Joseph and His Brothers Page 11

  His eyes were full of tears already. He needed only to mention the name of the wife he had loved more than anything, and they would well up, though it had been eight years now since God had incomprehensibly taken her from him, and his voice, charged as always with emotion, faltered, and broke with a sob.

  The young man stretched out his arms to him and then put clasped hands to his lips.

  "How needlessly the heart of my dear papa and lord is troubled," he said in gentle reproach, "and how overwrought is his concern. When our guest wished us good health and left to look after his precious image"—he gave a sneer to please Jacob, adding—"which to my eyes looked rather wretched and helpless and of no more account than some piece of crude pottery at the market—"

  "You saw it?" Jacob interrupted. This in itself displeased him and darkened his mood.

  "I begged our guest to show it to me before the meal," Joseph said with pouted lips and a shrug. "The work is mediocre, with impotence written all over it. . . When you had finished talking, you and our guest, I left with my brothers, but one of the sons of Leah's handmaid. Gad I think, who is by nature blunt and curt, suggested that I set my feet along paths that theirs did not tread, and it pained my soul somewhat, for he did not call me by my name, but rather by a false and foul one to which I do not gladly answer ..."

  Suddenly and quite unintentionally he found himself playing tattletale, though he knew this to be a propensity that only detracted from his own sense of satisfaction—that he genuinely wanted to control and only moments before had successfully though temporarily overcome. First, there was his unrestrained need to communicate, which became a vicious circle given his bad relations with his brothers; for inasmuch as this set him apart and pushed him closer to his father, it created a state halfway between them that only spurred him on as a tattler. This in turn made his estrangement that much worse, over and over again, so that one could not say whether the damage had first begun with one or the other of them, but that in any case the older brothers could hardly look at Rachel's son without grimacing. The origins can without doubt be traced to Jacob's partiality to the child—and noting that fact is not intended as any real offense to this tender-hearted man. For by its very nature tender

  feeling tends to know no bounds and to form a delicate cult of itself; it cannot be concealed, cannot keep its tongue, but seeks out ways to confess and announce itself, to "rub itself under the nose," as we say, of the entire world, so that everyone may be caught up in it. Such is the excessive indulgence of people of tender feeUng; and Jacob found himself encouraged all the more by his tribe's tradition, the prevailing view of God's own self-indulgence and majestic moodiness in matters of feeling and in the objects of His partiality. El-Elyon's choice and preference of some individuals, absent, or at least beyond any merit on their part was absolute and splendid; by any human measure, it was hard to comprehend and unjust, a sublime emotional reality that was not to be quibbled with, but to be honored with trembling and rapture in the dust. And Jacob, himself aware— though in all humility and fear—that he was the object of such favor, imitated God by insisting exuberantly on his own predilection and giving it free rein.

  Joseph had inherited from his father an emotional man's tender lack of self-control. We shall have more to say about his inability to tame the fullness of his feelings and the lack of tact that would become so extremely dangerous to him. As a nine-year-old child it was he who had told his father about how the tempestuous but kindly Ruben had burst into a rage at Jacob—who had made Bilhah his favorite by taking to the bed of Leah's handmaid, rather than to that of Leah, Ruben's rejected, red-eyed mother, cowering in her tent—and had torn his father's bed from its new location, cursing and maltreating it. A rash act, committed by a son whose pride had been hurt, committed on Leah's behalf—and he was soon sorry for it. The bed could easily and quietly have been put back in place, and Jacob would have needed to be none the wiser. But Joseph had witnessed it all, and could think of nothing better than to carry the tale to his father; so that from that hour on, Jacob—who himself was not the firstborn son by nature, but only in name and in the legal sense—had toyed with the plan of cursing Ruben and divesting him of his firstborn's status, but not in order to let the next eldest, Leah's second son, Shimeon, take his place, but instead, in an exercise of the most arbitrary freedom of emotion, Joseph, Rachel's first.

  The brothers were wrong to claim that by being a chatterbox the boy was intentionally trying to influence such paternal decisions.

