The Pit, the Prison, and the Palace

Jacob favours the son of his old age openly, and gives him a garment whose description is uncertain but whose function in the narrative is not: the brothers see it and cannot speak peaceably to him. The boy then reports two dreams, of sheaves bowing to his sheaf and of the sun, moon and eleven stars bowing to him, which offends even his father. Sent to check on the flocks, he is seen coming at a distance, stripped, thrown into a dry cistern, and sold to a passing caravan, and the garment is dipped in goat's blood and carried back for the father to identify. Jacob refuses to be comforted and mourns for years over a son who is alive in Egypt.

There he prospers in the household of an officer of Pharaoh, is falsely accused by the officer's wife after refusing her, and is imprisoned. In prison he interprets the dreams of two royal servants correctly, is forgotten by the one who is restored, and is remembered only two years later when Pharaoh dreams of seven fat cows swallowed by seven lean ones. Joseph reads the dream as seven years of plenty followed by seven of famine and adds, unasked, a policy for surviving it, and is put in charge of carrying it out. The famine brings his brothers to Egypt to buy grain, and he recognises them while they do not recognise him, which sets up the long testing with the hidden cup and the demand for the youngest brother before he finally breaks down and tells them who he is.