Joseph and His Brothers Read online

  A man named Jebshe, who called Taanakh his home, had told over dinner of the flocks of doves and the fishponds at the temple

  there, and of how he had been on the road for several days, bearing a stone tablet inscribed on all sides by Ashirat-Yashur, the lord of the city—the title of king was an exaggeration—and intended for his "brother," the Prince of Gaza, whose name was Riphath-Baal, with words to the effect that Riphath-Baal might enjoy a happy life and that all the more important gods might join together in concern for his welfare, and for that of his house and his children as well, but that he, Ashirat-Yashur, could not send the timber or money more or less justly demanded of him by his "brother," in part because he did not have it, and in part because he himself had urgent need of it, but was sending in its stead via this man Jebshe an uncommonly powerful clay image of the goddess Asherah, his personal guardian and protector of the city of Taanakh, that it might bring him blessing and help comfort him for the loss of the timber and the money. This same Jebshe, with his pointed beard and bright-colored woolens wrapped round him from throat to ankle, had stopped at Jacob's tent to hear his opinions, to break bread with him and spend the night before continuing his descent toward the sea; and Jacob had hospitably taken the messenger in, suggesting only that the image of Astarte—a female clad in trousers, crown, and veil, and clutching her tiny breasts with both hands—not be brought near him but left somewhat aside instead. Otherwise Jacob greeted him without prejudice, recalling an old tale handed down about Abraham, who had angrily chased off an aged idolater, sending him into the desert, but upon being rebuked by the Lord for his intolerance, had fetched the deluded old man back again.

  Attended by two slaves in freshly laundered linen smocks, the old man Madai and the youth Mahalaleel, and seated on cushions placed around the banquet carpet—for Jacob held fast to this custom of his forefathers and would not hear of sitting on chairs, as had become common among elegant people in cities, who followed the fashions of the great empires to the East and South—they had dined on olives and a roasted kid, served with the good bread made of kemach, and then on a compote of plums and raisins in copper goblets accompanied by Syrian wine in bowls of colored glass. Meanwhile the host and his guest carried on a serious conversation, to which Joseph at least had paid closest attention and which touched upon matters private and public, with topics ranging from the divine to the earthly, but to political rumor as well. They talked about the

  man Jebshe's own family and his official relation with Ashirat-Yashur, the lord of the city; about his journey, for which Jebshe had taken the road leading across the plain of Yezreel and into the highlands, then, mounting donkeys, had followed the route along the ridge of the watershed, although he was thinking of continuing his journey to the land of the Philistines by camel, on beasts to be purchased the morning he arrived in Hebron; about the price of cattle and grain at home; about the cult of the Blossoming Rod attached to Asherah of Taanakh, her "finger" as it was called, her oracle, by which she had granted permission for one of her images to be sent on a journey as "Asherah of the Way," so that it might deUght the heart of Riphath-Baal of Gaza; about her festival, which had been celebrated recently with universal and unbridled dancing as well as a feasting on fish beyond all excess and during which men and women had exchanged clothes in token of Asherah's male-femaleness, her twofold sexual nature as taught by the priests. At this Jacob stroked his beard and interjected questions of circumspect subtlety: what about the defenses of the city of Taanakh now that Asherah's image was on a journey; how was one to understand the relationship between the traveling image and the patron goddess of his homeland, and might not the latter have suffered a considerable loss of her powers now that part of her presence had wandered off? To which Jebshe replied that if that were the case, Asherah's finger would hardly have indicated she should be sent on her way, and that the priests taught how the divinity's full power was present with equally perfect efficacy in each of her images. Moreover Jacob had gently pointed out that if Ashirta was both male and female, that is, both Baal and Baalat at once, mother of the gods and king of heaven, one would have to revere her as the equal not only of Ishtar, renowned in Shinar, but also of Eset, renowned in the unclean land of Egypt, as well as the equal of Shamash, Shalim, Addu, Adon, Lachama, or Damu—in short, of the lord of all worlds and the highest god, so that the upshot was that in the end one was dealing with El-Elyon, the God of Abraham, the Creator and Father, whom one could not send on journeys because He ruled over all, and who was to be served not with a feast of fish but only by walking before Him in purity and by falling upon one's face to worship Him. But such a viewpoint was met with little understanding by the man Jebshe. Instead, he explained that just as the sun always followed a given direction

