Joseph and his brothers, p.183
Joseph and His Brothers, page 183
But the remarkable thing was that property still remained property. The mark of freely held personal property is the right to sell and to inherit, and these provisions Joseph let stand. From now on all land in the whole of Egypt belonged to Pharaoh and nonetheless
could be sold and inherited. It was not for nothing that we spoke of the magic spell that Joseph's measures cast over the idea of property; for whenever people tried to direct an inner eye on the notion of "property," the concept hovered there and shattered into ambiguities that left them staring. What they were trying to fix their eye upon had not been destroyed and canceled, but appeared in a twilight state of yes and no that seemed to melt away and yet abide, that kept them blinking until their minds grew accustomed to it. Joseph's economic system was a surprising combination of collectivization and individual property rights, a rascal mixture that was perceived as a manifestation of a crafty, mediating deity.
Tradition emphasizes that these reforms did not apply to the land held by the temples; the priestly caste endowed by the state with countless shrines, and especially the estates of Amun-Re, were left untouched and untaxed. "Only the land of the priests," it says, "he did not buy." That, too, was wise—if wisdom is a rascal's cleverness that knows how to harm its opponent while demonstrating the formality of respect. Forbearance in dealing with Amun and lesser local numina was certainly not what Pharaoh had in mind. He would have been happy to see the god of Karnak plucked and milked, and in his boyish way he argued over this with his Spender of Shade, who, however, had the support of Mama, the god's mother. With her approval Joseph held to his plan of indulging the common man's devotion to the old gods of the land, a piety that Pharaoh would have gladly destroyed root and branch in favor of the doctrine of his father in heaven and indeed tried to destroy by other means that Joseph could not prevent; for in his zeal Pharaoh was incapable of grasping the notion that the people would prove much more amenable to purification by the new if at the same time they were permitted to hold to their traditional faith and familiar rituals. When it came to Amun, Joseph would have considered it a mistake to give the ram-headed god the impression that the entire agrarian reform was directed against him with the intention to belittle him, rousing him to stir up the people against it. It was far better to hold him in check by gestures of polite consideration. The events of all these years—the abundance, the precautionary measures, the rescue of the people—weighed more than enough in favor of Pharaoh and his spiritual prestige; and the riches from sale of grain that Joseph
had passed on and continued to pass on to the Great House were indirectly such a heavy loss for the imperial god that any little reverence paid to his sacred and traditional freedom from taxation verged on pure irony—and indeed put that laughter in their shepherd's eyes that people noticed accompanied all his actions.
Even those tools of propaganda offered to the stern god of Kar-nak by Pharaoh s unconditional pacifism and total rejection of war were taken from his hand or at least lost their effectiveness as a result of Joseph's system of supply and mortgage, which for a while at least was able to restrain the audacity always evoked in humankind by power that has turned gentle and renounced violence. The sweet disposition of a late heir to the empire of Thutmose the Conqueror brought with it great dangers, for word quickly spread among nations round about that in the land of Egypt the tone was no longer being set by Amun-Re, but by a tender-hearted divinity of blossoms and twittering birds, who was unwilling, no matter what, to dye the imperial sword red—and it would have been an offense to universal common sense not to lead a god like that around by the nose. A taste for impudence, defection, and betrayal began to spread. The eastern provinces that owed tribute—from the land of Seir to Mount Carmel—were in turmoil. There was an unmistakable move toward independence among the princes of Syrian cities, who were relying on the Hetti's warlike incursions to the south, and at the same time the Bedouin savages to the east and south were pillaging Pharaoh's cities and, having likewise heard that kindness now reigned, took outright possession of some of them. Amun's daily call for the vigorous deployment of power—although intended primarily to apply to domestic politics and directed against the "doctrine"—was only too justified in terms of foreign affairs, proved a vexingly persuasive appeal by the heroic old god to resist this refined new one, and was a source of great worry about his father in heaven to Pharaoh. The famine and Joseph, however, came to his aid; they robbed Amun's appeal of much of its force by holding the wobbling petty kings of Asia in economic restraints; and such rigor, though perhaps not carried out with the mildness of Aton but with purposeful ruthlessness, can be regarded as minor considering that it spared Pharaoh from dyeing his sword red. The cries of pain of those bound to Pharaoh's throne with golden chains of this sort were often shrill enough to
have found their way down to us today, but all in all are not likely to leave us melting with sympathy. Granted, they had to send not only silver and wood down to Egypt in exchange for grain, but also young family members as hostages and security—a hardship to be sure, but not one to break our hearts, since we know that these Asiatic royal children received excellent care at elegant boarding schools in Thebes and Menfe and benefited from a better education there than they would have enjoyed at home. "To that land," the lament was, and still is, heard, "are gone their sons, their daughters, and the wooden furnishings of their houses." But about whom is this said? About Milkili, for example, the ruler of the city of Ashdod; and we know a thing or two about him indicating that his love for Pharaoh was not the most reliable and might very well have needed to be reinforced by the presence of his wife and children in Egypt.
