Have you noticed that success and excellence attract equal dose of appreciation and opposition? If you look well enough you find this is true. The three characters i have particularly cited in this book: Joseph and Daniel, in the old testament, and Jesus christ in the new testament, all had share of friends and enemies. Of course they are not the only people with the spirit of excellence in both hapless of the bible. There are a lot more others. I have mostly concentrated on these three because of what I want to state in this chapter.
Where do you wish to start from? I believe the opposition against Joseph started even before he was born. His mother was Rachel, remember? She was preferred wife to jacob, later named Israel. Take the trick his maternal grandpa, Laban, played on jacob after he had offered seven years laborious service to Laban as dowry for Rachel. Rather than give Rachel, Joseph's beautiful mother, to jacob, Laban gave his older daughter, Leah, who was not very attractive, to jacob, then insisted on another seven years service if jacob was desperate enough to have Rachel.
That story in Genesis 29 read like a fairytale. But it is a true story. You only have to consider the fact that had jacob married Rachel straightaway, there would be no issue about him marrying Leah in the first place; subsequently, the issue of Reuben, the son of Leah, and his gang of envious brothers who later ganged up to sell Joseph into slavery would not have come up. If that first obstacles that delayed Joseph's birth at least seven was not important, then recall that his birth was to be put off God knows how long. His mother, Rachel, was barren for some years. It got to a head when, in desperation, Rachel sieved on her husband, jacob, and demanded in her insistence, jacob started a third line of broods, through Rachel's handmaid, Bilhah.