And they took Joseph's coat, and killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood;
They took Joseph's coat. The commission of one sin necessarily leads to another to conceal it; and the scheme of deception which the sons of Jacob planned and practiced on their aged father was a necessary consequence of the atrocious crime they had perpetrated. What a wonder that their cruel sneer, "thy son's coat," and their forced efforts to comfort him, did not awaken suspicion! But extreme grief, like every other passion, is blind; and Jacob, great as his affliction was, did allow himself to indulge his sorrow more than became one who believed in the government of a supreme and all-wise Disposer.
Verse 34. Jacob rent his clothes ... sackcloth - the common signs of Oriental mourning. A tear is made in the skirt more or less lengthwise, according to the afficted feelings of the mourner, and a coarse rough piece of black sackcloth or camel's hair cloth is wound round the waist.
Verse 35. All his sons ... rose up to comfort him. What a bitter, heartless mockery, when the very authors of the grief professed to be comforters.
He said ... I will go down into the grave, х Shª'olaah (H7585)] - the place of the departed [Septuagint, eis (G1519) Hadou (G86)]; to Hades-not the grave, nor any opening in the earth; because Jacob believed his son's flesh had been devoured by an evil beast, and his bones scattered upon the surface of the ground-but to Sheol, the place of souls, the spirit-world, where he expected, in consciousness, to meet the undestroyed soul of Joseph.