Joseph and His Brothers Read online

  tradition. To be frank, however, the word "source," at least in its most literal sense, is somewhat out of place here; for those little cracked tablets are copies that date from a mere six hundred years before the common era and that Assurbanipal (a sovereign fond of all thought fixed in writing, an avid collector of clever works of wisdom, and himself an "arch-clever" man, to use the Babylonian term) had ordered learned slaves to transcribe from an original a good thousand years older—meaning it had originated in the days of the Lawgiver and the moon-wanderer and so was about as easy or as difficult for Assurbanipal's scribes to read and understand as a manuscript from the days of Charlemagne would be for us today. A hieratic document, executed in a very obsolete and rudimentary script, it must have been difficult to decipher even then, and it remains a matter of doubt whether in preparation of the copy original meanings were fully preserved.

  Except that this original was itself not actually an original, not the original if viewed correctly. It was itself already a copy of a document from God knows what ancient time, upon which, therefore, one might, without precisely knowing where one is, come to rest, declaring it the true original—if it were not for the fact that in its own day a scribal hand had doctored it with glosses and addenda intended as an aid for a better understanding of yet another text from still more ancient times, though probably achieving just the opposite by his "modern" transmogrification of its wisdom. And so we might continue on and on, were it not for the hope that our listeners already grasp what we have in mind at the mention of coastal backdrops and the gorge of the well.

  The people of Egypt had a term for this, a word Joseph knew and occasionally used. For although no Hamites were tolerated in Jacob's camp—because of the sin of their ancestor, who had been turned black all over for shaming his father, and also because Jacob disapproved of the morals of Mizraim on religious grounds— Joseph, being a curious young lad, nevertheless often associated with Egyptians in the cities of Kiriath-Arba and Sichem and picked up a thing or two in a language he would one day speak with such brilliant perfection. Speaking of things of indefinite and very great age or, better, from time out of mind, Egyptians said "From the days of Set," referring, of course, to one of their gods, the conniving brother

  of their Mardug or Tammuz, whom they called Osiris, the martyr— a sobriquet given him because Set, having first lured him into a burial chest, had tossed him into the river and then like some wild beast torn him to pieces besides, murdering him for good and all, so that Usiri, his victim, now reigned in the underworld as lord of the dead and king of eternity. "From the days of Set"—the people of Mizraim had all sorts of uses for the idiom, since the origin of everything they knew was inexpHcably lost in that same darkness.

  At the edge of the Libyan desert, near Memphis, there brooded a colossus hewn from rock, a fifty-three-meter-tall hybrid of lion and maiden, with female breasts and a man's beard—its headcloth displaying the royal serpent rising to strike, its giant paws stretched out before its feline body, its nose cropped and gnawed away by time. It had always brooded there, had always had that nose cropped by time, and it was impossible to remember an age when that nose had not been cropped or that the sphinx itself had not been there. Thut-mose the Fourth, Golden Sparrow-Hawk and Strong Bull, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Beloved of the Goddess of Truth, from the same eighteenth dynasty from which the aforementioned Amun-is-content would come, had ordered—following instructions received in a dream before ascending the throne—that the desert sands that had long since drifted in to cover most of the oversized sculpture be dug away. But one and a half thousand years before him. King Khufu of the fourth dynasty, who had built the Great Pyramid as his burial monument and offered sacrifices to the sphinx, had found it half in ruins, and no one knew of a time when it had not existed or had even existed with its nose intact.

