t12papocrypha
Testament of Gad 2
Gad confesses the full measure of his hatred toward Joseph — not mere jealousy but a consuming desire to erase him from the living, driven by resentment of the prophetic dreams. He discloses that the sale price was thirty pieces of gold, that ten were concealed from the other brothers, and that covetousness, not justice, governed his hand. Yet the God of their fathers overruled every scheme. The Joseph-of-Egypt master type surfaces here in its darkest register: the selling by brethren, the hidden corruption behind it, and the divine preservation that no fraternal malice could defeat.
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I confess now my sin, my children, that oftentimes I wished to kill him, because I hated him to the death, and there were in no wise in me bowels of mercy towards him. Moreover, I hated him yet more because of his dreams; and I would have devoured him out of the land of the living, even as a calf devoureth the grass from the earth. Therefore I and Judah sold him to the Ishmaelites for thirty pieces of gold, and ten of them we hid, and showed the twenty to our brethren: and so through my covetousness I was fully bent on his destruction. And the God of my fathers delivered him from my hands, that I should not work iniquity in Israel.
