Genesis 37:17: A second leg nobody planned, and the pit is at the end of it

"And the man said, 'They have gone away, for I heard them say, "Let us go to Dothan."' So Joseph went after his brothers and found them at Dothan." He has walked fifty miles and they are not there. What happens instead is one of the strangest small scenes in Genesis: a man finds him wandering in the fields around Shechem and asks what he is looking for, and it is this unnamed stranger, who overheard a sentence, who sends him the last fifteen miles to the place where his life changes. Remove him and Joseph goes home with nothing to report. Dothan is north-west of Shechem, at the head of a broad plain where the hill country opens out towards Jezreel and the coast. It is good grazing, which is the ordinary reason to move a flock there. It is also directly on the international road — the route that runs from Gilead across the Jordan, through this pass, and down the coast to Egypt — which is the reason the rest of the chapter is possible. Elisha is besieged in this same town by the Syrians, and his servant sees the hills full of horses and chariots of fire. The verse is quietly the hinge of the book. It is written as though it were logistics — they have moved on, he followed, he found them — and by tomorrow there is a pit with no water in it, a coat dipped in goat's blood, twenty shekels of silver and a caravan heading for the delta. They see him coming a long way off, which the plain here allows, and they have time to talk it over before he arrives. On the map it is a short line after a long one. Fifty miles from Hebron, then fifteen more because of something a stranger happened to hear, and at the end of the fifteen the family is broken for twenty-two years. Shechem is on the frame as the label for where he had expected them and not as a place this sentence visits; the verse names only Dothan.