  Had Set himself hewn the stone to create this monster, which later generations would regard as an image of the sun god and call "Hor in the Mountain of Light"? That is quite possible, for Hke Osiris the Martyr, Set presumably had not always been a god, but a man at one time, and indeed a king over Egypt. As for the contention one hears not infrequently that a certain Menes or Hor-Meni founded the first Egyptian dynasty approximately six thousand years before our common era and that anything prior is a "pre-dynastic period"; that he, Meni, first united the lands, both upper and lower, the papyrus and the lily, the red and the white crowns, and ruled as the first king of the Egyptians, whose history begins

  with his reign—as for that notion, presumably every word of it is false, and to the more acute and penetrating eye the primal king Meni becomes a mere backdrop in time. Egyptian priests told Herodotus that the written history of their land went back 11,340 years before his day, which for us would mean about fourteen thousand years, a number aptly suited for virtually ripping the garb of ancient primacy from King Meni's figure. The history of Egypt falls into periods of division and impotence and those of power and brilliance, into epochs without a sovereign and many petty rulers and those in which all its energies are called together in majesty; and it becomes increasingly clear that these forms of existence alternated far too often for King Meni to have been the first representative of unity. The fragmentation that he healed had been preceded by an older unity, and it by an older fragmentation; we cannot say how many times one must speak here of "older," "again," and "farther," but only that unity first flourished under a dynasty of gods, whose sons most likely were the aforesaid Set and Osiris, and that the story of Usiri, of his martyrdom, murder, and dismemberment, alludes in legendary fashion to struggles for the throne that followed and were finally settled with criminal cunning. It was that past, shaped by deep, mythic, theological processes leading to its spectral and supernatural spiritualization, that became the present and an object of devout veneration in the form of certain animals—a few falcons and jackals cherished at Butto and Nekhab, the ancient capitals of the two lands—and within those creatures the souls of these prehistoric beings were said to have been mysteriously preserved.

  "From the days of Set"—the phrase pleased young Joseph and we share his delight in it, for like the people of Egypt we, too, find it highly suitable and applicable to absolutely everything; indeed it lies close at hand wherever we look, in every sphere of human activity, and upon closer inspection the origin of all things is lost in the days of Set.

  At the point in time when our story begins—a point chosen rather arbitrarily, but we must start somewhere and leave the rest behind, otherwise we, too, would have had to begin "in the days of

  Set"—Joseph was already tending flocks beside his brothers, though called to this labor within gentle Hmits: whenever it pleased him, he would join them in shepherding his father's herds of sheep, goats, and cattle in the pastures of Hebron. What did these animals look like? In what way were they different from those we keep and tend? They weren't the least different. They were the same tamed and penned creatures, bred at the same stage of development, just as we know them now; and in young Joseph's day, the entire history of cattle's domestication from varieties of buffalo lay so far in the past that "long ago" would have been an outright ridiculous term for such expanses of time. It has been proved that cattle were being bred in that early stage of the culture that made its tools of stone, before the Iron or Bronze Ages, and that for an Amurru lad like Joseph, educated in Babylonian and Egyptian ways, lay almost equally far in the past as for us today—the difference is imperceptible.

  If we were to inquire about the breed of these wild sheep from which the animals in Jacob's and our present-day flocks were "once" bred, we would be told that it is extinct. It ceased to exist "long ago." Its domestication must have occurred in the days of Set; and be it the horse, the ass, the goat, or even the pig—bred from the wild boar that mutilated Tammuz, the shepherd—domestication goes back to that same misty past. Our historical records date back approximately seven thousand years—during this period, at least, not a single wild animal has b
een domesticated to serve us. All that lies beyond memory.

  In that same past lies the cultivation of wild and simple grasses to yield the grains that give us bread. To its regret, botanical science declares itself unable to trace our cereal grains, which also nourished Joseph—barley, oats, rye, corn, and wheat—to their wild-growing original state, and no nation can claim to have been the first to develop and cultivate them. We are told that in Stone Age Europe there were five different varieties of wheat and three of barley. And as for the taming of the wild grape for wine—an incomparable feat in terms of human achievement, whatever else one may think of it—the tradition echoing up from the abyss ascribes this to Noah, the righteous man who survived the Flood, the same man whom the Babylonians called Utnapishtim, as well as Atrahasis, "the arch-clever man"—and it was he who told his late-born grandson Gilgamesh, the hero of those tablet sagas, about the beginning of things. This

