Genesis 42:3: The road they sold him down, walked again with money in their hands

"So ten of Joseph's brothers went down to buy grain in Egypt." Twenty-two years earlier eleven of them walked to Dothan and ten came home. Now the same ten take the same road south, for the same reason the caravan was on it — Egypt has what Canaan has not — and the narrator counts them so that you will do the arithmetic. Ten. Benjamin is kept back, because Jacob has already lost one son of Rachel on a journey and will not risk the other. One is missing and nobody in the sentence says his name. The famine is the seven years Joseph read out of Pharaoh's dream, and it is why the road exists in this direction. Egypt is fed by a river that rises in another climate; Canaan is fed by rain. When the rain fails in the hills, the Nile does not care, and for four thousand years the answer to a Levantine drought was to go and buy Egyptian grain. Jacob says it himself two verses earlier, with an edge on it: why do you look at one another? Behold, I have heard that there is grain in Egypt. Go down and buy grain for us there, that we may live and not die. So the map is the coast road again, the fourth time this walk has drawn it. Abram went down it in the first famine. Isaac was forbidden it. A caravan carried Joseph along it with twenty shekels of silver changing hands behind him. The brothers now travel it themselves, about two hundred and fifty miles from the Hebron ridge to the delta, and at the end of it they will bow down to a man in Egyptian dress with an interpreter between them, exactly as a boy once told them they would, and not know him. Egypt is pinned where this series always pins it, at the one point all five hundred votes resolve to — a marker for a whole country, not a claim about a town. Hebron is the label the line starts from, because Genesis 37:14 put the household there and this verse names only where they are going.