  and appeared along that one path, lending its light to the planets so that each could in its particular way influence the fate of humankind, so, too, the divine was spHt apart and had transformed itself into divinities, among whom the Lord-Mistress Ashirat was in fact, as everyone knew, the one divinity who actualized that divine energy by making plants fertile and by resurrecting nature from the bonds of the underworld, by transforming herself from a dry stick into a blossoming branch each year, so that on such an occasion a little immoderate eating and dancing was surely in order, as were other liberties and amusements associated with the Festival of the Blossoming Rod—just as purity was ascribed solely to the sun and to primal undivided divinity, but not to its planetary manifestations, and so reason had to make a sharp distinction between what was pure and what was holy, and he himself had noticed that the holy and the pure had nothing, or at least did not necessarily have anything, to do with one another. To which Jacob responded with the greatest circumspection: When it came to convictions inculcated by parents and scribes, he did not wish to offend anyone—and least of all a guest in his humble abode, the bosom friend and messenger of a mighty king. But the sun was also merely the work of El-Elyon's hands—divine, but not God, a distinction reason had to make. In worshiping one or another of the Lord's works, one contradicted reason and risked rousing His wrath and jealousy; and with his very own lips his guest Jebshe had characterized the gods of the country as lesser deities, for which there was a nastier name, but one which he, the speaker, would forbear from speaking out of charity and courtesy. If the God who had estabUshed the sun, the signs along its path, and the planets, including the earth, was the highest God, then He was also the only God, and it would be best not even to speak of other gods in such a case, otherwise one would be forced to label them with the name Jacob had refrained from using, precisely because reason demanded that the term and concept of "the highest God" be equated with the only God. The issue of whether these two ideas, the highest and the only, were the same or different notions gave rise to one of those longer discussions that the host could never get enough of and that, had it been up to him, would have lasted half or even all the night. Jebshe, however, had brought the conversation around to events out in the world and its empires, to commerce and intrigues, about

  which he, as a friend and relative of a Canaanite city prince, knew more than the average man: how pestilence was raging on Cyprus, which he called Alashia, and had carried away a great many people, but not all of them, as the ruler of that island had written to the Pharaoh of the Lower Lands by way of excuse for the almost total cessation of his tribute of copper; how the king of the Empire of the Chetites or Hittites was named Suppiluliuma and commanded such a vast military force that he was threatening to crush King Tushratta of Mitanni and make off with his gods, even though the latter was related by marriage to the Great House of Thebes; how the Kassite of Babel had begun to tremble before the power of the priest-prince of Assyria, who was striving to loosen his ties to the Empire of the Lawgiver and to found a state of his own along the river Tigris; how Pharaoh had enriched the priests of his god Amun with the wealth of Syria's tribute, erecting for that god a new temple of a thousand columns and portals with those same
moneys, the flow of which, however, would soon be a mere trickle, for not only had the cities of that country been plundered by Bedouin thieves, but Chetite power was also expanding from the north and vying with devotees of Amun for dominance in Canaan, while at the same time a good number of Amorite princes were seeking to come to an accommodation with these foreigners against Amun. Jebshe gave a wink at this point, presumably to indicate, just among friends, that Ashirat-Yashur was also moving down that same clever political path; but once God was no longer the subject of discourse his host's interest had diminished greatly. As the conversation languished, people left their cushions—Jebshe to make certain that in the meantime no harm had come to Astarte of the Way and then to lie down to sleep; Jacob, supporting himself on his staff, to make his rounds of the camp and tend to the women and the cattle in their stalls. As for his sons, Joseph had parted from the other five outside the tent, although it had looked at first as if he intended to remain with them. But outspoken Gad had abruptly said, "Run along, you little dandy, you harlot, we don't need you!"

