“When his brothers went to pasture their father’s flock in Shechem, Israel said to Joseph: ‘Are your bothers not pasturing in Shechem? Come, let me send you to them’. And he said to him, ‘Here I am’. He said to him: ‘Go now, see how your brothers are 
Our every action, our every word, will affect the rest of history for the rest of time.
faring and how the flock is faring, and bring word back to me’. Thus he sent him from the valley of Hebron, and he came to Shechem. A man found him, and saw that he was blundering around in the field; so the man asked him, ‘What are you looking for?’ He said, ‘I am looking for my brothers; tell me please where they are pasturing’. The man said, ‘They have travelled on from here, because I heard them say, Let’s go to Dothan’. So Joseph went after his brothers, and he found them in Dothan” (Genesis 37:12-17).
One hundred and ninety-eight years earlier, G-d had appeared to Joseph’s great-grandfather Abraham, and told him: “Know for sure that your seed will be a stranger in a land that is not theirs; they will serve them, and they will oppress them for four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13). This decree had hung like a cloud on the horizon of Abraham’s family’s future, and each patriarch prayed that this ordained exile would not begin with him. But now, as Joseph reached his brothers in Dothan and they sold him to the merchants who took him in chains down to Egypt, this long-dreaded exile finally began. The Targum Yonatan paraphrases Genesis 37:14: “‘Go now, see how your brothers are faring and how the flock is faring, and bring word back to me’. Thus he sent him, according to the profound advice which Abraham had spoken in Hebron. And on that day was the beginning of the Egyptian exile, when Joseph arose and came to Shechem”.
But the great historic process was about to go wrong: the ten brothers had strayed from the script that they were supposed to have been following, and went several miles north of Shechem to Dothan – and Joseph failed to find them. And then he encountered this mysterious man, who – without knowing Joseph or his brothers – nudged Joseph back onto the right direction. Whether this “man” was literally a man who happened to be passing (per the Ibn Ezra), or if he was really the angel Gabriel in human form (per Tanhuma, Vayeishev 2, Targum Yonatan, and Rashi), G-d was clearly intervening to ensure that Jewish history would proceed on its pre-destined course. The (angel in the form of a) man directed Joseph on to Dothan – and the Targum Yonatan paraphrases verse 37: “The man said, ‘They have travelled on from here, because from behind the Heavenly Curtain I heard that now, as of this day, the Egyptian slavery begins’. And it was prophetically said to them that the Hivites are planning to wage a military war against them; and for this reason they said, Let’s go to Dothan. So Joseph went after his brothers, and he found them in Dothan”.
Thus Joseph travelled on from Shechem to Dothan and found his brothers; they sold him as a slave – and thus began the nation’s exile in Egypt. Both Shechem and Dothan would assume significance later on in our history.
Twenty-five years earlier, the brothers’ father Jacob had bought a parcel of land in Shechem for 100 kesitahs (Genesis 33:18-19), variously interpreted as the value of 100 fattened sheep (Targum Onkelos, Ibn Ezra to Job 42:11), or 100 precious jewels (Targum Yonatan, Jerusalem Targum), or a recognized coin of negotiable currency (Rashi, Rashbam, Rosh Hashana 26a, Metzudat Zion to Joshua 24:32, Me’am Lo’ez quoting Imre No’am, Yalkut Shimoni, Vayishlach 133). And 93 years later, as Joseph was about to die, he “adjured the Children of Israel saying: G-d will assuredly remember you; and then you must bring my bones up out of here” (Genesis 50:25).
On Moses’ last day in this world, one of his final charges to the Israelites was: “When Hashem your G-d brings you into the Land to which you are coming to inherit, then you will proclaim the blessing on Mount Gerizim, and the curse on Mount Ebal” (Deuteronomy 11:29, and see also Deuteronomy 27:11-13). These two mountains flank Shechem, which nestles in the plain between them. And indeed, just a few weeks later, after conquering Jericho and Ai, Joshua led the Israelites to these two mountains where they gathered on the hillsides, and the Levites in the valley between proclaimed these blessings and curses (Joshua 8:30-35). This ceremony, signifying the Israelites’ conquest of their homeland, closed the historical circle: Shechem, the place where Egyptian exile had begun 272 years earlier when the brothers had sold Joseph into slavery, was to be the place where the exile would end.
And one of the final events recorded in the Book of Joshua was that the Israelites buried Joseph’s bones in his ancestral plot in Shechem (Joshua 24:32). The Midrash expresses Joseph’s dying wish movingly: “From Shechem Joseph’s brothers stole him and sold him; and when his time came to pass away from this world, he adjured them, saying to them: Please, I plead with you, O my brothers – from Shechem you stole me. By your lives! Return my bones to Shechem!” (Exodus Rabbah 20:19). Or in the terser words of Rabbi Hama son of Rabbi Hanina, “from Shechem they stole him, and to Shechem we will restore that which it lost” (Sotah 13b).
So much for Shechem. And what about Dothan?
Dothan appears only twice in the entire Tanakh. The second time is during the reign of King Yehoram (Jehoram) of Israel, son of King Ahab (not to be confused with the contemporaneous King Yehoram of Judea, who had married the Israelite King Yehoram’s sister). Aram attacked Israel from the north, but their attacks and ambushes repeatedly failed. The king of Aram realised that the Israelite army had precise intelligence of his plans and suspected a spy in his army’s midst, until one of his servants told him that “Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, tells the king of Israel everything – even what you say in your own bedroom!” (2 Kings 6:12). The Aramean king demanded to know where the prophet Elisha was in order to capture him, “and it was told to him saying, He is in Dothan” (ibid 13).
Now the Tanakh gives no indication at all who betrayed on Elisha’s location to the king of Aram: was the informer a fellow-Israelite, an Aramean, or a complete outsider? – We do not know. But it may be significant that Elisha’s home territory was Avel Meholah (1 Kings 19:16), on the west bank of the River Jordan about 35 km (22 miles) south of the Kinneret – that is, in the territory of the Tribe of Manasseh. The inference is that the prophet Elisha was from the Tribe of Manasseh, which would mean that he was descended from Joseph. Apparently, even 840 years after Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers, his descendants were still being plagued by other people’s disloyalty.
But the name Dothan also has another connotation. On the phrase “…and he found them in Dothan”, the Ba’al ha-Turim (Rabbi Ya’akov ben-Asher, Germany and Spain c.1275-1343) comments: “There Judah argued in his favour . And in this merit, kings from his seed ruled for 454 years, which is the gematria of Dothan [dalet=4, tav=400, nun=50], from King David until King Zedekiah”. Indeed, the Judean monarchy began with King David in the year 2884 (876 B.C.E.), and continued uninterrupted through twenty more kings and one queen until Zedekiah (also called Mattaniah) was defeated and deposed by Babylon in the year 3338 (422 B.C.E.).
Even such miniscule loyalty – persuading his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery instead of killing him – earned Judah an immense reward for future generations. Everything that our ancestors ever did – both for bad and for good – stamped its imprint indelibly on our history for the rest of time. All their actions reverberate eternally in the echo-chamber of history. Nothing they ever said or did will ever be destroyed.
And this applies, mutatis mutandis, to everything that we, their descendants, do today. Our every action, our every word, will affect the rest of history for the rest of time. To be sure, this casts a tremendous responsibility on every one of us. And the obvious corollary is that our reward for good action is also eternal.