  Rather, he simply could not hold his tongue. Which made it all the harder to forgive him and only fueled the brothers' suspicions when, at the very next opportunity, he was again unable to keep silent, despite his awareness of such intentions and the charges laid against him. Few people know just how Jacob came to find out that Ruben had "sported" with Bilhah.

  What happened then, well before their settling in Hebron, at a stopover between there and Beth-el, was far worse than the story about the bed. Ruben, twenty-one at the time and with overflowing urges and energy, had been unable to resist his father's wife, the same Bilhah against whom he had felt such bitter spite because of the neglected Leah. He had spied upon her in her bath, at first purely by accident, then for the pleasure of shaming her without her knowledge, then with slowly overpowering lust. The sturdy youth had been seized with a sudden and brutal desire for Bilhah's ripe, but artfully maintained charms, for her still-firm breasts, her dainty belly, and his obsession was not to be quelled by any handmaid, any slave obedient to his every command. He crept in upon his father's concubine and current favorite wife, taking her by surprise if not by force, though indeed his strapping youthful vitality surely seduced this handmaid, who trembled before Jacob.

  Joseph had been loitering nearby and, with no real intention to spy, had observed enough of this scene of passion, fear, and misconduct that, in his naive eagerness, he was able to report to his father as an oddity of some note: that Ruben had been "sporting" and "laughing" with Bilhah. These words literally said less than he knew had occurred, but in common usage they impHed everything. Jacob blanched and gasped. Only minutes after the boy had told his tale, Bilhah lay before the clan's leader whimpering her confession and clawing her fingernails at those same breasts that had bewitched Ruben, but that for her master would now remain forever sullied and untouchable. Then the malefactor himself lay there, with only a sack cinched about him in token of his humiliation and submission; and raising his hands in true contrition above dust-strewn, disheveled locks, he let the sublime thunderstorm of his father's rage pass over him. Jacob called him Ham, the profaner of his father, called him the dragon of chaos. Behemoth, and a shameless hippopotamus—this last because of an Egyptian fable, according to which it was the hippopotamus's wicked practice to slay its father

  and then ravish its mother. By pretending that Bilhah was Ruben's real mother, simply because he himself slept with her, Jacob imbued his tirade with the ancient, dark notion that in cohabiting with his mother Ruben had intended to make himself lord of all—and now proclaimed to him the opposite. For with arms outstretched above the groaning man, he wrested from him the rights of the firstborn— though, to be sure, temporarily retaining them for himself, without bestowing that dignity on anyone else, so that the matter had remained unsettled ever since and, for now at least, a father's intense and majestic partiality for Joseph took the place of any legal fact.

  The remarkable thing was that Ruben bore the lad no ill feelings, and of all the brothers was the most indulgent of him. He quite correctly did not ascribe the boy's actions to pure malice but sincerely saw it as Joseph's right to be concerned for the honor of such a loving father and to inform him of events whose shamefulness he, Ruben, would be the last to deny. Conscious of his own fallibility, Re'uben was kind and just. Moreover, like all of Leah's sons he was, despite his physical strength, rather ugly—he had his mother's feeble eyes, too, and, though it did not help, was forever rubbing ointment on the lids, which tended
to fester. He was more susceptible than the others to Joseph's universally admired charms and, in his own oafishness, was touched by them and sympathetic to the idea that the forever shifting legacy, the chosen status as head of the clan, the divine blessing bestowed on its great patriarchs, was being passed on to the boy rather than to him or any other of the twelve. So that, hard as it had been for him, his father's wishes and plans in regard to the firstborn had always seemed understandable.