  To which, after pausing to order his thoughts, Joseph rephed, "Gad, you are like a beam of wood that has not yet been planed, and like a butting billy goat in the herd. Were I to report your words to Father, he would punish you. Were I to report them to our brother

  Ruben, however, he would, as a just man, reprimand you. But let it be as you have said. If you five go to the right then I shall go to the left, or the other way round. For indeed I do love you all, yet you have an abhorrence of me, and today most especially, because Father served me up pieces of the kid and cast friendly glances at me. And for that reason I find your suggestion good, for by that means any offense may be avoided and you will not fall unwittingly into sin. Farewell."

  Glancing disdainfully over his shoulder. Gad had listened to it all, for he was curious as to what sort of clever things the boy would think to say this time. Then he had made a crude gesture and walked off with the others. Joseph, however, went his way alone.

  He had taken a pleasant little evening stroll—or took what pleasure he could in it, given the downcast state into which Gad's coarse behavior had now put him, mitigated only in part by the satisfaction he took in his own well-formed reply. Ambling up the hill by following the easier slope on its eastern side, Joseph had soon arrived at the crest and its view to the south, so that to his left lay the valley and moon-whitened town, with its thick walls and four-cornered towers and gates, its palace extending out into a pillared courtyard, and its temple set on a rocky promontory surrounded by a broad terrace. He liked to gaze down at the town, where so many people lived. And at his family's burial place, the two caves that Abraham had once bought with some difficulty from a Hittite and where the bones of his ancestors, of his ancient Babylonian mother from Ur and of later heads of the clan, were laid to rest—he was just able make it out from here: the cornices of the stone portal to the rocky double grave were barely visible at the far left of its encircling wall. And in his breast he had felt a mixture of the piety that has its source in death and the sympathy that the sight of a populous town inspires. Then he had walked back, sought out the well, refreshed himself, washing and rubbing himself with oil, and afterward had paid his somewhat dissolute court to the moon, at which his ever-attentive, ever-anxious father had discovered him.

  The Tattletale

  And now the old man was standing next to him, and after shifting his staff to his left hand, laid his right hand on Joseph's head. His aged, but penetrating eyes gazed into the lovely black eyes of the lad, who had at first raised them—meanwhile displaying yet again a good many gapped and gleaming teeth—but now lowered them again, in part out of simple respect, but in part, too, because of an uneasy sense of guilt bound up with his father's demand that he cover himself. In fact it was not just because of the pleasant breeze, or not for that reason alone, that he had delayed putting his clothes back on, and he guessed that his father had seen through the urges and notions that had led him to direct his salutations skyward half-naked. He had in fact found it both sweet and auspicious to offer his youthful nakedness up to the moon, with which he felt certain ties due to his horoscope and for all sorts of other speculative and intuitive reasons, for he was convinced that the moon would be pleased and had intentionally tried to bribe it and gain its favor—or even that of the power on high in general. The sensation of its cool light joining the evening air to brush his shoulders had, or so it seemed to him, confirmed the success of his childish attempt, which ought not be called shameless, because it was itself tantamount to a sacrifice of shame. One must keep in mind that the rite of circumcision as adapted by Joseph's clan and family from an external custom practiced by the Egyptians had long since acquired a special mystical meaning. Commanded and instituted by God himself, it was the marriage of man with the deity, performed on the part of the flesh which appeared to constitute the crux of his being, and indeed every vow was physically confirmed by a hand placed upon it. Many a man bore the name of God bound to his reproductive organ or inscribed it there before taking a wife. The bond of faith with God was sexual, and since it had been established with a demanding Creator, with a Lord insistent upon exclusive possession, it had the civilizing effect of weakening the male of the human species in the direction of the feminine. The bloody sacrifice of circumcision is related more than just physically to the concept of castration. This sanctification of the flesh carries with it both the idea of chastity and its loss, and therefore has a feminine meaning as well. Moreover, Joseph was, as he

  knew and heard everyone say, handsome and beautiful—a state that in any case includes a certain feminine consciousness; and inasmuch as "beautiful" was an adjective commonly applied above all to the full, unclouded, uneclipsed moon—a moon word, if you like, more at home really in heavenly realms and, if one is to be precise, conferred upon human beings only in a wider sense—the concepts of "beautiful" and "naked" were thus almost interchangeable in his mind; and it seemed to him both wise and pious to respond to the beauty of that heavenly body with the nakedness of his own, so that the pleasure and admiration might be mutual.

