Certain passages in the Bible always touch my heart – no matter how many times I read them.  Genesis 45 is one of those passages.  It’s the account of when Joseph finally comes face-to-face with his brothers and confronts them with the sin they had committed against him years earlier.

A quick recap of the story.  Joseph’s family was kind of a dysfunctional one.  He was the second youngest of twelve brothers.  Those ten older brothers didn’t care much for Joseph.  He was somewhat of a brat – an annoying little brother who always got special treatment from their father.

“But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him.”  Genesis 37:4

They didn’t like him.  And gradually their dislike turned to anger.  Anger to hatred.  And hatred to murder.

“Now when they saw him [Joseph] afar off, even before he came near them, they conspired against him to kill him.  Then they said to one another, “Look, this dreamer is coming!  Come therefore, let us now kill him and cast him into some pit; and we shall say, ‘Some wild beast has devoured him.’”  Genesis 37:18-19

Uhhh…that’s not good.  Look, I got two brothers and we used to get into fights when we were younger; but there were limits!  We never used weapons.  We never tried to injure one another. And we never threw each other in pits and left one another for dead.  Period.  Those are the rules.

But not these guys.  These “brothers” hated Joseph so much that they wanted to kill him right there on spot.  You can only imagine how Joseph felt as he was attacked by his brothers… thrown down, beaten, kicked, mocked, spit upon and then left for dead in an empty well.  I shudder just at the thought of how helpless he must have felt – ten burly men attacking and assaulting a weak young boy…AND THAT BOY IS THEIR OWN BROTHER!