In short, we cannot bring ourselves to see in any of these things marks of some special cruelty, which was not part of Joseph's character, but are much more inclined, as were the people he "led," to recognize in them the tricks of a clever servant, of a versatile divinity with a laughing eye. Even far beyond Egypt's borders, this was the general opinion of Joseph's administration. It was a source of laughter and admiration—and what better reward can a man earn among his fellows than admiration, which by binding their souls together frees them at the same time for high delight.
Obedience
For what remains to be told, one needs to be a realist and to keep in mind the relative ages of the persons involved in these events—concerning which poetry and painting have largely encouraged false views among the broader public. This does not apply, to be sure, to Jacob, who is always depicted on his deathbed as an almost blind old man of very advanced years. (Indeed, in the final years of his life his eyesight obviously deteriorated; to some extent Jacob made a point of the fact and, following the pattern of Isaak, the blind bestower of blessing, exploited it to enhance his look of solemnity.) But as regards Joseph and his brothers, who were also Jacob's sons, public imagination is inclined to preserve them at a certain age and ascribe
to them all an abiding youthfulness that totally skews the relation between the age of their generation and the burden of years borne by their father's head.
It is our duty to intervene here with a correction, to permit no fairy-tale vagueness, and to point out that only death (which is the opposite of events as they tell themselves) can guarantee permanence and brings things to a halt, and that no one can be the subject of a narrative and belong in a story who does not rapidly grow older in the course of it. Indeed, as we have been unfolding this story, we have grown a good bit older ourselves—just one more reason to maintain clarity in this matter. We, too, preferred telling of a charming seventeen-year-old or even a thirty-year-old Joseph to having to speak now of a man who is a good fifty-five; and yet we owe it both to life and its ongoing process to insist upon your taking note of the truth. Even as Jacob—honored and well tended by his children and children's children in the district of Goshen—was adding those last seventeen years by which he would achieve the extremely venerable, but still natural age of one hundred and six, his favorite, who had been set apart as Pharaoh's Unique Friend, had ceased to be a mature man and become an aging one, whose hair (had it not been shorn and covered by an expensive wig) and beard (had he not been cleanshaven, as was the local custom) would have revealed a great deal of white against a dark background. One may also add, however, that those black Rachel eyes had preserved the cordial sparkle that had always delighted people, and that in general, though with the appropriate changes, the Tammuz attribute of beauty had remained faithful to him, thanks to the twofold blessing whose child he had always been held to be—a blessing not only from above and by virtue of his wit, but also a blessing from the deep that lies below and sends the vigor of maternal favor up into the external form. Indeed, it is not unusual for such natures to experience a second youth that to some degree takes their image back to an earlier stage of life; and if many of the artistic representations of Joseph beside Jacob's deathbed portray him in a still youthful state, they are not entirely mistaken, inasmuch as Rachel's firstborn had in fact been a good deal heavier and stouter a few lustrums earlier, but had become decidedly thinner by this time and looked more like his twenty-year-old than his forty-year-old self.
But irresponsible and unthinking are the only terms for certain
phantasmagoria of the artist's brush that present us Joseph's sons, the young gentlemen Manasseh and Ephraim, in the moment of being blessed by their dying grandfather, as curly-headed lads of seven or eight. It is of course obvious that they were princely cavaliers in their early twenties, dressed in the braided and ribboned garb of court dandies, with peak-toed sandals and chamberlain's fans. The otherwise incomprehensible carelessness of such depictions is at best excusable as a result of a few starry-eyed turns of phrase in the earliest text, to the effect that Jacob took them on his lap or, better, that Joseph took them from there after the old man had "kissed and embraced them." Such treatment would have been quite embarrassing for these young men, and it is very regrettable that this first report is guilty of that same tendency to make time stand still for most of the persons in the story and allow only Jacob to grow exaggeratedly old—one hundred and forty-seven years old!—and thus lends its aid to such preposterous notions.
We will very soon describe what happened during that visit, the second of three that Joseph paid to his father in his final stage of life. But first let us cast just a brief glance at the preceding seventeen years, during which the children of Israel settled down in the land of Goshen—pasturing their herds, shearing, milking, trading and trafficking, presenting Jacob with great-grandchildren—and so set about to become a multitude of people. It will never be possible to say with complete confidence how many of these seventeen years were actually part of the seven lean years, because it has never been determined with certainty whether there were seven or "only" five of them. (We have set that "only" in ironic quotation marks because in terms of its beautiful significance five is in no way inferior to seven.) As reported, variations in the degree of that ongoing calamity resulted in some uncertainty in the count. During the sacred season of the sixth year, the Provider swelled to no less than fifteen ells at Menfe, his color alternating between red and green, which is as it should be when he is doing well, and deposited a layer of fecund muck—only yet once again to prove totally undernourished and feeble the next year, so that it remained a matter of debate whether or not these two were to be counted as numbers six and seven along with their five lean-ribbed predecessors. At any rate, by the time this question was being discussed in every temple and street, Joseph's agrarian reform was completed, and on that basis he
now continued to rule as Pharaoh's Supreme Mouth and tended his sheep, leaving the wool of the fifth year over their eyes.
