Joseph and his brothers, p.100
Joseph and His Brothers, page 100
The Egyptian year took hold of him and spun him round within
its circle according to the ebb and flow of its nature and the ring dance of its feasts, of which one or another could be regarded as its beginning: the New Year's Feast at the onset of the inundation, which was a day abounding in hope and incredible tumult—a fate-fully significant day for Joseph, by the way, as it will turn out—or the recurrent anniversary of Pharaoh's ascent to the throne, an annual day of renewal for the people's jubilant hopes, which were bound up with the primal day itself, the dawning of a new dominion and age, when justice would drive away injustice and life would be lived in laughter and amazement. But, then again, since the year's cycle always returned upon itself, any day of memorial or celebration might do.
Joseph had entered Egypt's natural cycle at the time of the river's diminishment, when the land had reemerged and seed had been sown. That was when he was sold; and then he moved farther into and around with the year—the time of harvest came, which in name lasted on into the blazing summer and the weeks we call June, when to the devout jubilation of all Egypt's people the now narrow river began to rise again and slowly emerge from its banks under the watchful eye and precise measurements of Pharaoh's officials, for it was of first and final importance that the river rise correctly, not too wild and not too weak, because it governed whether the children of Keme would have bread to eat and Pharaoh a year of bountiful taxes for building. It rose and rose for six weeks, the Great Provider, very quietly, inch by inch, by day and by night—while people slept and believed in it even as they slept. Then, however, around the time of the most blazing sun, which we would date as the second half of July, but which the children of Egypt called Paophi, the second month of their year and its first season, called Akhet, it swelled truly mightily, spreading far over the fields on both sides and covering the land—a peculiar land of unique conditions, a land that was unlike any other in the world and that, much to Joseph's initial amazement and laughter, was now transformed into a single sacred sea, out of which, however, its cities and villages, set on higher ground and joined by causeways, emerged as islands. And the god stood up and lowered his fatness and nourishing muck down over the fields for four weeks, until Peret, the second season and the time of winter, when he began to pull away and return into himself—or as Joseph,
out of the depths of admonishment, said privately to himself, when "the waters receded from off the earth"—until, beneath the moon of our January, the river was once again in its old bed, continuing then to diminish and retreat until the summer. These were the seventy-two days, the days of the seventy-two conspirators, the days of winter drought, in which the god declined and died, until the day Pharaoh's wardens of the river announced that he had begun to grow again, until the commencement of a new year of blessing—perhaps middling, perhaps abundant, but at least, Amun forbid, without famine and a poor yield of tax moneys for Pharaoh, so that he might not even be able to build by year's end.
Joseph found that the time passed very quickly from New Year to New Year—or, as he reckoned it, from the moment in the year when he had first entered the land until its return, for he set that as its beginning—passed through its three seasons of inundation, sowing, and harvest, each lasting four months and arrayed with its feasts, in which he, as a child of the world, took part, though with reservations and trusting in a higher indulgence; but take part in them he did and with good grace, if only because most of these idolatrous feasts were bound up with commercial life and as Petepre's servant and Mont-kaw's business agent he dared not neglect the markets and fairs that were part of these holy proceedings, for commerce bursts from the very soil wherever people gather in great numbers. The steady trade in goods for sacrifices meant that there were always markets and business in the courtyards of Thebes' temples; but up and down the river were many places of pilgrimage, to which boisterous hosts of people came streaming from all directions whenever here or there a god held his feast, adorned his house, was of a mind to speak in oracles, and promised, along with these spiritual refreshments, crowded fairs, amusements, and revels. It was not merely Bastet, the cat down in the Delta, who held her own feast, about which Joseph had heard so many rollicking tales early on. Each year people traveled from near and far to nearby Mendes—or Djedet, as Kerne's children called it—for a similar, but far more roistering feast than the one held in Per-Bastet; for Bindidi, the crude and lewd goat, was even closer to the popular heart than Bastet the cat, and at his feast he publicly engaged in intercourse with a local virgin. But we can definitely vouch for the fact that although Joseph traveled
downriver to do business at the goat's fair, he did not go looking for that particular diversion, but as his steward's agent was interested solely in marketing his paper, utensils, and vegetables.
