Joseph Sold by His Brothers, Antonio del Castillo y Saavedra, ca. 1655-1660. Wikimedia
Finding Meaning in Incoherence: The Joseph Story Beyond Source Criticism
The story of Joseph is replete with narrative contradictions. Source criticism has long dominated the quest for textual coherence. But how are we to make sense of the integrated text?
Published: January 2, 2020
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
“Doubling” is a literary term describing repetition of structure. It should be distinguished from “doublet,” a source-critical term that refers to alternative versions of a text that were separately transmitted before being edited together in a composite text. “Doubling” often goes under the broader name of “repetition”; see, e.g., Jacob Licht, Storytelling in the Bible (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978), chaps. 3 and 4. See further Elizabeth R. Hayes and Karolien Vermeulen (eds.), Doubling and Duplicating in the Book of Genesis (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2016).
Editor’s note: For a discussion of how the related literary technique of repetition with variation is utilized in the Joseph story, see Gary Rendsburg, “The Joseph Story: Ancient Literary Art at Its Best,” TheTorah (2017).
The Medanites are technically distinct from the Midianites. Medan and Midian are two of the sons born to Abraham through his wife Keturah (Gen. 25:2). In our verse, however, they are apparently variants of the same group; cf., e.g., Ernst Axel Knauf, “Medan,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 4.656.
For higher-critical solutions to this textual knot, see Matthew C. Genung, The Composition of Genesis 37: Incoherence and Meaning in the Exposition of the Joseph Story (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017). Editor’s note: For some examples of source critical analyses of parts of the Joseph story along the lines noted here, see Ben Sandler, “Encountering the Documentary Hypothesis in the Joseph Story,” TheTorah (2014); Zev Farber, “Jacob's Multiple Death Scenes,” TheTorah (2014); idem, “Joseph in Custody: Enslaved or Imprisoned,” TheTorah (2015).
Technically, the supplementary approach doesn’t read the later layers without the earlier layers. Nevertheless, the basic approach is diachronic, not synchronic. “Original” sections are determined on the basis of their internal unity and flow, and then redactional layers or passages are identified that alter and adapt the original narrative sections to new purposes and/or settings.
See now Joshua A. Berman, Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). See also Edward L. Greenstein, Review of The Formation of the Pentateuch: Bridging the Academic Cultures of Europe, Israel, and North America, Review of Biblical Literature (on-line) 1/2019 (9 pp.), and the literature cited there.
See the article cited in n. 9, the first version of which I delivered at a conference in 1979.
Editor’s note: For a source-critical look at these stories, see TABS Editors, “Korah, Datan, and Abiram: A Case Study for the Methods of Academic Biblical Studies,” TheTorah (2014); Jason Gaines, “Korah's Poetic Rebellion and God’s Flowery Response,” TheTorah (2017). For an attempt to read the story as a whole, while taking source division into account, see Rachel Adelman, “The Mysterious Literary Life and Death of Korah,” TheTorah (2014).
This essay is based primarily on Edward L. Greenstein, “An Equivocal Reading of the Sale of Joseph,” in Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, Volume II, ed. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis, James S. Ackerman, Thayer Warshaw (Nashville: Abingdon, 1982), 114–125, 306–310. I expect to publish a rewritten version of that essay in a forthcoming book, Reader Responsibility: Making Meaning in Biblical Narrative.
