Rachel names her firstborn Joseph — "God hath taken away my reproach" — and then adds a second, forward-looking clause in the same breath: "The LORD shall add to me another son" (Genesis 30:23–24). Watch that second half; it's easy to skim past, but it's a small prophecy about her own death, since the "other son" is Benjamin, and Rachel dies delivering him. Joseph's whole life carries this same double shape from the very start — grief and promise folded into the same sentence, loss producing more than it takes.
You know the outline of what happens next, so walk through it for what it's actually doing rather than just what happens. Jacob loves Joseph more than his other sons and doesn't hide it — the coat, the dreams Joseph insists on telling his brothers even when they clearly don't want to hear them, the favoritism that any honest reader can see is going to end badly before it ends badly. And it does: the brothers sell him into slavery, dip his coat in blood, and let their father grieve for a son they know is alive. That's the engine of everything that follows, and Judah's own transformation — the offer of substitution for Benjamin you've already met in his study — only makes sense because this betrayal happened first.
In Egypt, notice the pattern that repeats three separate times, because it's the real argument of the whole narrative: Joseph rises, gets falsely accused or forgotten, and rises again — in Potiphar's house, in Pharaoh's prison, and finally before Pharaoh himself, interpreting a dream nobody else could read and being handed the second-highest office in Egypt in a single day (Genesis 41:39–43). Each collapse looks, in the moment, like the end of the promise. Each one turns out to be the mechanism carrying it forward instead. That's worth remembering the next time your own setback looks final; Joseph's story is the Old Testament's clearest sustained argument that it usually isn't.
The reconciliation scene, when the brothers finally stand before him unaware of who he is, is one of the most emotionally exposed moments in all of Scripture — Joseph weeping so loudly the Egyptians outside can hear him (Genesis 45:2). And when the truth is fully out and Jacob has died, the brothers, still afraid of revenge they clearly believe they deserve, get the sentence that holds the entire book together: "ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive" (Genesis 50:20). Notice what that verse does and doesn't say. It doesn't pretend the brothers' evil wasn't evil. It says God was working underneath it the entire time, toward an end they couldn't see and didn't intend.
Jacob's deathbed blessing over Joseph is the second-longest given to any of the twelve, after Judah's, and it's worth reading for its sheer density of image: "Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall... the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob" (Genesis 49:22–24). And just before this, in the previous chapter, Jacob does something worth pausing on: he formally adopts Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, as his own, giving Joseph a double portion among the twelve — the birthright the text earlier stripped from Reuben for his failure gets handed, quietly, to the brother who forgave the men who tried to destroy him (Genesis 48; 1 Chronicles 5:1–2). And in the blessing itself, Jacob crosses his hands, deliberately placing his right hand on the younger Ephraim over the older Manasseh — one more instance, on top of Isaac and Jacob himself, of God's blessing running through the younger son rather than the one custom would expect.
Later Scripture keeps returning to Joseph as a type worth reading typologically, not just historically — a beloved son, envied by his brothers, stripped, sold for silver, falsely accused, and then exalted to save the very people who betrayed him, offering them forgiveness they never earned. You don't need the New Testament to tell you that pattern rhymes with something much larger; the shape is right there in Genesis, waiting.