There was much in this land and its customs—its festive customs in particular, for the feast is custom's hour of greatness, its self-glorifying pinnacle—for which Joseph, who despite his worldliness was still mindful of Jacob, did not go looking or regarded only with a very cool, detached eye. He did not share the Egyptian's love of drink—memory of Noah thwarted any such sympathies, as did both the deeply embedded model of his soberly reflective father and his own nature, which though bright and joyous, abhorred the befud-dlement of intoxication. But the children of Keme, men and women alike, knew nothing better than to get drunk on beer or wine on every occasion. At each feast they were all given more than enough wine, so that they and their wives and children could drink for four days, and be of no use whatever. But there were special drinking days, like the great beer festival in celebration of the old story that told of how mighty Hathor, the lion-headed Sakhmet, had raged against humankind to destroy it, and was prevented from totally annihilating our race only by a lovely ploy in which Re made her drunk on beer dyed blood red. Which was why the children of Egypt drank beer on this day in truly appalling quantities: dark beer, a beer called khes, very strong, honeyed beer, beer both imported from the harbor and brewed locally—primarily in the city of Den-dera, Hathor's residence, to which people went on pilgrimages for that very purpose and which, as the home of the goddess of intoxication, was in fact called Seat of Drunkenness.
As a result, Joseph did not go looking about and drank only a few token sips out of courtesy, as much as business and accommodation demanded. For Jacob's sake he also regarded with great detachment popular customs associated with the high feast of Osiris, Lord of the Dead, observed during the period of the shortest day, when the sun died—though he followed the feast itself and its rituals and beliefs with some attentive interest. For they marked the return of the sufferings of the mutilated and buried god who rose again, as presented by both priests and laymen in very beautiful masques depicting both the terrors of his death and his jubilant resurrection, all to the accompaniment of people jumping for joy on one leg and
other indigenous foolishness—ancient traditions for which no one had any real explanation, such as very earnest brawls between various groups of men, some representing the "people of the city of Pe" and others the "people of the city of Dep," even though these cities themselves were long forgotten; or a herd of asses driven around outside the city amid loud scornful cries and under equally rough blows from cudgels. In some sense it was a contradiction to mock and beat these creatures, which were symbols of phaUic potency, since this festival of the dead and buried god was also a sanctification of the erect male member that had ripped open Usir's mummy wrappings so that Eset, in the form of a female vulture, could conceive the avenging son; and during the days of the feast, village women would carry an ell-long male member about in procession, singing its praises and moving it like a puppet on strings. And so mockery and thrashings contradicted the exaltation of the feast—for the obvious reason that stiffened procreation was on the one hand a matter of sweet life and fruitful continuance, but on the other, and in particular, a matter of death. For Usir was dead when the vulture conceived by him; but all the gods became stiffened for procreation in death— and this was, just between us, the reason why Joseph, despite personal sympathies for the feast of Osiris, the mutilated god, did not go looking for many of its traditional customs and kept an inner detachment from them. What sort of reason was that? Yes, it is difficult to speak about so delicate a subject if one person understands, but the other does not yet see it—which is all the more pardonable since Joseph barely saw it himself and his dark account of it was at best only a half- or three-quarter-way affair. Almost without his being aware of it, the gentle bite of conscience stirred within him because of unfaithfulness—unfaithfulness in fact to his "lord," whether one chooses to set that concept on one level or another. One dare not forget that he regarded himself as dead and as part of the realm of death in which he was now rising, and one must also always keep in mind the name that, out of deliberate presumption, he had assumed there. His presumption, however, was not even all that great, for Mizraim's children had finally prevailed so that each, even the least of them, became Usir when he died and united his name with that of the mutilated god, just as Hapi the bull became Serapis in death— and so the meaning of this unification was "to be dead in the god" or
"to be like the god." But precisely this "being the god" and "dead" impHed the same procreative state that had ripped open the mummy's wrappings; and that bite of conscience of which Joseph was only partially aware was bound up with his secret realization that certain momentary flashes, for which Dudu was responsible and that had begun to play a worrisomely delightful role in his life, had some distant and dangerous relationship with divine rigidity in death and thus with unfaithfulness.
