And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it to his brethren, and said: ‘Behold, I have dreamed yet a dream: and, behold, the sun and the moon and eleven stars bowed down to me.’ And he told it to his father, and to his brethren; and his father rebuked him, and said unto him: ‘What is this dream that thou hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down to thee to the earth?’ And his brethren envied him; but his father kept the saying in mind. . (Genesis 37:9–11)
וַיַּחֲלֹם עוֹד חֲלוֹם אַחֵר וַיְסַפֵּר אֹתוֹ לְאֶחָיו, וַיֹּאמֶר: הִנֵּה חָלַמְתִּי חֲלוֹם עוֹד וְהִנֵּה הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ וְהַיָּרֵחַ וְאַחַד עָשָׂר כּוֹכָבִים מִשְׁתַּחֲוִים לִי. וַיְסַפֵּר אֶל אָבִיו וְאֶל אֶחָיו, וַיִּגְעַר בּוֹ אָבִיו וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ: מָה הַחֲלוֹם הַזֶּה אֲשֶׁר חָלָמְתָּ? הֲבוֹא נָבוֹא אֲנִי וְאִמְּךָ וְאַחֶיךָ לְהִשְׁתַּחֲוֹת לְךָ אָרְצָה?! וַיְקַנְאוּ בוֹ אֶחָיו – וְאָבִיו, שָׁמַר אֶת הַדָּבָר. (בראשית ל"ז, ט-יא)
The parasha begins with Joseph’s dreams of sheaves and stars.
The stars present an internal contradiction. Rachel died en route to Ephrath while bearing Benjamin (Genesis 35:18–20). If the moon represents living Rachel, as Jacob’s rebuke suggests, only ten stars, meaning brothers, should appear: Benjamin was unborn. Yet eleven appear, and Joseph is seventeen at the parasha’s opening, suggesting Benjamin is already born and Rachel dead, unable to be the moon.
The solution lies in when the dream occurred. In describing current events, the Torah usually places a future-form verb with the reversing vav before the sentence’s subject: “and Esau went unto Ishmael” (Genesis 28:9). Rarely it instead puts a past-form verb after the subject: “And the man knew Eve his wife” (Genesis 4:1), or “And the LORD remembered Sarah as He had said” (Genesis 21:1). Rashi explains that both changes indicate events earlier than those just recounted.
This form appears here too. After describing Jacob’s residence in Canaan when Joseph is an older youth, the Torah shifts to the earlier-past form in a parenthesis:
Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he made him a coat of many colours. (Genesis 37:3)
וְיִשְׂרָאֵל אָהַב אֶת יוֹסֵף מִכָּל בָּנָיו – כִּי בֶן זְקֻנִים הוּא לוֹ – וְעָשָׂה לוֹ כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים. (פסוק ג')
Where does the parenthesis end? After nine verses, with “And his brethren envied him; but his father kept the saying in mind” (Genesis 37:11). The final clause puts the subject before a past-form verb, a characteristic biblical closing. Instead of the ordinary consecutive “and his brethren envied him and his father kept the saying,” the closed form gives a concluding character (Aaron Mirsky, The Punctuation of Hebrew Style, pp. 11–50).
On this explanation, Jacob’s preference for Joseph, “because he was the son of his old age,” and the dreams in this parenthesis occurred years earlier in childhood, rather than at seventeen. “Son of his old age,” understood as youngest son, fits when Joseph was little and Benjamin unborn. Joseph and his brothers were small children, Rachel alive, and little Joseph innocently told his dreams to his older brothers and father.
If so, who were the eleven bowing stars? While Rachel lived and Benjamin was unborn, he had only ten brothers.
Joseph saw sun, moon, and eleven stars: the parents represented by sun and moon, and all eleven brothers including himself by the stars. Like the sheaves, where the brothers’ sheaves bowed to Joseph’s sheaf rather than directly to him – “and, behold, your sheaves came round about, and bowed down to my sheaf” (Genesis 37:7) – sun, moon, and the ten other stars bowed to Joseph’s star. He thus mentions eleven stars, but only ten bow; he, represented by the central star, receives their homage.
