Genesis 37:28: Twenty shekels, and the trade road does the rest

"Then Midianite traders passed by. And they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. They took Joseph to Egypt." The price is the going rate. Twenty shekels of silver is what Leviticus 27 sets for a male between five and twenty years old, so the brothers are neither gouging nor being cheated — they take the market value for a boy, and it is less than a quarter of what their great-grandfather paid for the field at Machpelah. The caravan is described three verses earlier and the description is the map. Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels bearing gum, balm and myrrh, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. That is a real trade and a real road: the aromatic resins of the Transjordan going to the embalmers and physicians of the delta, over the Jordan, through the pass at Dothan, down onto the coastal plain and along the shore of Sinai to the eastern mouths of the Nile. It is the busiest land route in the ancient Near East, and the brothers do not have to arrange anything. They sit down to eat, look up, and the machinery for removing him is already going past. That the traders are Ishmaelites is not decoration either. Ishmael was Abraham's first son, sent away into the wilderness so the second one could inherit; his descendants are now carrying Abraham's great-grandson into Egypt because his own brothers have sold him for hating the way their father looks at him. Genesis lets that sit without comment, as it does most things. So the map draws the road and not the pit. Egypt is at the end of it, pinned where every page of this walk has pinned it, at the one representative point all five hundred votes resolve to — a marker for a country and not a claim about a town, since nothing in this verse happens there. Dothan is a label rather than a place, because this sentence has stopped naming it. He is seventeen. He is thirty when he stands in front of Pharaoh, and thirty-nine when his brothers walk into his office and do not recognise him. The line on this map is two hundred and fifty miles long and it takes twenty-two years to come back.