So now it is out, expressed in the most lenient words possible, why it was that Joseph did not wish to spend much time looking about for popular customs of the feast of Osiris, or its processions of village women, or its beaten asses. Otherwise, however, during the circuit of the festively adorned Egyptian year, he did indeed look about, both in the cities and in the countryside. Once or twice, as the years went on, he even saw Pharaoh—for there were occasions when the god would appear, not only in his Window of Presentation, when he would toss tributes of gold down to favorites in the presence of a selected audience, but also in moments of splendor, when he left the horizon of his palace and shone in all his radiant glory before the people, who to a man jumped for joy on one leg, as prescribed both by custom and the love in their hearts. Pharaoh was fat and squat, Joseph noticed; the color in his face not the best—at least not the second or third time that Rachel's son beheld him—and his expression was very reminiscent of Mont-kaw's when his kidneys troubled him.
It was during the years of Joseph's rise within Potiphar's house that Amenhotep III, Neb-maat-Re, actually began to fail, his physical condition revealing—or so said his temple priests skilled in medicine and the magicians from his House of Books—a growing tendency to decline again with the sun. The prophets of healing were in no way equipped to control this tendency, since there was all too great a natural justification for it. In the same year that Joseph witnessed the Egyptian year complete its second round, the divine son of Thutmose IV and Mutemwia the Mitannite, celebrated the jubilee of his reign, called the hehsed, which meant that it had been thirty years since—amid innumerable ceremonies, all of which were exactly reproduced on the great day of its anniversary—he had set the double crown upon his head.
Behind him lay a magnificent, regal Hfe, virtually free of war, weighed down, as it were, by the golden robes of hieratic pomp and care for his nation, filled with the joys of the hunt, in commemoration of which he had had scarabs distributed, and arrayed with the building projects he had loved; but his nature was now in decline, even as Joseph's was in ascendancy. In his early years the majesty of the god had suffered occasionally only from toothache, an affliction promoted by his habit of nibbling balsamic sweets, so that not infrequently it was with a swollen cheek that he had had to hold audiences and state receptions in his throne room. Since his hebsed, however—when Joseph had seen him drive forth—his physical complaints had had their origins in other, more deeply concealed organs: Pharaoh's heart wavered at times or pounded with far too many beats inside his chest, leaving him short of breath; his excrement contained matter his body should have retained, but could not, for it was in the process of breaking down; and later it was no longer only his cheek that was thick and swollen, but his belly and legs were as well. It was during this time that the god's distant colleague and correspondent of equally divine standing in his own sphere. King Tushratta of the land of Mitanni, son of Shuttarna, the father of Mutemwia, whom Amenhotep called his mother—which is to say, his brother-in-law on the Euphrates (for it was from Shuttarna that he had received Princess Gilu-kheba as a concubine for his house of women)—had sent him a healing image of Ishtar under securest escort from his distant capital city to Thebes, for he had heard of Pharaoh's complaints and had himself had good success with this blessed image for his own less serious ailments. The entire capital, indeed all of Upper and Lower Egypt from the borders of Nubia to the sea, spoke of the arrival of this shipment in Merima't Palace, and it was also almost the sole topic of conversation in Potiphar's house for several days. But there is no doubt that this Ishtar of the Way proved either unable or unwilling to bring anything more than very temporary relief to Pharaoh's shortness of breath and swellings, much to the satisfaction of his local magicians, whose doses of wolfsbane had not accomplished anything much more substantial, simply because the inclination to reunion with the sun was stronger than everything else and was slowly, but inexorably gaining ground.
