How much was Joseph sold for?

The sale at Dothan

The brothers have thrown Joseph into a dry cistern and sat down to eat. Then they look up and see a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, east of the Jordan, “with their camels bearing spices and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt” (Genesis 37:25). Judah sees an opening: “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood?” (37:26). Better to sell him, and keep their hands clean.

Midianites who were merchants passed by, and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. The merchants brought Joseph into Egypt.

Reuben, who had planned to rescue him in secret, comes back to an empty pit and tears his clothes. Joseph is already on the road south.

Twenty shekels, not twenty coins

The Hebrew says only “twenty of silver.” The unit understood is the shekel, which was a weight, not a coin. Coins were first struck in Lydia, in what is now Turkey, around the 7th century BC, long after any date proposed for Joseph. Before that, silver changed hands as scraps, rings and ingots, and the price was settled on a scale. Abraham “weighed” four hundred shekels of silver to buy his family’s burial cave (23:16). Judean shekel weights from centuries later run about 11 grams, so twenty shekels would be roughly a quarter of a kilogram, about half a pound, of silver.

Was that a lot? Two laws give a scale. Leviticus 27:5 values a male aged five to twenty at twenty shekels, exactly the price paid for a seventeen-year-old. Exodus 21:32 sets thirty shekels as the payment for a slave gored to death by an ox. The Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen pointed out that slave prices in ancient documents rose over the centuries, and that twenty shekels matches the going rate in the early second millennium BC. What that says about the story’s date is still debated.

Ishmaelites or Midianites?

Read closely, and the buyers change names. They are Ishmaelites in verses 25, 27 and 28, Midianites in verses 28 and 36, and Ishmaelites again in 39:1, when they sell Joseph to Potiphar. Readers have offered several answers:

• The same people. “Ishmaelite” could be a general word for desert traders. Judges 8:24 calls a band of Midianites Ishmaelites.
• A chain of sales. Midianite merchants pulled Joseph out and sold him to the Ishmaelite caravan, which took him to Egypt.
• The brothers never got paid. The medieval commentator Rashbam read the Midianites as passersby who drew Joseph out while the brothers were eating, so the deal slipped away from them. Yet Joseph later tells them, “I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt” (45:4).
• Two tellings woven together. Many modern scholars see two older versions combined, one featuring Judah and the Ishmaelites, the other Reuben and the Midianites.

A price that echoes

In prison Joseph put it more bluntly: “I was stolen away out of the land of the Hebrews” (40:15). The later law made exactly this a capital crime. Whoever kidnaps a fellow Israelite and sells him, “that thief shall die” (Deuteronomy 24:7). Christian readers have long set Joseph’s twenty pieces beside the thirty that Judas took to hand over Jesus (Matthew 26:15; see why Judas betrayed Jesus). And two decades later Joseph will slip silver back into his brothers’ sacks, to see what they do with it (see why Joseph tested his brothers).