One cannot say that he saw his father and brothers frequently during this time. Their tents were pitched closer to his in comparison to earlier days, but it was still a good distance between his home in the city of the wrapped god and their place of residence, and he was swamped with administrative affairs and duties at court. He maintained far looser contact with them than those three final visits paid to his father in quick succession might lead one to believe, and no one took offense at this in Jacob's household—it met with silent approval, and the silence said a great deal and expressed more than just an understanding for the external obstacles involved. Those who listened with an attentive ear to the whispered conversation between Jacob and Rachel's firstborn at their reunion, when they stood there between the seventy and Joseph's entourage, will know to assign to the reserve expressed on both sides—for it was indeed mutual—the austere and tenderly sad meaning it deserves: obedience and renunciation. Joseph was the man set apart, who in being exalted had stepped back, was now separated from his tribe, and could not be a tribe himself. The fate of his lovely mother, whose name had been "eagerness rejected," had reappeared transformed in him under a different motto, which read "love that must deny." This was understood and accepted, and, far more than distance and pressing business it was the real reason for his reserve.
If one listens closely to the phrase Jacob used in making a certain request of Joseph, to the polite formula "If now I have found favor in your sight," one has an embarrassing and almost chilling example of the accentuated distance that had established itself between father and son, between Joseph and Israel, and one is reminded, as was Jacob, of an earlier dream, dreamt on the threshing floor, where not only eleven kokabim but the sun and moon as well had bent low and bowed before the dreamer. These dreams had roused in his brothers a deadly spite and hatred, had inspired them to the crime that had proved a heavy burden. But how strange to realize what they silently realized themselves, that their crime had fulfilled its purpose and that they had achieved their goal by it. For although things had turned out contrary to all expectation and they had lain upon their bellies before the man who had become first among those here below, they had nevertheless not sold him in vain—that is, had not
merely sold him out into the world, but to the world, for he was now lost to it and the inheritance that the man of tender feeling had arbitrarily intended for him was now denied him, had been transferred from the beloved Rachel to the disdained Leah. Was that not worth a little bowing and bending low?
"If now I have found favor in your sight"—it was during the first of the three visits that Jacob said these words to this beloved stranger, at about the time, that is, when he felt life, well into its final quarter, waning, dragging itself, red and weary, belatedly over the horizon before the onset of total darkness. He was not ill at the time and knew that the end was not approaching in great haste. For he still had firm control over his life and energies, could accurately assess how much of them was left, and knew that he still had time, but also that it was time to lay upon the heart of the person who alone could fulfill it a wish that lay upon his own heart and concerned him most personally.
Which is why he sent someone to Joseph to have him summoned. Whom did he send? Why, Naphtali, of course, Bilhah's fleet-footed son; for Naphtali was still fleet of foot and nimble of tongue despite his years—which needs to be noted, since tradition has likewise cast a veil of carelessness over the age of the brothers. A clear-eyed view says that at the time they were all between the ages of forty-seven and seventy-eight, with Benjamin, the little man, no fewer than twenty-one years behind Zebulun, the third youngest after Joseph. This is mentioned here so that come the day that Jacob gathers his sons to curse and bless them in his last hour, you will not be under the illusion that the tent was full of young folk. All the same, we repeat that Naphtali at seventy-five still retained, almost unimpaired, a sinewy command over his long legs and a babbling agility of the tongue—as well as his need to balance out the earth's knowledge and pass back and forth with its messages.
"My boy," Jacob said to this vigorous old man, "go down from here to the great city where my son, Pharaoh's friend, lives and speak with him, saying, 'Jacob, our father, wishes to speak to your grace about an important matter.' You are not to alarm him so that he thinks I am already dying. But rather you shall say to him, 'Given the sum of his many years, our father, the old man, is well in Goshen and has no intention of departing this life. But he deems that the hour has come to speak with you about something that concerns
himself, though it Hes beyond his Hfe. Therefore be so kind as to find your way to the house that you prepared for him and to his bed, to which he now generally keeps, though sitting up.' Depart, my boy, bound ahead, and tell him that."
Naphtali swiftly repeated his charge and took to his heels. Had it not taken him several days, for he went on foot, Joseph would have been there at once. For he came by chariot, with a small entourage and Mai-Sakhme, his steward, who put far too much importance in his being in this story to have been kept from accompanying his master. But he waited outside with the other members of the household staff, while Joseph was alone with his father in the tent, in its well-furnished living and sleeping quarters, the stage to which the usually wide-ranging expanse of our story has now contracted. For there, in and around his bed at the rear of this space Jacob spent his last days of life, waited on by Damasek, Eliezer's son (who was himself now called Eliezer), a man dressed in a white belted tunic, who despite youthful features had a bald head wreathed in gray hair.
When viewed by full light of day, the man was actually Jacob's nephew, since Joseph's teacher, Eliezer, was the son of a handmaid and a half brother to the man of blessing. His position, however, was that of a servant, though of one elevated above the rest of the household staff; like his father he called himself Jacob's eldest servant and stood over his house in the same way that Joseph stood over Pharaoh's and Captain Mai-Sakhme over Joseph's. After announcing his son to the father, he stepped outside to join the captain and converse with him as his equal.
