Humans have an ability to kill the conscience, or at the very least, put it into such a deep sleep that it cannot bother us, but we will see how God shines upon a dark conscience—He stirs it and brings about repentance. As we begin this chapter we cannot really sense that the consciences of Joseph's brothers were utterly subdued, perhaps gravely wounded, but not dead. Now why do I say this? It is because of a very strange sentence in Genesis 42.
What is the significance of that question, “why do you look at one another?” And what does it have to do with ten men being sent to Egypt to buy grain?
There is a proverb that says, “Never speak of rope in the house of a hangman.” When we begin to think about this, Egypt was the place in which these men, excluding Benjamin, had sold Joseph off to. They had planned to kill him, but when the caravan of Midianite merchants came by on their way to Egypt, Judah said:
So the Midianites counted out the twenty shekels of silver and Joseph was handed over. The last the brothers saw of Joseph was his anguished face as he was led away in chains with the caravan. Then the brothers devised a lie to explain his disappearance to Jacob. They tore Joseph's robe and dipped it in blood pretending that a wild animal had killed and eaten him. Then they tried to put the incident from their minds but they could not.
Now we can imagine the glances between them whenever Joseph's name was mentioned, and we can imagine the weight that must have descended on them whenever the place of their brothers imprisonment was spoken of, Judah must have looked at Reuben, Levi must have thrown anguished glances at Zebulun, that is why Jacob asked, “Why do you keep looking at each other?” As Shakespeare said, “conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
Now the fact that Joseph's brothers looked guiltily at one another instead of taking decisive steps when the family heard that grain was in Egypt shows that their consciences were not entirely dead, just asleep. If nothing more had happened in this story then the mere mention of Egypt, these men would no doubt have continued on their own guilty way and would have died unrepentant. This was their way and not God's way. God now moved to awaken them and lead them to repentance.
It is interesting because we get a little bit of insight into family operations here and also a little bit of insight into the brothers once again, because it says that Jacob said, "Why do you look upon one another?"—which means that they were in conference with one another. They were arguing back and forth, talking: "What shall we do? What shall we do? Can we do this? Can we do that? Can somebody else go to Egypt? I'll go to Egypt." (They could not make up their mind.)
