What Does Genesis 37:9 Mean?

They said to one another, "Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits. Then we will say that a fierce animal has devoured him, and we will see what will become of his dreams." The brothers' plan is to kill Joseph and use one of the empty cisterns in the field as his grave. The cover story: a wild animal killed him: attributes his death to the landscape's ordinary dangers. The most chilling element of their speech is the final taunt: "we will see what will become of his dreams." They intend to kill the dreamer and by killing him destroy the dream's possibility of fulfillment. They understand the dreams as claims about the future; killing Joseph is their answer to those claims.

Reuben intervenes: "Let us not take his life." His motive, the narrator reveals, was to restore Joseph to his father: to rescue him from the brothers and return him home. He proposes throwing Joseph into the pit without killing him, intending to come back and retrieve him. The brothers agree. When Joseph arrives, they strip him of the special robe and throw him into the empty cistern. The robe that marked his elevated status is taken first: before anything else, the symbol of favoritism is removed. The pit receives him without water, and the brothers sit down to eat.

The image of the brothers eating their meal while Joseph is in the pit is one of the Bible's sharpest pictures of moral numbness. Their brother is in a hole in the ground, crying out (we will learn later from their own testimony that he pleaded with them: Genesis 42:21). They are eating. The normalcy they maintain in the face of what they have done is not the calm of people who have resolved their conscience but the numbness of people who have chosen not to feel what is happening. The meal over the pit is the moment when the brothers are at their most human and their most terrible.