18 JOSEPH'’S DREAM

these two were very dear to him, for they were the children of his loved wife who had died
such a short time after their marriage.

And Istael did not try to hide his love, but gave Joseph a beautiful white embroidered
coat edged with a many-coloured fringe such as was always worn in those days by the
favourite son. And so his brothers, who were older than he was, and thought that one of
them, Reuben perhaps who was the oldest, should have the coat, envied him and hated him.

They envied him too, I dare say, because he was good and obedient, so much better than
they, and would not join in their wrong doings, and sometimes came back to the tent and
told his father of their bad ways, not because he liked to tell tales—a tale-bearer is never a
nice boy—but that they might be stopped in their evil ways before it was too late.

 

One day he made them very angry so that they could bear it no longer but resolved
to get rid of him somehow or other. He told them about a.dream he had had: Perhaps
it would have been better if he had kept it to himself or only told his father. You can see
what he dreamed in the picture at the beginning of this story. Listen to his own
account of it. “Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed. For behold, we were
binding sheaves in the field, and lo, my sheaf arose and also stood upright : and behold, your
sheaves stood round about and made obeisance to my sheaf.” And his brethren said to him,
“ Shalt thou indeed reign over us or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us >” and they
hated him all the more for his dream and for his words. s ‘