  Joseph had known perfectly well, then, what he was doing in threatening Zilpah's son—who though outspoken was certainly not the worst—with Ruben's justice. For the latter had often spoken, if disparagingly, on Joseph's behalf to his brothers, had defended him by force several times from abuse and reprimanded them when, enraged by one of his acts of disloyalty, they had made vengeful plans to attack him. For the ninny had learned nothing from his earlier serious episodes with Ruben, nor had Ruben's magnanimity improved his behavior; and as he grew older he became a more dangerous observer and talebearer than he had been as a child. Dangerous to himself as well, especially since the role he had become accustomed to playing daily exacerbated his ostracism and exclusion, diminished

  his happiness, called down upon him a hatred he was unable by nature to cope with, and created every reason for him to fear his brothers, which only meant that he was tempted yet again to secure his position against them by flattering his father—all despite repeatedly resolving not to dip his tongue in poison, to improve his relationship with the ten of them, of whom none was a scoundrel and who, together with himself and his little brother, were as many as the houses of the zodiac, a number with which he felt a deep and holy bond.

  But in vain. Whenever Shimeon and Levi, who were hot-tempered men, picked a quarrel and brawled with shepherds from foreign parts or even with the residents of nearby towns, bringing shame on the clan; whenever, much to Jacob's displeasure, Jehuda, a proud but long-suffering fellow who was tormented by Ishtar and found nothing funny in what others found so humorous, had got involved in a clandestine affair with some country lass; whenever one of the brothers transgressed against the One and Most High God by surreptitiously burning incense before an image, thus endangering the fertility of the flocks and calling down upon them the pox, the mange, or the staggers; or whenever at a sale of culled cattle, whether locally or at Shechem, the sons quietly tried to secure and divide profits over and above what was rightfully Jacob's—their father would hear of it from his favorite. He even heard falsehoods from him that stood counter to reason but that, gazing into Joseph's lovely eyes, he was inclined to believe. The boy claimed that several of the brothers had repeatedly cut pieces from the flesh of living rams and ewes in order to eat it, that all four born of the concubines had done so, but that Asher had been the worst offender, for he was known in fact to be a glutton. Asher's appetite was the only thing that spoke for such an accusation, which in and of itself seemed highly unbelievable and could never have been proved true against any of the four, either. It was, objectively speaking, simple slander. Perhaps from Joseph's point of view, however, the incident did not quite deserve that name. Presumably he had dreamed the tale; or more correctly, at a period when he had every right to expect a thrashing, he had let himself dream it, hoping to get his father to shield him with it against his brothers' intentions, and now neither could nor would rightly distinguish between truth and a mere vision. It goes without saying, of course, that in this case the brothers'

  outrage took especially lavish forms. They were almost too ferocious in declaring themselves innocent, as if this were not totally the case and there might have been something true behind Joseph's fantasies after all. We are bitterest about accusations that are indeed false, yet not entirely so.

  The Name

  Jacob came close to flying into a rage upon hearing about the coarse name that Gad had called Joseph and that the old man was instantly ready to take as a punishable offense against his holiest feelings. But with just a cheerful face and a deft turn of phrase, Joseph could relent, mollify, and move on so swiftly and charmingly that Jacob's wrath abated before it truly flared up, and he could only smile dreamily as he continued to gaze into those black and slightly slanting eyes, narrowing with sweet guile now as Joseph spoke.

  "It was nothing," he heard his son say in that austere yet languorous voice he loved because it held much of the timbre of Rachel's voice. "I offered him a brotherly reproach for his coarseness, and since he wisely accepted my admonition, it is to his credit that we parted so amicably. I walked up the hill to view the city and Ephron's double dwelling; I cleansed myself here with water and with prayer, and as for that lion, that ravener of the underworld and offspring of the black moon with which it pleased my dear papa to unsettle me, he has kept to the thickets of the Jarden"—he pronounced the river's name with different vowels from those we use, called it the "Jarden," with a rather open "e" and an "r" formed at the palate but without being rolled—"and has found his supper in the clefts of the cliff, and the eyes of the child have not seen him, either near or far."

  He called himself "the child," a name that had remained with him from his earliest days, because he knew it would especially touch his father.

