Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies.

And it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

We'll go ahead and get started, and when we get started here, in this moment, we'll be

starting at the beginning of Genesis chapter 38.

Then I won't spend too, too long on the recap, because there's actually kind of a break in

the story, because we had one chapter

that was sort of the beginning of Joseph's story and now we're moving to something else.

But depending on how far we get tonight, we might get back to Joseph's story.

So we'll do a little bit of recap.

So basically what we talked about last time is there was a sort of

semi-transition. And we said semi-transition because we had already been talking about the actions of

some of Jacob's sons within the context of the story of Jacob before.

And so even though we're now sort of transitioning here to following Joseph and his brothers,

right, we're still within the same family unit that we were before.

Just the focus has moved from father to one of the sons in terms of the main focus.

I say main focus, because again, at least most of tonight, we're going to be talking about

another brother, another son.

But we saw sort of the ultimate playing out of the sort of bias, shall we say, and favoritism that Jacob showed for Rachel,

his second wife over Leah, his first wife.

We'd already seen that causing a lot of trouble in the family.

And then we saw that play out further in the sons and how they related to each other.

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