*NOTE: I just spent five minutes trying to find a YouTube clip that has Mr. Smee saying "I've just had an apostrophe" to Captain Hook in the 1991 film Hook. Thought you'd like to know.
Being from Canada, and at that time, northern Ontario, the well-worn Biblical phrase "the wilderness" always made me think of the only wilderness I'd ever known -the eighty-billion-kilometre expanse of pine trees and lumberjacks that is northern Ontario. Cold in the winter, yes, but otherwise relatively full of shelter, firewood, water, etc.
But looking around while actually in Israel, the true meaning of "the wilderness" really sunk in, and all those stories took on a whole new level of vibrancy and desolation.
This is what gets underscored to me first off with today's reading. There have been a few examples of it so far, but here we've got two more: people using trees as landmarks. Abraham had gone specifically to the oaks of Mamre (still around, by the way), and here Jacob hit all the false-god loot under "the oak which was near Shechem" before travelling to Bethel, which was formerly called Luz, which means "almond tree."
Just a funny thing that struck me. Trees are rare enough that they can be referred to individually.
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Here's another weird thing about names, and Jacob/Israel in particular: he gets his name changed twice. Here he is again, this time it's specifically identified as God doing the naming, and this time it's followed up with a renewal of the Abrahamic covenant as applied to Jacob/Israel. I have no idea why this is happening again, except for maybe there was a foreshadowing element to the previous one, and it was an angel after all... But that's doing that whole second-guessing-the-text thing, which I'm less comfortable with than just shrugging and saying "okay, so this time, he's really Israel."
Only he's still not, at least not all the time...
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Oh, and Isaac dies. Yeah, he was still alive the whole time. Remember when he gave the Jacob-in-goat-clothing the blessing instead of Esau, when he was already too blind to tell his sons apart, and told Esau to make him some food so that he could get Isaac's blessing because Isaac didn't know how much longer he had? Turned out, he had several more decades in him. But, in keeping with the sparse coverage of things-Isaac in Genesis so far, he gets another couple of verses, a polite send-off and that's the last we hear of him.
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Our first introduction to Joseph is a sort of mixed bag. On the one hand, if we're familiar with the stories (or the Andrew Lloyd Weber canon of musical theatre) then we're already pretty in-tune with the fact that this guy's one of the first (and few) overall pretty genuinely great folks in the Bible. On the other hand, he does start out a bit... snotty.
He's already the favourite. His dad, who apparently makes no bones about the fact that Joseph is his prized son, has given him a fabulous coat. Incidentally, this also strikes me as a good little wake-up call for how different everything was way back when (and by that I pretty much mean from the dawn of time to the middle of the 18th century or even a bit later)...
The coat, according to the Bible, was "multicoloured." That's it. Not tassled, it didn't light up, it wasn't spun with gold... it probably didn't even have polished silver oval wifi 2GB USB cufflinks. Just a variety of colours.
But, before artificial dyes and textile factories, colour was an enormous thing. It was tremendously expensive, as a rule, and was actually really, really hard to come by in most cases. So a coat of many colours was already one of the fanciest things, almost literally, in the whole world. THAT is where wealth and extravagance have come.
Back then, the sign of a wealthy father's adoration of his favourite son was a (probably still pretty rough-spun) tunic thing that had three or four colours of fabric. Today, with $250, you can connect to basically the entirety of human knowledge, collected in ethereal space, using your shirt, AND keep photos safe while you're at it. Or for $350,000, you can have a flying car.
Moving right along...
So Joseph is clearly the darling of the family, and a family that is literally built on rivalries and competitions for affection and status, and one that clearly does not conform to many normal happy family benchmarks (is it a bad time to bring up the fact that Reuben slept with his brothers' mom? Fine, I won't)
He's significantly younger than many of his brothers, and is completely in the throws of The Stupid Years to boot. (though it's almost comforting to discover that 17-year-old boys have, apparently, been obnoxious and awkward since the dawn of time...).
So it's true that for the rest of his life, Joseph's knack for dreams will take him places, to put it mildly, he maybe needs to work on his delivery, and choose a more subtle time to tell his father, mother and brothers that he's had these awesome dreams where he's the king of the universe ("and you were there, and you were there, and you were there..."), ruling over all the rest of them, who spend the whole dream bowing down to him.
Now, did he deserve to be thrown into a pit and left there to die? No. Did he deserve to be sold into slavery? Still no, I feel. However, Joseph, this may have been a good time to put into practice one of Wil Wheaton's most memorable axioms: don't be a dick.
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