Genesis 37:25: The road was already going where they needed him to go

"Then they sat down to eat. And looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels bearing gum, balm, and myrrh, on their way to carry it down to Egypt." They have just put their brother in a dry pit and their next act is lunch. That sentence is doing the work of a paragraph, and the verse spends none of its remaining words on them: it goes to the horizon instead, and describes, in the detail of a shipping manifest, a caravan that has nothing to do with this family at all. Every clause of that description is geography. Coming from Gilead — the wooded highland east of the Jordan, which is where the resins come from; the balm of Gilead is a proverb because it was a trade. Carrying gum, balm and myrrh — the aromatics the embalmers and physicians of the delta buy, so the cargo names the customer. On their way down to Egypt — four hundred miles of road, over the Jordan, through the pass at Dothan, onto the coastal plain and along the top of Sinai. It is the busiest land route in the ancient Near East and it has been running for centuries before anyone in this chapter was born. Dothan sits on it, and that is the whole reason this day goes the way it does. The brothers moved the flock there for grazing, not for traffic; Joseph was sent after them because a stranger in a field overheard where they had gone. Nobody in the story arranged to be standing beside an international highway on the afternoon they decided what to do with him. They look up from a meal and the means of disposing of him is already going past, under load, on a schedule that was set before they got there. So the map is the road and not the pit. The green leg is the stretch that has happened: out of the hills, across the Jordan at the Beth-shan crossing, and west through the pass to where the brothers are eating. The red one is the rest of the caravan's journey, drawn as a course rather than a journey because at this verse nobody has walked it yet — three verses later Joseph is on it, and /maps/genesis-37-28 draws the same track as a road actually travelled. Gilead has no pin. It is a highland forty miles deep, and the sources fix the name by one representative point on a mound above the Jabbok that Penuel and Mahanaim are also argued over, so the country is drawn as country and the point as a ring. Egypt has one, at the head of the delta where every page of this walk has put it — a marker for a whole land, not a claim about a town. The brothers do not know what they are looking at. They see a buyer. What is actually passing them is the road into the four hundred years that the rest of the Torah exists to bring them back out of.