  righteous man had also been, as Joseph Ukewise knew, the first to plant vineyards—which Joseph did not regard as all that righteous. For could he not have planted something of real use? Fig trees or olive trees? No, he was the first to make wine, got drunk on it, and in his drunkenness was mocked and gelded. But if Joseph thought it had not been all that long ago that those monstrous events had occurred and the noble grape developed—a dozen generations or so before his own "great-grandfather"—that was a reverie of error and a pious foreshortening of an inconceivably distant primal past. Though it leaves us blanching in amazement, we can only point out that even that primal distance must in turn have come much later, at a very long interval after the origins of the human race, for it to have brought forth a degree of cleverness capable of so civilizing an act as the ennobling of the wild grape.

  Where do the first foundations of human civilization He? How old is it? We ask this in relation to the distant Joseph, whose stage of development—apart from little dreamy imprecisions that bring a friendly smile to our lips—already no longer differed in its essentials from our own. The question, however, needs only to be posed, and that taunting vista of backdrop dunes opens up before us. When speaking of "antiquity" we usually mean life in the Greco-Roman world—a period, by comparison, of bright and shiny modernity. Moving back to the so-called "aboriginal" peoples of Greece, the Pelasgi, we discover that before they took possession of its islands, these were inhabited by the true aborigines, a race of people who were forerunners to the Phoenicians in mastering the sea, reducing the latter's distinction as the "first buccaneers" to a mere backdrop. As if that were not enough, science is increasingly inclined to the hypothesis and conviction that these "barbarians" were colonists from beyond the Pillars of Hercules, from Atlantis, the submerged continent that long ago joined Europe to America. But whether that had been the region first settled by humankind is so very uncertain that it approaches improbability, and what becomes more probable instead is that the early history of civilization, including that of Noah, that arch-clever man, must be linked to far more ancient continents that had fallen and perished much earlier still.

  Those are foothills that we shall not venture to wander, that can be only dimly suggested by that Egyptian turn of phrase, and the peoples of the Orient displayed equal wisdom and piety in ascribing

  to the gods their first instruction in civihzed Ufe. The red-hued people of Mizraim saw their benefactor in the martyr Osiris, who had first taught them to till the soil and had given them laws, his deeds having been interrupted only by the insidious attack of Set, whose behavior toward him was that of a ravening boar. And the Chinese see the founder of their realm in an imperial demigod named Fu Hsi, who introduced cattle among them and taught them the precious art of writing. This same divine being evidently did not consider them mature enough at the time—2,852 years before our era—to be instructed in astronomy, for according to their annals this was first shared with them some thirteen hundred years later by the foreign emperor, Tai Ko Fokee; whereas it is certain that the astrologer priests of Shinar were skilled in reading the signs of the zodiac several hundred years before, and we are told that a man who accompanied Alexander the Macedonian to Babylon sent to Aristotle baked clay tablets with Chaldean astronomical inscriptions whose data would be 4,160 years old today. That is easily possible; for it is probable that celestial observations and calendric calculations had already been made on the continent of Atlantis, whose destruction the scholar Solon dated to nine thousand years before his own lifetime—meaning that humankind had advanced to the study of these high arts a good 11,500 years before our era.

  Clearly, then, writing is to be regarded as no more recent, and quite possibly much older still. We speak of it because Joseph had a particular and lively fondness for it and, unlike all his siblings, had early on—at first with Eliezer's assistance—perfected himself in not only the Babylonian but also Phoenician and Hittite scripts. He had a true partiality, a weakness for the god—or idol—who in the east was called Nabu, the writer of history, but was known as Taut in Tyre and Sidon, being viewed in both regions as the inventor of symbols and the chronicler of primal beginnings, but who in Egypt was Thoth of Khmunu, scribe of the gods and patron of science, whose position in the land below was esteemed more highly than all others—a truthful, temperate, and cautious god, who at times took the charming shape of a white-haired monkey, but at times also had the head of an ibis, and, moreover, much to Joseph's liking, maintained very subtle and solemn relations with the moon. The young man did not even dare admit this fondness to his father Jacob, who was unbending in his prohibition of dalliance with any such riffraff

  idols and was probably more stern in this regard than certain highest powers to which his sternness was dedicated, for Joseph's story teaches us that such powers did not seriously hold against him—or at least not for long—these little excursions into what were actually proscribed areas.