  We would prefer not to judge to what extent that certain dissolute quality in his behavior may have been connected with these shadowy sentiments. They originated in any case from the primal meaning attached to a cultic nakedness that was still regularly practiced before his eyes; and so when he was confronted by his father and his reprimand, they stirred in him a vague sense of guilt. For he loved and feared the old man's spirituality, and he had a clear suspicion that a world of thought to which he himself still felt some connection, if only a playful one, was for the most part considered sinful by his father, who had put such things behind him as pre-Abrahamic, applying to them a term he had ever at the ready, his most dreadful word of scorn, the word "idolatrous." Joseph was prepared to hear just such a reproach that expressly called things by their name. But given the worries that, as always, he felt for this son, Jacob chose other words. He began:

  "Truly it would be better had my child said his prayers and were now sheltered and sleeping. I do not Hke to see him alone in the deepening night, and beneath stars that shine upon both the good and the evil. Why did he not remain with Leah's sons and why did he not go with the sons of Bilhah?"

  He knew very well why Joseph had once again not done so, and Joseph also knew that only worry over this familiar state of affairs had compelled his father to ask the question. Pursing his lips, he replied, "My brothers and I discussed the matter and resolved it peaceably."

  Jacob continued, "The lion of the desert that lives in the reed banks where the river flows into the salt sea has been known to come across and attack the sheepfolds when hungry and to snatch his prey

  when thirsting for blood. It is but five days now since the shepherd Aldmodad lay upon his belly before me and confessed that a ravenous beast of prey had fallen upon two young ewes during the night and dragged one off to devour it. Aldmodad swore true to me without any oath, for he sh
owed me the bloodied ewe that had been preyed upon, so that it stood to reason that the other had been stolen by the lion and that the loss was upon my own head."

  "A small loss," Joseph said to flatter him, "and as nothing when compared with the riches with which the Lord chose to favor my lord in Mesopotamia."

  Jacob lowered his head and let it fall to one side a bit, as a sign that he did not boast of this blessing—although without some clever assistance on his part it would not have come to pass. He replied, "From one to whom much is given, much can be taken away. And if the Lord has made silver of me, He can make me into clay, poor as the potsherds upon the rubbish heap; for He is mighty in His ways, and we do not comprehend the paths of His justice. Silver has a pallid light," he continued, but avoided looking at the moon, although Joseph immediately cast it a sidelong glance. "Silver is grief, and the bitterest fear of the fearful is the folly of those who are sick for it."

  Looking up imploringly, the lad made a caressing gesture to mollify him.

  Jacob did not let him finish, but said, "It was out in those pastures there, a hundred or two hundred paces from here, that the lion crept near and pounced upon the old dam's ewes. But my child is sitting beside the well at night, careless, naked, with no weapon and no thought to his father. Are you steeled for danger and armed for battle? Are you like Shimeon and Levi, your brothers—God protect them—who attack their enemies with a shout, sword in hand, and who burned the cities of the Amorites? Or are you like Esau, your uncle in the wastelands of Seir to the south—a hunter and a man of the plains, red of skin and hairy like a billy goat? No, you are gentle, and a child who dwells in tents, for you are flesh of my flesh. And when Esau came to the ford with four hundred men and my soul did not know how it would all turn out before the eyes of the Lord, I put my handmaids in front with their children, your brothers, then Leah with her sons, but as for you, behold, I put you at the very rear, beside Rachel, your mother ..."