Genesis 37:2-4 states:

At seventeen years of age, Joseph tended the flocks with his brothers, as a helper to the sons of his father’s wives Bilhah and Zilpah. And Joseph brought bad reports of them to their father. Now Israel loved Joseph best of all his sons, for he was the child of his old age; and he had made him an ornamented tunic. And when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of his brothers, they hated him so that they could not speak a friendly word to him. 

Genesis 37:5-8 continues:

Once Joseph had a dream which he told to his brothers; and they hated him even more. He said to them, “Hear this dream which I have dreamed. There we were binding sheaves in the field, when suddenly my sheaf stood up and remained upright; then your sheaves gathered around and bowed low to my sheaf.” His brothers answered, “Do you mean to reign over us? Do you mean to rule over us?” And they hated him even more for his talk about his dreams.

Genesis 37:9 records the second dream of Joseph.

He dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers, saying, “Look, I have had another dream: And this time, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.”

Although Genesis 37:10 records that Joseph told it (the dream) to his father and brothers, his brothers do not speak to him at all this time. Only his father Jacob responds. Indeed, when the Torah records the episode where the brothers throw Joseph into the pit, it does not record any words that they speak to him. They only talk about him: “Here comes that dreamer! Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; and we can say, ‘A savage beast devoured him.’ We shall see what comes of his dreams!” (Genesis 37:37:20).

The Torah depicts the manner in which the hatred of the brothers for Joseph grew and grew. Interestingly, although the Torah clearly states that an early reason for their hatred (verse 4) was their perception that Jacob loved him more than he loved them, it also mentions (verse 2) that Joseph brought bad reports of his brothers to his father.

One can pose the following question: Was the hatred of the brothers for Joseph the simple fact of Jacob’s additional love? Or was it because they felt that Joseph, because of moral defects expressed by his behavior, was undeserving of such additional love? This second alternative allows for the possibility that had Joseph added in an exemplary fashion, they might not have minded that Jacob loved Joseph more than any of them. They might have understood that he (Joseph) was the child of his (Jacob’s) old age and they would be able to fahrginn (not to begrudge) the token’s of Jacob’s added affection. Moreover, as his mother Rachel had already died, Joseph was already in a vulnerable position, one that none of his brothers shared.

Moreover, the Torah only writes of Jacob’s additional love for Joseph at verse 3. Yet, as we shall shortly see, even verse 2 might indicate that things were not right between Joseph and his brothers. A third possibility exists: namely, that the additional love that Jacob bestowed upon Joseph was the catalyst for the additional hatred that the brothers felt for Joseph. But even without the fact of Jacob’s additional love for Joseph, they had already “started” the quarrel.

I think that one can arrive at the various conclusions outlined above by stressing different aspects of Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 37:2.

 At seventeen years of age. Joseph tended the flocks with his brothers, as a helper (Hebrew, na‘ar) to the sons of his father’s wives Bilhah and Zilpah (Genesis 37:2).  Commenting on na‘ar (which can also be translated as a lad), Rashi writes: his actions were childish: he dressed his hair, he touched up his eyes so that he should appear good-looking. Presumably, his brothers knew of these facts, therefore one can be led to the conclusion that they felt Joseph’s childish behavior made him undeserving of Jacob’s additional love. On the other hand, commenting on the subsequent word Bilhah, Rashi writes: meaning that he made it his custom to associate with the sons of Bilhah (i.e., Dan and Naftali) because his brothers slighted them as being sons of a handmaid: therefore he fraternized with them. (One might additionally deduce from this Rashi, which only explicitly mentions Bilhah and not Zilpah, that Joseph felt a greater affinity to those two half-brothers of his, perhaps because they were the sons of Bilhah, his late mother’s handmaid.) Now, one may reason as follows: if the sons (of Leah) despised the sons of Bilhah and of Zilpah, was it only because they were sons of handmaids? According to that view, as Rachel was a “full wife” of Jacob, a son of Rachel would not be despised. Alternatively, the reason why the sons of Leah despised the sons of the handmaids Bilhah and Zilpah was the fact that they were sons of other wives of Jacob. Thus, they would certainly despise the son of Rachel, the rival of their mother Leah. If this is so, one can maintain that Joseph’s brothers despised him even before they perceived him acting in a way that could demonstrate that he was undeserving of Jacob’s additional love.

If one arrives at the conclusion that the sons of Jacob from Leah, (or at least the older four, i.e., Reuben, Shimon, Levi and Yehudah), were ab initio verbally cruel to the sons of the handmaids, and (by implication), to Joseph, the son of Rachel, the rival of their mother Leah, as well, Joseph fraternized with the sons of Bilhah because he needed “allies.” But the brothers had already “started” their quarrel with Joseph as well.

