Joseph and his brothers, p.166
Joseph and His Brothers, page 166
With a heart full of laughing and weeping and anxiety, he gazed
at them and recognized them all under their beards, which some of them had not even had in his day. But they, gazing at him in return, did not even think of recognizing him, and their eyes, though seeing, were blind to the possibiHty that it could be he. They had once sold a shameless blood brother into the world, to the far horizon, to foreign lands lost in mist—they had always known that, they knew it now. But this elegant heathen here on his throne beneath those fans, dressed in pure white, against which the deep brown of his brow and arms stood out in a very Egyptian way—this ruler of the state and keeper of the market here, to whom they had come in their need, this man with his necklace of royal favor, an incredible work of the goldsmith's art, in which was set a large brooch of equal craftsmanship, a design of perfect taste combining falcons, sun beetles, and crosses of life—this man here with his fancy flyswatter, an ornamental silver mace in his sash, and an elaborate headscarf whose stiff wings fell to his shoulders as was the peculiar fashion here—that this could be the Dreamer of Dreams, the brother they had got rid of and whom their father had finally ceased to mourn, that life-giving idea was closed and barred, concealed from them. And that the man constantly held his handkerchief before his mouth and chin certainly could not alter the fact.
He now spoke again, and whenever he paused the interpreter beside him would echo him, rattling off in a Canaanite monotone what he had said.
"Whether commerce is to be engaged in here and a delivery arranged," he said ill-temperedly, "remains to be seen and is unresolved—quite possibly it may resolve itself very differently. That you do not speak the language of human beings is the least of the difficulties. I feel sorry for you, by the way, if you expected you would be able to converse with Pharaoh's Supreme Mouth in your local gibberish. A man such as I speaks Babel's language, he also speaks Chetite, but is loath to deal with Habiritic or any such aulasaukaula, and if he ever did know it he would hasten to forget it."
Pause and translation.
"You stare at me," he continued without waiting for an answer, "you regard me in the indiscreet manner of barbarians and silently take note that I am protecting myself with a cloth, from which you privately conclude that I am probably not feeling well. That is cor-
rect, I am slightly ill—but what reason is that for staring, for recon-noitering, and drawing conclusions? I have caught a catarrh from the dust—even a man such as I is not immune to these things. My physicians will cure me. Medical knowledge is well advanced in the land of Egypt. My own steward, the overseer of my private palace, is a physician himself. So you can see that he will cure me. But to those people—however remote they may be from me—who have been forced to embark on a journey, indeed a journey through the desert, under these abnormal and foul weather conditions, my heart responds with sympathy and concern, given what they must have endured in their travels. From where do you come?"
"From Hebron, great Adon, from Kiriath-Arba, the Fourfold City, and from the terebinths of Mamre in the land of Canaan, in order to buy food in the land of Egypt. We are all..."
"Stop! Who speaks there? Who is the little fellow with the shiny lips speaking there? Why does he speak and not, for example, that tower of a man there—for he is indeed built like a tower in a pasture—who appears to me to be the oldest and wisest of your crew?"
"By your leave, my lord, it is Asher who answers. Asher is your servant's name, one brother among brothers. For we are all brothers and sons of one man, united by fraternal bonds, and when a matter concerns us as a whole and we are together, it is customarily Asher, your obedient servant, who states our cause."
"So, you are the group chatterbox and platitudinarian. Fine. But in taking a good look at you, my keen eye has not failed to note that, despite your fraternal bonds, you are clearly different people, that this one belongs with that, but others have something else in common. The group spokesman, who responds to our questions, appears to resemble the fellow there in the short coat, to which plates of brass have been sewn, and that man there, with the eyes of a serpent, has a certain something in common with the man next to him, who keeps shifting from one lean leg to the other. But still others can be grouped by the fact that their eyelids are all red and inflamed."
It was Re'uben who took it upon himself to reply.
"Truly, you see all things, my lord," Joseph heard him say. "Let me explain. The similarities and disparities among us come from our having different mothers, four of us from two and six from one. But we are all sons of one man, of Jacob, your servant, who sired us and has sent us to you to buy food."
"He sent you to me?" Joseph repeated, pushing his handkerchief up to cover his entire face. Then he peered out over it again.
"My man, you surprise me by the thinness of the voice that conies from a body built hke a tower, but I am even more astonished by the content of your words. Time has silvered the hair and beards of you all, and the eldest who wears no beard is all the more frosted on top. You get tangled up in your own words, which I do not find credible, for you do not appear to me to be men whose father is still alive."
"By the light of your countenance, he lives, my lord," Judah now said. "Allow me to confirm my brother's word. We deal in truth. Our father, your servant, lives in high estate and is not all that old, eighty years in all or perhaps closer to ninety, which is nothing special in our tribe. For our great-grandfather was a hundred years old when by his true and genuine wife he sired a son, who sired our father."
"What barbarism!" Joseph said, his voice breaking. He looked around for his steward, but then turned back and said not a word for a while, so that everyone grew uneasy.
