What Does Genesis 37:7 Mean?

So when Joseph's brothers came to Shechem to pasture their father's flock, Jacob said to Joseph, "Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them." And Joseph said, "Here I am." The detail that the brothers are at Shechem is freighted with narrative memory. It was at Shechem that Dinah was assaulted and where Simeon and Levi massacred the city's men. The family's relationship with Shechem is already marked by violence. Jacob's willingness to send his beloved son to meet his hostile brothers at Shechem: the place of the last great family catastrophe: is a narrative warning that the reader hears more clearly than Jacob does.

Jacob's instructions are simple: go, see whether your brothers are well, and bring me word. The errand is the kind a father might send any son on: a welfare check on the ones working in the field. But the sons who are being checked on hate the son being sent. The ordinary domestic errand is being dispatched into an extraordinary atmosphere of hatred. Joseph's cheerful response: "Here I am": is the response of a son who does not know what his brothers have been saying among themselves about him. He goes willingly, without suspicion, into the situation that will destroy his life as he has known it.

"Here I am": the Hebrew hinneni: is a significant phrase in Genesis. Abraham said it when God called him to the Akedah. Jacob said it when God spoke to him. Now Joseph says it to his father's errand. The three uses of the word in different contexts create a resonance: the willingness to present oneself for a calling, a test, a commission. Joseph does not know he is entering a test. He knows only that his father wants him to check on his brothers. He goes: and everything changes.