How old was Joseph when he was sold into slavery?

Seventeen, from the first line

Joseph’s story opens with his age.

Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives.

The Hebrew word translated “boy,” na‘ar, covers a wide range: a child, a teenager, a young servant. His brothers kept thinking of him that way. Reuben, finding the pit empty, cries, “The child is no more” (37:30), and twenty years later in Egypt he still calls him “the child” (42:22). In their memory, Joseph never grew up.

A teenager on the road

At seventeen, Jacob sends him alone to check on his brothers: from the valley of Hebron north to Shechem, about 80 kilometers (50 miles), and on to Dothan, a day farther. Near Shechem he gets lost in the fields, and a stranger has to point the way (37:15–17). Days later he travels the other direction as merchandise, along the trade road down the coast, past Gaza and across northern Sinai into Egypt, some 400 kilometers (250 miles). A psalm remembers that journey in harsher words than Genesis uses:

He sent a man before them. Joseph was sold for a slave. They bruised his feet with shackles. His neck was locked in irons

How old was his father?

Genesis never states Jacob’s age at Joseph’s birth, but its numbers allow the sum. Jacob tells Pharaoh he is 130 (47:9). That meeting comes in the second year of the famine (45:6), when Joseph is 39: thirty at his promotion, plus seven years of plenty, plus two of famine. So Jacob was about 91 when Joseph was born, and about 108 when the bloodied robe came home. “The son of his old age” was no figure of speech.

The numbers also make a quiet mirror. Joseph had seventeen years with his father in Canaan before the sale. At the end, “Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years” (47:28), close to the son he had mourned as dead. Seventeen years at the start, seventeen at the close.

From seventeen to thirty-nine

• 17: sold at Dothan (37:2, 28).
• 17 to 30: a slave in Potiphar’s house, then a prisoner, including “two full years” after the cupbearer forgot him (41:1). The text never says how those thirteen years divide (see how old Joseph was when he became ruler).
• 30: stands before Pharaoh (41:46).
• 37 to 39: the famine begins, and his brothers come to buy grain and bow to him without knowing him.
• 39: “I am Joseph!” (45:3), about twenty-two years after the sale.

The price his brothers took for him is in how much Joseph was sold for.