Jamin Bradley

They were going to kill Joseph before Judah got in the way. His plan wasn’t noble, but it wasn’t full-on murder. Instead, he convinced his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery. In doing so, their deep hatred of their father’s favorite son was finally satisfied. They returned home and told a lie to their father about how his son had been mauled by an animal, and their father’s heart broke.

This might have been annoying to his sons at first, but perhaps they, too, eventually broke as they gazed upon their broken father, day after day and year after year. Perhaps their faces fell when they saw that selling Joseph hadn’t really fixed anything—their father simply changed his favoritism from his favorite wife’s first-born to her second-born.

Much of the rest of Genesis is about Joseph, except for one random breakaway story about Judah, in which his own fatherly imperfections are called to account. Like his father, his children did bad things. Like his father, he had suffered the loss of his beloved children. Like his father, he had put great value on his youngest. Like his father, he had treated some of the women in his family badly. At some point, Judah seems to have become aware of himself.

And so the same Judah that stepped up to propose selling his father’s old favorite son became the same Judah that stepped up to protect his father’s new favorite son. He had learned the lesson and he would not allow his father to relive his trauma.

Like Judah, we often have to face ourselves before we truly learn the lesson. And it’s only when we come awake to ourselves that we’re able to find the humility to tell a different story.