  By way of suggesting the murky origins of the art of writing, it might be better to employ a variation of that Egyptian phrase and say that it comes "from the days of Thoth." The scroll can be found depicted on the most ancient Egyptian monuments, and we know that a papyrus belonging to Horus-Send, a king of the second dynasty there, some six thousand vears ago, was already considered so old that it was said Send had inherited it from Set. During the reigns of Sneferu and the aforementioned Khufu, solar sons of the fourth dynasty, when the pyramids of Giza were built, knowledge of writing was so common among the lower classes that today we can study simple inscriptions scratched by workers into the gigantic building blocks. It should come as no surprise, however, that such knowledge was widespread even in those remote periods, not when one recalls that priestly testimony concerning the age of Egypt's written history.

  And if the days of fixed symbolic language are beyond our counting—where, then, would one search for the beginnings of the spoken word? The oldest language, the primal tongue, is said to be the Indo-Germanic, Indo-European, Sanskrit. But it is as good as certain that the "primal" is as premature in this case as in many another, and that there was yet again an older mother tongue that contained within it the roots of Aryan as well as Semitic and Hamitic dialects. It was probably spoken on Atlantis, whose silhouette forms the last backdrop of foothills still vaguely discernible in the distant haze of the past, and yet even it can hardly be the primal homeland of man the speaker of words.

  Certain discoveries have induced experts in the history of the earth to estimate the human species to be five hundred thousand years old. That is cutting it fine—first, in Hght of what science teaches to be

  true today, that man qua animal is the oldest mammal and already during the later ages of prehistoric life, prior to any cerebral development, lived his life on earth clad in various zoological fashions, including amphibian and reptilian; and second, in light of what vast expanses of time beyond our ken must have been required for a kind of semi-erect, somnambulant, web-fingered marsupial twitching with protoreason, such as humans surely must have been before the appearance of that arch-clever man
Noah-Utnapishtim, to become the inventor of the bow and arrow, the master of fire, the smith of meteoric iron, the breeder of domestic animals, the cultivator of grain and wine—to become, in a word, the precocious, skillful, and in every definitive sense modern creature that stepped out to meet us as a human being in the first dawn of history. A sage in the temple at Sais explained to Solon that the Greek legend of Phaethon stemmed from a deviation in the course of heavenly bodies moving in space around the earth, a deviation that human beings had experienced as a devastating conflagration on earth. And it surely becomes ever more certain that in its dreams—shapeless, yet constantly reshaped in fabulous forms—human memory reaches back to incredibly ancient catastrophes, traditions of which, fed by later and smaller events of a similar sort, found a home among various peoples, giving rise to that same series of backdrops that lure and excite the wanderer through time.

  The verses from those tablets that were recited for Joseph and that he learned by heart told, among other things, the story of the Great Flood. He would have known this tale even had it not come to him clad in Babylonian language and form; for it was alive everywhere in his western land, and especially among his own people, though in a somewhat different form and with other details from what people in the land between the rivers believed to be true. During his youth, in fact, it was on the verge of being fixed by his tribe into a particular version, a variant on the eastern form. And Joseph knew very well what had happened back then, when all flesh, animals not excepted, had corrupted its way in indescribable deeds, and even the earth itself had committed whoredom and brought forth deceitful tares where wheat had been sown—and all of this despite Noah's warnings, so that the Lord and Creator, who had to watch as even His angels became involved in this abomination, could finally