"You could," he said at last, "be more precise and avoid digressing into nonessentials when answering my questions. What I asked you was how you withstood the adverse conditions of your journey, whether you suffered greatly from the drought, whether your water held out, whether you were attacked by a pack of robbers or a dust Abubu, whether anyone suffered heatstroke—that is what I wanted to know."
"We managed tolerably, Adon, and we thank you for your kind inquiry. Our caravan was secure against robbers, we were well supplied with water, we lost scarcely an ass and all remained healthy. A moderately unpleasant dust Abubu was all that we had to endure."
"All the better. My inquiry was not kind, it was purely objective. There is certainly nothing unusual about a journey such as yours. There is a great deal of travel in this world; journeys of seventeen days, even seven times seventeen, are quite routine and must be accomplished step by step, for it is hardly likely that the earth will leap up to greet one. Merchants from Gilead travel the road that leads from Beizan by way of Yenin through the valley of—wait, I did know that, yes, I recall it now—through the valley of Dothan, where they then join the great caravan road from Damashki to Lejun and
Ramleh and the harbor at Khazati, You had it easier. You came from Hebron down to Gaza, and then proceeded, I presume, quite simply along the coast to this land?"
"As you say, moshel. You know everything."
"I know a great deal. Partly as a result of a naturally keen mind, partly by other means at the command of a man such as myself. In Gaza, however, where I presume you joined your caravan, the worst part of the journey began. One must survive a city of iron and a cursed seabed covered with skeletons."
"We did not look at them and God brought us through that horror."
"I am glad to hear that. Did a pillar of fire also lead you perhaps?"
"It went before us part of the way. It collapsed, and then came the moderately unpleasant dust Abubu."
"You apparently do not wish to boast of its terrors. It could easily have proved fatal. It concerns me that travelers are subjected to such atrocities on their journey down to Egypt. I say that strictly as an objective observation. And so you probably considered yourself fortunate when you came into the territory of our bastions and watchtowers?"
"We exclaimed our good fortune aloud and thanked the Lord for sparing us."
"Were you frightened by the fortress of Zel and its armed hosts?"
"We were frightened of it in that we stood in awe of it."
"And what happened to you there?"
"We were not prevented from passing through, since we declared that we had come as buyers of grain, which we wished to take from this great granary so that our wives and children might live and not die. But we were set apart from the others."
"That is what I wanted to hear. Are you surprised at this measure taken for setting you apart? Presumably you had never witnessed such a measure taken before, let alone that you should be the cause of it? In any case they kept the lot of you intact and at full count, all ten, if one can say that ten is full count—but none of you was set apart again, you simply parted ways with the other new arrivals?"
"So it was, my lord. We were told we would not be permitted to
use our money to buy bread anywhere else in the land except at Mempi, the balance scale of the Two Lands, and from you personally, the Lord of Food, the Friend of the God's Harvest."
"Correct. You were guided on your way? You had a good journey from the border down to the city of the wrapped god?"
"A very good one, Adon. They kept an eye on us. Men who came and then disappeared again directed us and our animals to inns and places of rest, and if we attempted to pay come morning, the landlord would not hear of it."
"Free board and room are given two sorts of people: the honored guest and the prisoner. How do you like the land of Egypt?"
"It is a wondrous land, great vizier. Its power and splendor are like those of Nimrod, it is magnificent in both ornament and form, whether towering or spread wide. Its temples are overwhelming, and its tombs touch the sky. Our eyes often welled with tears."
"Not to the point, I would hope, that you neglected your task and mission, so that it prevented you from spying, from reconnoi-tering and drawing secret conclusions."
"What you say, my lord, is dark to us."
"So you pretend not to know why you were set apart from the other new arrivals, why an eye has been kept on you and you were brought before my countenance?"
"We would love to know it, your grace, but we do not."
"You put on faces as if you hadn't the vaguest—yet does your conscience not whisper to you that you stand suspect, that a suspicion has come to rest upon you, so heavy and dark that it is already more than a suspicion, that your villainy lies open before our eyes?"
"What are you saying, my lord! You are as Pharaoh. What suspicion?"
"That you are spies!" Joseph exclaimed, slamming a hand on the arm of his lion-pawed chair and standing up. He had used the Akkadian word for spy, daialu, a very insulting word, and now stood waving his flyswatter in their faces.
''Daialu,'' the interpreter echoed in a hollow voice.
As one man, they recoiled, thunderstruck, horrified.
"What are you saying!" they repeated in a chorus of murmurs.
"What I said is what I said! You are spies, come to see the weakness of the land, which it keeps secret, that you may discover it and
find an opening by which to invade and plunder. That is my conviction. If you can refute it, do so."
