The chapter
Allah Himself named this surah "the best of stories", and it opens with a child's dream. "O my father, I saw eleven stars and the sun and the moon, I saw them prostrating to me." Yusuf brought the vision to Ya'qub, and the old prophet read it instantly: greatness was coming to this son, and with greatness, danger, from inside the house. "O my son, do not relate your vision to your brothers, or they will plot against you a plot. Indeed Shaytan is to man a clear enemy."
That warning is the whole first act. Ya'qub did not doubt his other sons' religion; he understood the oldest disease in the family of Adam, envy of the preferred. The brothers' complaint was arithmetic: "Yusuf and his brother are dearer to our father than we, though we are a strong group. Our father is in clear error." They proposed murder, then settled, at one brother's urging, on the well: remove Yusuf, and the father's face will turn to us alone; "and you can be righteous people afterward." The Qur'an lets that self-deception stand naked: sin now, repentance scheduled for later.
They asked leave to take him out to play, carried him to the well, and lowered the boy into the dark. In that pit, revelation reached a child for the first time in the story: "We revealed to him: you will surely inform them of this deed of theirs while they perceive not." The dream was already working.
They returned at night, weeping, with the shirt, and false blood upon it. "The wolf ate him." The wolf was innocent, and the shirt was too intact for a father who could read evidence. Ya'qub answered with the phrase that became the Islamic definition of grief with dignity: "Rather, your souls have enticed you to a matter, so patience is beautiful, and Allah is the one sought for help against what you describe."
The Prophet ﷺ said of him: "The noble one, son of the noble one, son of the noble one, son of the noble one, Yusuf son of Ya'qub son of Ishaq son of Ibrahim." Four generations of prophethood, and the story now descends with the boy into slavery, temptation, and prison before a single star of the dream rises.