Joseph beheld Pharaoh at his hehsed, when all of Weset came out
to see the god drive forth, which was just one of the solemn acts and ceremonies that filled the whole day of jubilee. The entire investiture—the throne ascension, coronation, purifying bath performed by priests in masks of the gods, censing, and other acts of primal symbolism—took place solely before the eyes of the court's and the nation's greats, while the people outside drank and danced, indulging themselves in the idea that henceforth time would be renewed in its foundations, establishing a new era of blessing, justice, peace, laughter, and universal brotherhood. This happy, fervent conviction had played a role in the original change of sovereigns a generation before and had been renewed, though in a weaker and more fleeting form, at the return of this day each year since. But at hebsed it arose with full freshness and festal energy in every heart, a triumph of faith over all experience—the cult of expectation that no experience can wrench from the human heart, for it has been planted there by a higher hand. But when, at noon, Pharaoh drove forth to visit the house of Amun and offer sacrifices, he was the object of public display, and crowds of people, including Joseph, awaited him in the West, at the very gate of the palace, while others thronged the road that the royal procession would take through the city on the far side of the river, particularly along the boulevard of ram sphinxes, Amun's ceremonial avenue.
The royal palace, Pharaoh's Great House, from which in fact Pharaoh took his name, for Pharaoh means "great house," even if on the lips of the children of Egypt the word itself sounded somewhat different—about as different as "Petepre" is from "Potiphar"—the palace, then, lay at desert's edge at the foot of Thebes' colorful cliffs, in the middle of a vast gated and well-guarded circular wall that enclosed both the god's beautiful gardens and, amid flowers and exotic trees, the smiling lake that Amenhotep's word had caused to shine in the east of the gardens, primarily for the pleasure of Tiy, his Great Consort.
Even by stretching their necks, the people outside did not see much of Merima't's shining splendor. They saw palace guards at the gates, with wedge-shaped leather plates at their aprons and feathers on their storm helmets, saw sunlight-bathed foliage flickering in the constant wind, saw ornate roofs hovering above bright, polished columns, saw long ribbons of multicolored pennants fluttering atop golden masts, and they could smell the fragrance of Syria rising from
the flower beds of the invisible garden—which accorded very nicely with the idea of Pharaoh's divinity, since sweet fragrance usually attended the gods. But then the expectations of the merry and eager crowd of gossipmongers, lip-smackers, and dust-eaters outside the gate were fulfilled, and at the very moment when Re's barque reached its zenith, a cry rang out, sentries raised their spears, and the bronze gates between the flagpoles opened to reveal a sphinx-lined avenue strewn with blue sand and leading through the garden—and moving down it came Pharaoh's procession of chariots, emerging now through the main gate and into the crowd, which gave way and fell back, even as it screamed with joy and awe. For men bearing rods waded in among them, clearing the way for chariots and horses and shouting in piercing voices: "Pharaoh! Pharaoh! Hold your heart! Turn your head! He drives forth! Make way, make way, for he drives forth!" And like waves of the sea rolling in a storm, the ecstatic throng parted, hopping on one leg, thrusting skinny arms at Egypt's sun, throwing ardent kisses; the women, however, raised their wailing, kicking urchins into the air or flung back their heads and offered their breasts, holding them in both hands, their cries of exultation and yearning filling the air: "Pharaoh! Pharaoh! Strong Bull of your mother! Tall in feathers! Live a million years! Live for all eternity! Love us! Bless us! We love and bless you deliriously! Golden Falcon! Horus! Horus! You are Re in all your members! Kheper in your true form! Hehsed! Hehsed! ]nh{tt Jubilee! Turning point of time! End of toil! Dawn of happiness!"
