Joseph is trown into a well

The scene of Joseph thrown into the pit by his brothers belongs to the Old Testament narrative cycle that Pacher painted — probably as part of a typological programme linking Joseph's betrayal with Christ's Passion. The episode from Genesis 37, where Joseph's jealous brothers cast him into a dry cistern before selling him to Ishmaelite merchants, was read typologically as a prefiguration of Judas's betrayal of Christ, making it appropriate for altarpiece programmes in Passion-focused churches. Pacher, who was equally sculptor and painter, gave the scene its characteristic pictorial drama by focusing on the physical act of lowering rather than on the brothers' conference or Joseph's pleading — a narrative decision that isolates the victim's powerlessness as the theological core of the image.

Pacher concentrates the drama in the gestures of the brothers lowering Joseph by rope into a rocky pit that opens in the foreground of the composition. The landscape behind uses the rising terrain format common in his exterior scenes, with distant blue mountains characteristic of the Tyrolean landscape he knew directly.