Who sold Joseph into slavery?

#maklelan2188

[jamesduncan]

I've heard Dr. Josh and Dr. Kill discuss this blended pair of stories as well. I love it, how it's just one more confirmation of the multiple authorship of the Pentateuch.

[mylord]

This is a brilliant job of demonstrating redaction. And in 3 minutes. Brilliant.

[angelonzuji]

More Bible contradictions, please 🤗
As a Christian I found them delightful.
It’s help me to not being dogmatic anymore as I use to be in the pass 😊

Thank you Dan for your work 🙏

[lisaboban]

Once you see this, you can't unsee it. There are 2 different stories going on here, and someone DECIDED to blend them together. It's not a history. It's not inspired. It's editing.

[SpaceLordof]

It’s also kind of strange that the story calls one of the involved groups Ishmaelites.

Joseph’s father was Jacob/Israel. Jacob’s father was Isaac, the son of Abraham. Isaac’s half brother, also the son of Abraham, was Ishmael, whom this group is named after.

Is it it weird to anyone for the story to treat these Ishmaelites as a distinct tribe of foreigners, despite only being two generations in the past?

[ChristianCarrizales]

This is my favorite example of explaining the multi-source theory of the Torah

[chasson]

I left Christianity years ago in my late 50’s. Even then I thought I knew the Bible but never even saw this particular inconsistency until today! Thanks Dan.

[leighmelnychuk]

This editing of the narrative by authors thousands of years ago sounds a lot like listening to Jordan Peterson trying to explain most of his current day talking points.

[shanegooding]

When you can't admit that there are obvious conflations of various versions of older stories you have to work ridiculously hard to convince yourself and others that this isn't the case.

[johnmurphy]

What we seem to have is an early example of Apologetics failing to unify two versions of a tale.

[Wertbag]

It all seems to come down to the one-line, Genesis 37:28 "So when the Midianite merchants came by his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for twenty shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt", but that has the name change within the single sentence, so seems unlikely the author didn't understand the name change. The apologists would say the two groups are related, perhaps Ishmaelites are a subgroup of Midianites, a tribe within a regional group. Like being a New Yorker and an American, both true at the same time while applying to a single person. I don't know if we know enough about these ancient groups to tell if this could be the case, but when I was a Christian, I would have found such a claim plausible (and of course not dug any further).

[robertmauck]

What's even better, is if you take the story on its face, Ishmael was their father's uncle. Just 2 generations down the line, and now there's enough descendants of Ishmael that they form a whole tribe. Who would have bought their 2nd cousin as a slave.

[williamwatson]

I have a problem that I have rarely if ever seen addressed. Ishmael and Midian were both children of Abraham. That would make the Ishmaelites and Midianites cousins to Joseph and his brothers, not some distant tribe.

[kkiller]

Ouu, this is really interesting. Thanks.

[HessianHunter]

If anyone wants more detail about the multiple sources in the Torah (including Genesis), Dr. Joel Baden has a ton of great lectures on the topic. He's a Yale professor and the best respected current champion of the "Documentary Hypothesis", which proposes that 4 distinct versions of the Law got stitched together like how this video shows. When pulled apart, these sources have unique and relatively coherent theologies.

For instance, the Priestly source imagines an orderly universe guided by an omnipotent deity who merely speaks the world into existence in 7 days. It painstakingly reports the exact measurements of the ark and tabernacle. It gives us the tedious laws of Leviticus.

Meanwhile, the J and E sources imagine a more personal deity that creates man out of the Earth. This god plays around and changes his mind frequently. It has humor and folklore about local heros.

Finally, the D source is all of Deuteronomy. The entire text is one speech from Moses giving the law all his people need to follow. It is clearly written to replace laws that were known before. It has one thuddingly obvious thesis - worship Yahweh alone and you will prosper. Worship other gods and you won't.

[abanks]

They're very good at ginning up stories. Especially when making up sermons to preach.

[AMoniqueOcampo]

Oh jeez. I always bought into the narrative that it was just Joseph's brothers. The Midianites were never mentioned.

[jeffmacdonald]

One of the things I find fascinating is that the Hebrew Bible generally takes this approach - merging different versions of the story into one text, while the NT preserved the different versions as separate texts. Probably because the temple cult in Jerusalem had centralized power that no one had in the early Christian church. Not until the different versions were broadly known and accepted.
It's still an interesting difference though.

[WiddleWeeWee]

Heard he was lost in a game of UNO and they couldn’t prove the guy cheated. Oh well, that was normal back then. Like child marrying old old old dudes, yuk, some still think that.

[Maurice-Navel]

In the Hebrew the 2 tellings stand out, not only in this short passage, because there are 2 separate vocabularies that show up throughout the Joseph story. The words for sack/saddlebag, Jacob/Israel, as well as the names Judah/Reuben flash by in a coherent fashion (coherent within each telling). My only surprise is discovering that the J and E documents are no longer considered separate by scholars, because they seem to define the contrasting stories.