Getting Joseph Thrown into Slavery

Arlo Guthrie, the Jewish folk singer, likes to call him "the 'they-went-that-a-way' guy."  He is the man who tells Joseph where to find his brothers.  If Joseph did not find them, Guthrie points out, his brothers would have no opportunity to throw him into a pit and he would not have been sold down to Egypt.  Everything that naturally follows would also fail to occur:  Joseph would not be able to interpret Pharaoh's dream; there would have been a famine in Egypt as well as Israel; Jacob and his sons would not go to Egypt, grow into a nation there, be enslaved, and then be freed; and there would be no story to tell—no Bible and thus no Western civilization.  All because one guy was at the right place at the right time to say, "They went that-a-way."