Joseph and His Brothers Read online

  It was from there that long ago (Joseph himself was not clear just how far in the past it lay) a man made restless by his ponderings had set out together with his wife—whom presumably out of tenderness he Hked to call his "sister"—and other members of his family and in imitation of the moon, the divinity of Ur, began to wander, thinking

  Descent into Hell

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  this the most proper thing to do given his disgruntled, doubt-filled, indeed tormented state of mind. His departure, which had a vague but undeniable sense of opposition and rebellion about it, was connected with certain structures that impressed him as impertinent and that, although they had not been erected by Nimrod, the current ruler of the locality and a mighty man on earth, had been restored and made exceedingly taller by him, less in honor of the divine heavenly lights to which they were dedicated—or that at least was the private opinion of the man of Ur—than as a deterrent to the inhabitants' scattering over the land and as a heaven-aspiring monument to King Nimrod's amassed power, from which the man of Ur had now escaped by scattering with his household all the same, to wander who knew how long. The tradition handed down to Joseph was not definite as to whether what had specifically annoyed this malcontent had been the great moon citadel of Ur, the towered temple of the god Sin—whose name had also been given to the entire land of Shinar and was Ukewise echoed in place-names closer to home, as in, for instance, a Mount Sinai—or whether it had been the lofty house of the sun, the Marduk temple Esagila in Babel itself, an exact description of which, including the pinnacle that Nimrod had also raised to rival heaven, had been passed down in the stories told to Joseph. There had evidently been several other things that offended this man as he pondered them: beginning with Nimrod's mightiness in general on down to various customs and usages that to others appeared part of a sacred, inalienable tradition, but that had filled his soul with increasing doubt—and since it is not easy to sit still with doubt in one's soul, he had set himself in motion.

  He arrived in Haran, the moon city of the north, the City of the Way, in the land of Naharina, where he remained for several years and gathered souls, bringing them into a close relationship with his own family. This was, however, a relationship that brought with it uneasiness, and almost nothing else—an uneasiness of the soul expressed in a restlessness of the body that had little to do with the fickleness of everyday wanderlust and light-footed adventures, but was instead the obsession of one driven man, in whose blood there stirred the dark beginnings of fateful developments, the irresistible force and scope of which may well have stood in some mysteriously precise proportion to the torment that left him no peace. Which was also why Haran, a city still within Nimrod's sphere of influence.

  proved in fact to be merely a "city of the way," a station from which the moon man again set out after a while, together with Sarai, his sister-wife, and all his kin and his and their goods, to continue his hegira as their leader and mahdi, uncertain of his goal.

  And so he had come to the western land, to the Amurru who resided in Canaan, where the rulers in those days were men from Heth, had moved by stages across the land, and forged ahead far into the south, beneath another sun, into the Land of Mud, where the water runs backwards, not like the water of Naharina, and boats float downstream to the north, where an ancient, stiff-necked people prayed to their dead and where there had been nothing for a man of Ur to search out or accomplish in his distress. He had returned to the western land or, better, to the middle country that lay between the mud and Nimrod's domains, with desert not far to the south, came to a mountainous region where there was little tilling of the soil, but abundant pastures for his flocks, where he and the inhabitants dealt fairly with one another, and he settled superficially after his fashion.

  Tradition has it that his God—the God on whose essential image his mind was hard at work, the highest among all the others; whom alone he was determined to serve out of pride and love; the God of the eons, for whom he had sought a name and, finding none to his satisfaction, had assigned him a plural, tentatively calling him Elo-him, the Godhead—that this God, then, had made him both far-reaching and tightly circumscribed promises to the effect that not only would he, the man of Ur, become a nation numberless as sand and stars and a blessing to all nations, but also to the effect that the land in which he now dwelt as a stranger and to which Elohim had led him out of Chaldea would be given to him and his seed as an eternal possession in all its parts—whereby the God of gods must have expressly listed all those peoples and current inhabitants of the land whose "gates" this Ur man's seed was to possess or, better, all those whom God clearly intended be subjugated and reduced to servitude in the interest of the man of Ur and his seed. All this is to be accepted only with caution—or at least must be correctly interpreted. We are dealing with late and tendentious interpolations, whose purpose is to find in God's intention from earliest times a sanction for political arrangements established much later by force