Ruben spoke now, since the others were nodding eagerly in unison for him to vindicate them. He slowly shook his head and said, "What, my lord, is there to refute? It would be a waste of words—except it is you who have said this, otherwise it could simply be dismissed with a shrug. Even great men can err. Your suspicion is mistaken. We do not lower our eyes before it, but as you can see, we all look back freely and honestly at you, indeed even in polite reproach that you can so misjudge us. For we recognize you in your greatness, but you do not recognize us in our honesty. Look upon us and let your eyes be opened at the sight of us. We are all the sons of one man, an excellent man, in the land of Canaan, a king of flocks and friend of God. We deal in truth. We arrived along with the other new arrivals to buy food in exchange for good rings of silver that you may weigh upon exacting scales, food for our wives and children. That is what we desire. By the God of gods, your servants have never been daialu."
"Oh but you are!" Joseph answered and stamped his sandaled foot. "If a man such as I sets it into his head, it remains so. You have come to discover the nakedness of the land, so that it may be harmed with a stroke of the sickle. It is my conviction that you ten have been sent on this mission by the evil kings of the East, and it rests upon you to refute it. But far from having weakened my conviction, this tower here has instead simply made the vacuous claim that it is not so. That is no vindication to satisfy a man such as I."
"But, my lord, consider in your mercy," one of them said, "that it rests more upon you to prove such an indictment, than upon us to refute it."
"Who is it that speaks so subtly there from your midst and gazes so fiercely? Fve been aware for some time now of your serpent's eyes. What is your name?"
"Dan, by your leave, Adon. I am called Dan, born of a handmaid on her mistress's knees."
"My pleasure. And so, master Dan, to judge by the subtlety of your words, you fancy yourself to be a judge, and in your own cause no less, is that right? But here it is I who establishes justice, and he who is under suspicion must exculpate himself before me. Do you
denizens of the sand and sons of wretchedness have any idea of the vulnerable opulence of this highly refined land over which I have been set and for whose well-being I am answerable to the god's son in his palace? It is under constant threat from the wanton greed of desert brutes who spy to discover its weakness—Bedu, Mentiu, Antiu, and Peztiu. Are the Habiru then to run riot here as they have from time to time out in Pharaoh's provinces? I know of cities that they have fallen upon like madmen and strangled people in their fury and maimed oxen for barbarian sport. You see, I know more than you thought I did. Two or three of you, though I shall not say all, certainly look to me as if they were perfectly capable of such tricks. And I am supposed to believe you simply at your word that you intend no evil and have no designs on the secrets of this land?"
Shifting and jostling, they took counsel with excited gestures. In the end it was Judah who was given the nod to reply and espouse their cause. He did it with the dignity of a man who has been tested.
"My lord," he said, "let me speak before you and present to you our circumstances in accordance with the exact truth, that you may recognize that we deal in truth. Behold, we, your servants, are twelve brothers, all sons of one man in the land of . . ."
"Stop! How is that?" cried Joseph, who had sat back down, but here almost sprang to his feet again. "Now you are twelve all of a sudden? So you were not dealing with truth when you claimed to be ten?"
"... in the land of Canaan," Judah completed his statement firmly, with an expression that verged on saying it was impolite and overhasty to interrupt him now that he was about to tell everything and make a clean breast of it. "We, your servants, are twelve sons, or rather we were—we have never pretended that as we stand here before your eyes we are at full count, but simply stated that we ten were all sons of one man. We are twelve by birth, but our youngest brother, born to none of our mothers, but rather to a fourth, who has been dead for as many years as he has known life, remained behind with our father, and one of us is no more."
"What does that mean, 'is no more'?"
"He got lost, my lord, at an early age, lost beyond the reach of our father's and our hand. He got lost in the world."
"He must have been quite an adventurous fellow. But what con-
cern is he to me? The Httle one, however, your youngest brother, has not been lost? Your hand has not—he is not beyond your reach but still at hand?"
"He is at home, my lord, always at home at our father's right hand."
"By which I am to conclude that this aged father of yours is alive and well?"
"By your leave, Adon, you asked that question once before, and we said yes."
"Certainly not! It may be that I previously inquired whether your father was alive, but this is the first time that I have inquired whether he is well."
"Your servant, our father," Judah replied, "is very well given the circumstances. These, however, have been very difficult for a year and a day in the world out there, as my lord knows. For since heaven has denied us the blessing of water once and now twice, the scarcity has grown worse with time, oppressing us as it oppresses every land. And to speak of scarcity is to mitigate the evil, for no grain is to be had, not at any price, neither for seed nor for food. Our father is rich, he lives in very comfortable style ..."
"To what extent rich and comfortable? Does he have a family tomb, for example?"
"As you say, my lord. Machpelah, the double cave. Our forebears He at rest there."
"Does he live in such style, for example, that he has an eldest servant, a house steward, such as I have, who is Hkewise a physician?"
"So it is, your grace. He had a wise chief servant of much experience, EHezer by name. Sheol covers him; he bowed his head and died. But he left behind two sons, Damasek and Elinos, and the elder, Damasek has assumed the deceased steward's place. He is now called Eliezer."
