As for the significance of: They said, 'If he is stealing, a brother of his stole before', it is that the heart, alone from among all of the faculties, had been prepared for this meaning beforehand, and so they continued not to recognise the two [Joseph and his brother], accusing the two before their father in order to actualise what they sought and to seek a pleasure beyond the one they sought [ḍ]. It is said that Abraham, God's blessings and peace be upon him, used to own a belt which the eldest of his children would inherit. So after Isaac, Joseph's paternal aunt inherited it since she was the eldest of the children, and she had also raised Joseph after the death of his mother Rachel. But when he came of age, Jacob wanted to take [possession of] it [the belt] from her, but she would not renounce [possession of] it. So she tied the belt underneath his clothes, peace be upon him, and then said that she had lost the belt. When it was found upon him [Jacob], it was handed over to her and Jacob left it with her until she died. This [belt] is an allusion to the station of chivalry which he [Jacob] inherited from Abraham the spirit before the station of sanctity, during the time of his youth. It was the reassured soul that had tied it around him, the one that had embraced it at the time of the death of Rachel the self-reproaching [soul]. Jacob's desire to strip her of this [belt] is an allusion to the fact that the intellect desires to be elevated to the [station of the] earning of gnoses and realities; and when he finds it [the intellect] described with qualities of excellence at the station of chivarly, he is satisfied with it and leaves him with the reassured soul wayfaring along the path of virtues until she [the reassured soul] passes away through annihilation in God at the station of sanctity. But God knows best. As for Joseph's keeping his words secret in his soul, that is his awareness of their inability to perceive his station and their falling short of his perfection, and these [words] were: you are a worse case. The one who requested to be taken by Joseph the heart in place of his brother the practical intellect was [the faculty of] estimation since it tends to interfere with rational concepts and yearns to be elevated to the horizons of the intellect; his [estimation's] judgement concerning these [concepts] in an improper way and their [the brothers'] inclination to his leadership of them, excluding the practical intellect, is on account of the correspondence between them in terms of their attachment to substrata and his [estimation's] wish to actualise for them their goals in the way of corporeal pleasures.