  of arms. In reality this moon-wanderer's personality was not the sort that either receives or generates poUtical promises. There is no proof that from the very start, upon leaving his homeland, he had viewed the land of the Amurru as the future setting for his actions; indeed, his trial wandering into the land of tombs and the crop-nosed lion-maid would appear to prove the contrary. And even if—after putting Nimrod's all-powerful state behind him, but also quickly turning back out of the celebrated empire of the double-crowned king of oases—he intentionally returned to the western land, to a country, that is, whose fractured national existence condemned it to hopeless political impotence and dependency, this is a testimony to anything but a personal taste for imperial greatness or a gift for political vision. What had set him in motion was spiritual uneasiness, a need for God; and if prophecies were made to him—and of that there can be no legitimate doubt—these referred to the wider effects of his novel and personal experience of God, for whom he had sought to gain sympathy and adherents from the very beginning. He suffered, and in comparing the measure of his own interior discomfort with that of the great majority, he concluded that his suffering bore the future within it. Your torment, your restlessness, so he learned from his newly discerned God, is not to be in vain—for it will impregnate many souls, will bring forth proselytes countless as the sand upon the seashore and provide the impulse for amplitudes of life contained like a seed within it—in a word, you will be a blessing. A blessing? It is unlikely that this word correctly renders the sense of the one that came to him in his vision or corresponds to his own temperament and sense of self. The word "blessing" implies values that should be kept separate from the characterization of the nature and significance of men of his kind—of men, that is, who know an inner unrest, an urge to wander, and whose novel experience of God is destined to shape the future. The life of these men, with whom a new history begins, seldom or never means a pure and unquestioned "blessing," nor is that what is whispered to them by their own sense of self. "And you shall be a destiny" —that is the purer and more correct translation of the word of promise, whatever language it might have been spoken in; and whether this destiny may be a blessing or not is a question whose secondary importance is revealed by the fact that always and without exception there can be different answers to

  it—although of course a "yes" was always the answer of the community, growing by both physical and spiritual means, that recognized the true Baal and Adad of the grand cycle in the God who had led the man of Ur out of Chaldea. And it was to that cohesive community that Joseph traced his own spiritual and physical existence.

  At times he considered the moon-wanderer even to be his own great-grandfather, but that must be most sternly dismissed from the realm of possibility. From instruction of all sorts he himself knew perfectly well that it was all more far-reaching. Not, to be sure, so far-reaching that that mighty man of earth—whose boundary stones decorated with signs of the zodiac the man of Ur had left behind him—had in fact been Nimrod, the first king on earth, who
had sired Bel of Shinar. Rather the tablets told that it was Hammuragash the Lawgiver who had restored those citadels of sun and moon, and if young Joseph equated him with the far earlier Nimrod, this was merely a charming play of fancy that nicely suited his mind but is barred to us, for it would ill become our own. The same holds true for his occasionally confusing the man of Ur with his own father's grandfather, who had borne a similar or the same name. In terms of chronology, a system of which was certainly not unknown in his own cultural sphere and era, there lay between the boy Joseph and the wanderings of his spiritual, physical ancestor a good twenty generations, some six hundred Babylonian rounds of the year, a time span stretching back as far as the Gothic Middle Ages are from us— that far, and yet again not really.

  For although we have adopted intact the mathematical sidereal time of that place and period—that is, from days far preceding the travels of the man of Ur—and shall likewise bequeath it to our most distant posterity, earthly time's meaning, gravity, and fullness have not always and everywhere been one and the same; despite all the objectivity of Chaldean measurement, the size of time is uneven. Six hundred years in those days and under that sky did not signify what they do to our history in the West; those expanses of time were more silent, more mute, more alike; time was less active, the efficacy of its constant work to effect change in things and the world was both

  milder and more restricted—though, naturally, over those twenty generations it had brought about significant changes and revolutions, even natural revolutions, changes in the earth's crust in Joseph's immediate environs—as we know, and as he himself knew. For where in his day were those licentious towns Gomorrah and Sodom, the home of Lot of Haran, whom the man of Ur had received into his close kinship? A leaden, briny sea now lay where their lewdness had once flourished, the result of an upheaval that had flooded the region in fiery pitch and brimstone so dreadful and all-destroying that Lot's daughters, who had escaped in the nick of time with him—the same women he had tried to offer up to the lusts of the Sodomites in lieu of certain staid visitors—had been crazed enough to believe that there were no other humans left on earth and out of feminine concern for the continuance of the human race had lain with their own father.

