Genesis 37:17

Joseph does not find his brothers when he comes to Shechem. They have left. Now is his chance to return to Hebron if his heart is not wholly in his mission. Here was a good excuse for turning back and giving up the task. But no; he has no thought of turning back, or of giving up the work his father gave him to do.

Joseph took this path of service. He carried his father's message and stood for his father's interest. He came to Shechem, but found his brothers gone, and his mission stalled. Such checks often come to test how real we are — whether the Father's will is all we want. Joseph's heart was set on finishing the errand. Instead of going home when he could not find them, he waited at his post until he got news of them. Then he followed them to Dothan, unprepared for the murderous and spiteful welcome that awaited him.

Joseph was certainly not one to break from his brothers without cause. He followed them forty miles to be with them and serve them, but "they hated him without a cause." He was a picture, given in advance, of One whose deepest human sorrow was that "His own people did not receive Him." He was wounded in the house of His friends, and He said to those He had held close, "One of you will betray me."

Dothan means "their decree." Just as Joseph found his brothers at Dothan, so the Lord Jesus found Israel in a place of their own decrees and traditions, rather than in the place of subjection to the law of God.

They were zealous law-keepers, and Dothan points to this exactly, if I am not mistaken. The name means "laws" — not "precepts," the moral and spiritual guidance that God's law was, but imperial "decrees." Israel had gone away from God and from the path of their forefather. That is what God's word had become to them.

"Dothan" means "two wells," or perhaps better, "cisterns." That at once recalls what God says of Israel in Jeremiah 2:13: "they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water." This was Israel's condition exactly when the One who held the fountain of life was among them.

Because of their self-righteousness and pride they would not be convinced by Him of their wickedness. So He appealed to their unsatisfied hearts and cried out, on the last day of the feast, the great day: "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink." Joseph goes from Shechem, the scene of their wickedness, to Dothan — heart thirst. This is still Christ's way with souls. Some find it impossible to think of themselves as great and grievous sinners. But they do have empty hearts. When they see how broken earth's cisterns are, they will come to Him who is Himself the satisfying fountain of true joy.

They were heartless toward the innocent sufferer and toward the father who had sent him in love. Yet in the middle of it rises the foreshadowing of Him who was to come, one infinitely greater than Joseph. He too was the Beloved of His Father, and His Father sent Him as Son of Man to seek the lost.