The end of Genesis 37:2 states: And Joseph brought bad reports of them to his father. Which of his brothers are signified by the word them? Rashi, in the midst of his famous comment that he accused his brothers of violating halakhic norms, writes that he accused the sons of Leah. By implication, he did not accuse the sons of Bilhah or Zilpah of any violations (although admittedly, an argument can be made that this would be the simplest reading of the verse). Moreover, a close reading of Genesis 37:5 and 37:9 reveals that it is not at all explicit that Joseph told his dreams to all his brothers, that is, even to the sons of the handmaids. He may have told them only to the sons of Leah.  (The Torah never mentions the number of sheaves in verse 5. Moreover, the fact that eleven stars are mentioned does not prove that he told the dream to all eleven brothers. Presumably, he certainly did not tell the dream to his little brother Benjamin, even though he would be the referent of one of the eleven stars!)

Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer (Chapter 37) and other traditional sources understand the episode in which Joseph’s brothers threw him into the pit as a scenario in which all ten brothers were there and actively participated in their actions against Joseph. Im halakhah hi, neqabbel. Alternatively, one might understand that only the sons of Leah, or even more restrictively, the four older sons of Leah (excluding the younger Issachar and Zebulon) were in Shechem and planned to harm Joseph.. Hazal’s deduction (quoted by Rashi at Genesis 42:24) that Shimon told Levi, “Here comes that dreamer! Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; and we can say, ‘A savage beast devoured him.We shall see what comes of his dreams!” (Genesis 37:19-20), can thus be understood as a simple deduction from the fact that there were only four (or at the most, six) participants in the group that sought to harm Joseph. Reuben, for his part, said “Let us not take his life…Shed no blood! Cast him into that pit out in the wilderness but do not touch him yourselves.” (Genesis 37: 21-22). Yehudah, for his part, argued, “What do we gain by killing our brother and covering up his blood? Come. Let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, but let us not do away with him ourselves. After all, he is our brother, our own flesh.” (Genesis 37:26-27). Who was left? Shimon and Levi.

To be sure, however, the simplest interpretation of the Parashah (and the one that is assumed by virtually all commentators) is that all ten of Joseph’s older brothers were at Shechem. But one may still wonder why not one of them, not even the sons of Bilhah, tried to help him when he begged and pleaded with them. (Genesis 42:21 quotes the brothers saying, ”Alas, we are being punished on account of our brother, because we looked on at his anguish, yet paid no heed as he pleaded with us. This is why his distress has come upon us.” Maran Ha-Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik, zatzal, expressed the idea that the Torah writes this verse only in Parashat Miqqetz, when we [the readers of the Torah] already know that Joseph has indeed not died, and is, on the contrary, the viceroy of Egypt, and not in Parashat Va-Yeshev, where the verse more properly belongs, because to write at that point the explicit mention of Joseph’s pain and humiliation, and his brothers’ callousness, would be too damming an indictment of his brothers’ cruelty.) Was it simply a matter that the remaining brothers were afraid of Shimon and Levi? Was it, alternatively, just because they had also heard the dream of Joseph regarding the eleven stars and became so angry that they also willing to kill him? 

In January 2003, a book titled The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander: From Preschool to High School by Barbara Coloroso was first published. The beginning of her book emphasizes the ubiquity of the three roles in interpersonal dynamics. “The bully, the bullied, and the bystander are three characters in a tragic play performed daily in our homes, schools, playgrounds, and streets..."

Applying her classification to the story of Joseph and his brothers, one may say that one tragedy was that the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah were indeed only bystanders, but they unfortunately just could not stand up and defend the bullied (that is, Joseph) from the bullies.

There is an aggadic tradition, found in the several books of the Pseudepigrapha (the Testamaent of Gad and the Testament of Zebulun), the Palestinian Targum to Genesis 37:28 and most prominently, in Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, chapter 37, (in the Gerald Friedlander edition [ London, 1916], p. 293), that  all ten brothers sold him to the Ishmaelites “for twenty pieces of silver, each of them receiving two silver pieces, enough to buy a pair of shoes…” These accounts also interpret the verse in the Book of Amos (2:6), Because they have sold for silver those whose cause was just, and the needy for a pair of sandals, as a reference to Joseph who was sold by his brothers. Accordingly, numerous sources ascribe the episode of the ‘Asarah Harugei Malkhut, the ten Tannaim who had been brutally murdered by the Romans, as representing, in a cosmic sense, atonement for the acts of all ten of Joseph’s brothers.

Granting that all ten brothers (excluding the little Benjamin) were present when Joseph was sold , and, excluding Reuben as well, nine brothers were present when Joseph was thrown into the pit, is the assumption that they were all involved necessarily so? Perhaps Hazal, from another perspective, were davka trying to inculcate in all of us the moral lesson of the bully, the bullied and the bystander. The sons of Bilhah and of Zilpah did not participate in the cruel actions towards Joseph. They were only bystanders. But they also committed a grave sin. It is not enough not to be a bully. One must not be a bystander either!

And carrying this idea one final step further, one may say that the ultimate teshuvah of the brothers as reflected in Genesis 50, after the dיnouement of the Joseph episode, entails the fact that the brothers who been bystanders to the cruel treatment of Joseph repented of that as well.