Genesis 42:29: Nine brothers, one missing, and a story their father does not take well

"When they came to Jacob their father in the land of Canaan, they told him all that had happened to them, saying…" Ten went down and nine come back. Simeon is in an Egyptian prison as security against their returning with Benjamin, and somewhere on the road home one of them opened a sack at a lodging place and found his money in the mouth of it, and their hearts failed them, and they turned trembling to one another and said what is this that God has done to us? They have grain and they have a hostage and they have money they did not pay, and none of the three is good news. The verse names the land rather than the town, which is the narrator stepping back a pace. The land of Canaan is the phrase Genesis uses for the whole promise seen from outside — it is what Abram was called to, what the famine is emptying, and what Joseph, two chapters on, will describe from a throne as somewhere his family is to be fetched out of. Standing where it stands here it sets a country against a country: they have been in Egypt, and now they are home, and home is a place you can starve in. So the map draws the return leg in Canaan's olive rather than Egypt's red, and pins the land itself at the representative point the sources use for it — a dot for a whole territory, well north of where this family actually lives, which is why the line ends at the Hebron ridge and the pin sits where the atlas puts the country. What they tell him is mostly true, and Jacob's answer is the bleakest sentence he speaks in the book: you have bereaved me of my children. Joseph is no more, and Simeon is no more, and now you would take Benjamin. All this has come against me. He is wrong on two counts out of three and does not know it, and the man he is grieving for is the one who set the whole thing up.