Find Dothan on the map — in the central highlands, north of Shechem. Joseph had been sent from Hebron by his father Jacob to check on his brothers grazing their flocks. They were not at Shechem as expected, and a man found Joseph wandering in a field and told him: "They are departed hence; for I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan" (Genesis 37:17). Joseph traveled another twelve miles north. His brothers saw him coming while he was still far off, recognized the coat of many colors, and conspired to kill him. Reuben talked them down to throwing him in a pit instead.

Now follow the blue line southward from Dothan. This is the route Joseph was carried against his will — all the way to Egypt. The caravan was Ishmaelite traders from Gilead, carrying spicery, balm, and myrrh down to Egypt. Judah proposed selling Joseph rather than killing him: "What profit is it if we slay our brother?" (Genesis 37:26). They sold him for twenty pieces of silver — the price of a young male slave in the ancient Near Eastern market codes. The caravan moved south through Shechem, past Bethel, through Jerusalem, through Hebron — within miles of his father's house — and on down to Egypt.

The brothers dipped Joseph's coat in goat's blood and brought it to Jacob. "Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces," Jacob concluded, and mourned so deeply that none of his children could comfort him. Meanwhile — follow the blue line to the bottom of the map — Joseph arrived in Egypt and was sold again to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh. He was seventeen years old. He had been betrayed by the brothers he loved, sold twice as a slave, and carried to a foreign country where he knew no one. What looked like absolute catastrophe was, as Joseph would later recognize, the hidden hand of God positioning him exactly where he needed to be: "Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good" (Genesis 50:20).