  "Had he come with his tail whipping and voice rumbling with hunger like the voices of the seraphim raised in hymns of praise," he went on, "the child would have been only slightly terrified of his fury, or perhaps not at all. For, thief that he is, he surely would once

  again have set upon some little lamb—assuming Aldmodad had not already driven him off with rattlings and flames—and would wisely have avoided the human child. Does my dear papa not know that animals fear and avoid man because God has given him the spirit of understanding and instilled in him the order and kind to which each of them belongs? And does he not recall how Sammael shrieked when the man of clay first learned to put names to creation, as if he were its master and maker, and how all the fiery hosts were amazed and cast down their eyes, for they know quite well how to cry 'Holy, holy!' in chorus arrayed, but lack any understanding of the ranking of higher and lower orders? And the animals, too, are ashamed and tuck their tails, for we know them and have command over their names and can deprive each of its roaring demeanor simply by presenting it with its name. And if he had approached with gruff, panting, abhorrent muzzle and long slinking stride, I certainly would not have let his terror rob me of my good sense or cause me to blanch before his riddle. 'Is not your name Bloodthirst?' I would have asked, just to make sport of him. 'Or are you perhaps called Death-pounce?' But then I would have sat up tall and cried, 'Lion! Behold, you are a lion after your order and kind, and your secret lies bare before me, so that I can speak it and dismiss you with a smile on my lips.' And he would have blinked at that name and slunk away at that word, powerless to answer me. For he has no learning whatever and knows nothing of the tools of writing ..."

  He was playing on words, something he always enjoyed, but, as with his boasting just now, he did it at the moment to amuse his father. His own name contained the sounds of the word "sepher," meaning book, writing material—which was a source of constant satisfaction, by the way, for unlike his brothers, none of whom could write, he loved composing with the stylus and was so skilled at it that he could have served as a junior scribe at some place where documents were collected, at Kiriath-Sepher or Gebal, that is, if Jacob could conceivably ever have given approval for such a profession.

  "And if my dear papa," he continued, "would deign to ease himself into a comfortable seat beside his son at the well, here on the rim of its depths for instance, while his bookish child slips down to sit at his feet, what a truly delightful order and ranking that would be. For then he could entertain his lord and tell him a fable that he has

  learned, a tale of names that he knows how to tell most engagingly. For in the days of the generations of the Flood, the angel Semhazai saw upon earth a maid whose name was Ishchara and whose beauty made a fool of him, so that he said, 'Hearken unto me!' But she answered an
d said, 'I would not think of hearkening unto you unless you first teach me the true and undisguised name of God, which at its mere mention causes you to mount up on high.' And, fool that he was, since all his lust was for her to hearken unto him, the messenger Semhazai indeed taught her the name. But no sooner did Ishchara find herself in its possession, and what does my dear papa suppose the chaste maid then did to snap her fingers in the face of the persistent angel? .. . This is the moment of highest suspense in my tale, but, sad to say, it would seem my dear papa is not listening, that his ears are sealed by his thoughts and that he is lost in his deep pondering?" And in fact Jacob was not listening, but "pondering." It was a mighty and eloquent pondering, the essence of pondering, its very definition so to speak, an emotional self-absorption of the highest degree—he never did less than that. When Jacob pondered, then it had to be a pondering visible at a good hundred paces, a pondering so grand and strong that not only was it obvious to anyone that Jacob was lost in thought, but also people realized for the first time in their lives what it truly means to ponder and were left awestruck by such a state and sight: the old man leaning with both hands grasping his long staff, his head bent over one arm, an ardently dreamy bitterness playing upon the lips within his silver beard, the brown aged eyes burrowing and probing deep into memory and thought, their self-absorbed and blunted gaze directed from so far below that it appeared caught in his overhanging brows. . . . Emotional people are expressive people, for emotions, in their need to be taken seriously, find expression by casting off silence and inhibition; expression arises from a tender but great soul, where languor and boldness, sensuality and nobility, naturalness and mannerism, all blend to form the most sublime theatricality, which other people may regard with slightly amused awe. Jacob was very impressive—much to Joseph's delight, for he loved and was proud of such stirring flights of emotion, but much to the alarm and shock of those who had dealings with him, and in particular his other sons, who, whenever there was a disagreement with their father, feared nothing so much as just such expressiveness. That had been the case with Ruben, when he