What Does Genesis 37:5 Mean?

Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers they hated him even more. He said to them, "Hear this dream that I have dreamed: behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf." Joseph's first dream is agricultural: sheaves bowing to a sheaf. The setting is harvest work, the daily labor of a farming household. The dream's content is transparent to both Joseph and his brothers: his sheaf stands upright and theirs bow. The elevation of one brother's position over the others, which the robe communicated visually, is now communicated in the vocabulary of agricultural hierarchy.

The brothers' interpretation of the dream is immediate and correct: "Are you indeed to reign over us? Or are you indeed to rule over us?" They do not consider whether the dream might be from God or whether its fulfillment might be far in the future. They hear it as the announcement of an ambition: that the favorite son of their father also wants to be the ruler of his brothers. The dream intensifies the hatred that the robe provoked. The robe was their father's doing; the dream is Joseph's own announcement. He is, in their reading, not just the father's favorite but someone who believes himself destined to be their superior.

The reader who knows the Joseph story knows that the dream is divine and prophetic: Joseph will indeed stand over his brothers in Egypt, and they will bow before him. The irony of the chapter is that the brothers' attempt to prevent the dream's fulfillment by selling Joseph into slavery is the very mechanism by which the dream is fulfilled. The pit and the slave caravan are not the destruction of the divine plan; they are its vehicle. God's purposes in Genesis characteristically move forward through human opposition rather than despite it.