Jacob's love for Joseph (v.3: "Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons") and ends with Jacob weeping for him. The love that prompted the robe produced the hatred that produced the sale that produced this weeping. Genesis is not saying that Jacob's love caused the disaster: it is showing how love expressed through favoritism in a household of rivalrous brothers can be catastrophically dangerous to the very person it is meant to honor. Joseph was endangered precisely because his father loved him most.