a. No remorse. We see in verse 25, that the brothers, after leaving Joseph to die, sit down and eat. At this point, they have no remorse. In Genesis 42, when the brothers talk to each other about what they did, they admit that they did not care at all. They said they saw the distress of his soul and that he begged them not to do what they did but they did not listen. They were merciless and the fact that they heard the cries for mercy from Joseph and then threw him away and then sat down to eat shows just how callous these men were. b. The brothers make a quick buck. At some point in the storyline, Reuben is separated from the rest of the brothers and so he is not aware of what happens in verses 25-28. As the rest are eating, they see a caravan coming from Gilead on their way to Egypt. They are called Ishmaelites, Midianites, and Medianites. The term Ishmaelite came to be an umbrella term for several different people groups including the Midianites and Medianites. So this group of traders appears and who speaks up? It’s Judah, of course. Judah suggests to his brothers that they not kill Joseph since he is their brother after all. But they could make a profit by selling him into slavery. There would be no profit in just leaving him to die. And so they pull him out of the cistern, make a deal with the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. We assume that they felt this was an equally valid way of keeping his dreams from coming true because how could a slave in Egypt rule over them? It is important to note that even though Reuben had plans to save Joseph, it was ultimately by Judah that Joseph would live. This is another clue that God had rejected Reuben and chosen Judah to be the one by which the Promised Seed would come.