  Time in its course had, after all, left behind just such visible transformations. There had been periods of blessing and periods of curse, of plenty and scarcity, with campaigns of war, changing rulers, and new gods. Yet, on the whole, the mind of the age was more conservative than ours. The shape of Joseph's life, his modes of thought, his customs were far less different from his ancestors' than ours are from the crusaders'. Memories based on oral tradition passed from generation to generation were more direct, unimpeded, intimate; time was more uniform, the eye could pierce through its vista more easily. In short, there is no reason to be annoyed with Joseph for dreamily collapsing time and, at least occasionally, when his mind was less exact, at night perhaps or by moonlight, for considering the man of Ur to be his father's grandfather—nor given such imprecision, did matters rest there. For in all probability, we should add, the man of Ur was not the real and original man of Ur. Probably— probable even to young Joseph, when, by day, he was more precise— the former had never seen the moon citadel of Uru, but rather it had been his father who had gone up from there, toward the north, to Haran in the land of Naharina; and it was from Haran, then, that our imprecisely called man of Ur had, at the bidding of the Lord of the gods, departed for the land of the Amorites, together with Lot, who was later to reside in Sodom and whom communal tradition dreamily declared to be a nephew of the man of Ur, inasmuch as Lot was a "son of Haran," his brother. To be sure. Lot of Sodom was a son of

  Haran, since he came from that city, just as had the man of Ur. But to turn Haran, the City of the Way, into a brother of the man of Ur, making a nephew out of Lot the proselyte, was purest dreaming— a fancy not tenable by day, yet it goes a long way to explain how it was so easy for the young Joseph to make his own little mistakes.

  He made them in the same good faith, for instance, as the star-worshipers and astrologers of Shinar, when for their prognostications they followed a principle of astral representation, substituting one heavenly body for another—for example, exchanging the sun, once it had set, with Ninurta, the planet of war and state, or the planet Mardug with the constellation of Scorpio, blithely calling the latter Mardug and naming Ninurta the sun. In his desire to put a beginning to the events of which he was part, Joseph did much the same as a practical makeshift, for he was met with the same difficulty that confronts every such endeavor—the fact that everyone has a father and nothing is first, comes of itself, or is its own cause, but rather everything has been engendered and points backward, deeper into the first foundations, the depths and abysses of the well of the past. Joseph knew, of course, that the Ur-man's father, that genuine man of Uru, also had to have had a father with whom his own personal history would then have had to begin, and so forth, back to Jabel, Adah's son, the primal ancestor of those who live in tents and breed cattle. And so for Joseph the departure from Shinar also meant only a conditional and particular primal beginning, for he had been well instructed, in song and saga, how behind it things went on and on toward universality, by way of many stories, as far back as Adapa or Adama, the first man, who according to Babylonian lore—lies told in verse that Joseph even knew partly by heart—had been the son of Ea, the god of wisdom and the watery^ depths, and was said to have served the gods as baker and cup-bearer, but about whom Joseph knew more hallowed and accurate things; as far back as the garden in the East, where had stood two trees, one of life and the other an unchaste tree of death—back to the beginning, to the origin of the world, of heaven and the earthly universe formed out of a formless void by the Word that was moving above the primal waters and was God. But was not this, too, only a conditional, particular beginning of things? There had been beings even then to watch the creator in wonder and amazement: the sons of god, astral angels— about whom Joseph knew some remarkable and even comic

  stories—and foul demons. They must have come from a past world eon, which in perishing of old age had provided the raw material for the formless void—and had that even been the very first eon of all?

  At this point the young Joseph grew dizzy, just as we do when leaning over the edge of the well; and despite those little impreci-sions that ill become us but that his handsome and beautiful head allowed itself, we feel him close to us, our contemporary in relation to that underworldly gorge of the past, into which he too, now so distant, has already peered. He was a human being like us, so it appears to us, and despite being so early in time was, mathematically speaking, as far as we from the beginning foundations of humanity (not to mention, yet again, the beginning of all things), since those in fact lie in the abysmal darkness of the well's gorge. And so in our scrutiny either we shall have to hold to conditional pseudo-beginnings that we confuse with real beginnings in much the same way that Joseph confused the wanderer from Ur on the one hand with the man's father and on the other with his own great-grandfather, or we shall be lured backward, ever backward, from one coastal backdrop to another and into immeasurable depths.

  We mentioned the example of those lovely Babylonian verses that Joseph knew by heart and that were taken from a larger written tradition full of spurious wisdom. He had learned them from travelers passing through Hebron, whom in his amiable fashion he had engaged in conversation, and from his tutor, old Eliezer, a freed slave of his father's—not to be confused (as Joseph sometimes did—a confusion in which the old man himself probably indulged on occasion) with the Eliezer who was the oldest servant of the wanderer from Ur and who had once wooed Bethuel's daughter by the well for Isaak. In point of fact, we know these verses and legends; we possess the texts on tablets found in Nineveh, in the palace of Assurbanipal, King of All That Is, son of Assarhaddon, son of Sennacherib, several of which provide, in delicate cuneiform inscribed on grayish yellow clay, our earliest recorded source for the Gr
eat Flood in which the Lord destroyed the first human race because of its depravity—and which also played such a significant role in Joseph's own personal