In the early eighteenth century b.c., pastoral clans pushed flocks across the arid ridges of Canaan. Simeon starves his own body to fuel a quiet rage against his brother. The blistering sun bakes the soil into cracked clay. Envy works like a slow poison in the gut. A man refuses water and meat until his ribs show. He drains his own strength to maintain a defensive anxiety over family inheritance. Consolation arrives only years later when the Most High breaks his pride.
Simeon plots a murder in the grazing fields near Dothan. He views Joseph as a threat to the patriarchal hierarchy. Jealousy blinds his mind to basic reason. A dry water pit becomes a temporary holding cell. Judah alters the execution plan. The brothers sell the boy to passing merchants. They exchange him for a weight of silver equal to three months of a laborer's wages. Simeon burns with anger at this compromise. He wanted actual blood. The transaction forces an unwanted exile upon the victim.
A dry limestone pit offers no water to the trapped. It simply holds a man in the dark while his captors eat bread above him. Ancient Levantine cultures identified the liver as the anatomical seat of severe emotion. A hardened liver meant a man had shut off all human pity. Simeon describes his own internal organs turning to stone. He physically manifests hatred into a bodily sickness. Anger hollows out the aggressor—it rots the container long before it harms the target.
A man consumed by jealousy starves his own flesh just to watch another person go hungry.
The brothers carried a torn tunic back to Hebron to deceive their father. The transaction scattered a single family across foreign borders and laid the groundwork for an eventual national exodus.