Joseph and his brothers, p.19
Joseph and His Brothers, page 19
The Agreement
And that is what happened. Jacob had pitched his camp not far from the city, near a group of old mulberry trees and terebinths that seemed sacred to him and that stood out from the rolling, open country of meadows and fields from where one could view the bare bluffs of Mount Ebal, while nearby rose Mount Gerizim with its boulder-strewn heights, but richly blessed lower slopes. From here he sent three men, three shepherds, to Shechem, with pretty presents for Hemor: a sack of doves, pressed loaves of dried fruits, a lamp in the shape of a duck, and a pair of lovely ewers painted with fish and birds. And he told them to say that Jacob, the great traveler, wanted to meet with the leaders of the city beneath its gate, there to negotiate his sojourn and rights to pasture here. The people of Shechem were relieved and delighted. The hour of the meeting was set, and when it came round, from the city's east gate emerged gout-ridden Hemor, with all the trappings of his position, and Sichem, his fidgety young son, as well as Weser-ke-Bastet, who also appeared in a flower necklace and with several cats; and from the other side Yaaqov ben Yitzchak came forward with great dignity, accompanied by Eliezer, his eldest servant, and surrounded by his older sons, whom he had enjoined to absolute courtesy for the duration. And so they met at the gate and conferred both under and before it, for the gate was a massive structure, with hall-like extensions both inside and out, the inner one serving as a market and court of law; and a great crowd formed behind these great men; for people wished to watch them discuss a business arrangement that began with all the ceremonial of fine manners, but was actually addressed only very hesitantly, so that the meeting lasted six hours, during which the peddlers in the crowded marketplace did a good business themselves. After first bowing low, the parties took their places, facing each other on camp stools, mats, and cloths; refreshments were served: spiced wine and curds with honey; there was a long discussion of nothing but the health of the chief participants and their loved ones, then of traveling conditions on both sides of the "drain," then of even more remote subjects. They approached the matter about which they had come together, however, only reluctantly and with shrugs, skirting and backing off the issue several times, as if each side wished to suggest
to the other that it would be better not to speak of it—precisely because the topic to be addressed, the matter at hand, was a subject about which it was necessary to maintain the appearance of disdain for the sake of a higher humanity. For, ultimately, it is the luxury of exaggerated objectivity, a pretense of priorities honoring refined formality, including a generous casualness about wasting time for formality's sake, that defines what is worthy of humankind: those things that are more than merely natural and therefore civilized.
Jacob's personality made a splendid impression on the city's populace. If not at first glance, then shortly after the initial exchanges, they knew whom they had before them. This was a lord and a prince of God, of refined intellectual gifts that hkewise ennobled his social personage. At work here was the same nobility that in the eyes of the people had always been the hallmark of the successor or reincarnation of Abraham—a nobility that, by being quite independent of birth and based solely on spirit and form, had assured spiritual leadership to this race of men. The touching gentleness and depth in Jacob's eyes, his perfect bearing, his exquisite gestures, the tremolo in his voice, the cultured and flowery speech in which his thoughts moved, rhyming in theme and countertheme, filled with mythical allusions—these so won over gout-ridden Hemor in particular that in scarcely no time he stood up and walked across to kiss the sheik, to the accompanying applause of the crowd in the gate's inner hall. As for the stranger's requests, which as was well-known in advance were aimed at his settling legally here, that, to be sure, presented the head of the city with some difficulty, for if some distant higher-up were to be notified that he, Hemor, was handing land over to the Habiru, that might bring vexation to his old age. But reassured in this regard by silent glances exchanged with the commander of the occupying garrison, who for his part was equally warmed by Jacob's manner, Hemor opened the negotiations with the lovely suggestion, accompanied, needless to say, by the segue of a low bow, that Jacob should simply accept both land and pasture rights as a gift, then followed up by naming his exorbitant price, demanding one hundred shekels of silver for cropland encompassing some nine acres, and, since he was prepared for some serious bargaining, closed with the question of what was such a paltry sum between the two of them. But Jacob did not haggle. His soul was moved and exalted by thoughts of emulation, recurrence, the past
made present. He was Abraham coming from the east to buy a field with its double grave site from Ephron. Had the founder haggled with the leader of Hebron and with the children of Heth? The centuries did not exist. What had been was now again. The rich Abraham and Jacob, the rich man from the east, they both struck a bargain with dignity and no further ado. Chaldean slaves dragged the scale and the weighing stones over; Eliezer, the steward, approached with a clay pot full of rings of silver; Hemor's scribes rushed forward, squatted down, and began to prepare the commercial documents and articles of peace in best legal fashion. Payment for the field and pasture rights was weighed out, the contract made valid and sacred, and cursed be he who contested it. Jacobus people were now Sichemites, citizens with full rights. They might enter and leave the city gate as they pleased. They might come and go and do business in the land. Shechem's sons might take their daughters to be their wives, and Shechem's daughters their sons to be their husbands—all by force of law, and he who opposed it would forfeit his honor for the rest of his life. The trees upon the purchased field were Jacob's as well—he who doubted it was an enemy of the law. In witness thereto Weser-ke-Bastet pressed the scarab on his ring into the clay, Hemor applied his stone, Jacob the seal cylinder hanging from his neck. It was done. Kisses and compliments were exchanged. And thus it was that Jacob settled outside the city of Shechem in the land of Canaan.
Jacob Dwells at Shechem
"Do you know of this?"—"I know it well." Israel's shepherds knew nothing of the sort when they later made it the subject of "fine discourses" by the fire. In good conscience and for the sake of the purity of the story, they rearranged some things and were silent about others. They said nothing of what wry faces Jacob's sons, particularly Levi and Shimeon, pulled that day at the signing of articles of peace; they pretended as if the contract had been drawn up only after the incident with Dinah and Sichem, the princeling, had already begun—and in fact it also began rather differently from how they "knew" it. They told it as if there had been an additional point in the document of agreement, a certain condition demanded of Sichem in
regard to Jacob's daughter—whereas that stipulation had been a totally separate matter, a demand made at a quite different point in time from the one they pretended to "know well." As we shall now explain. The treaty came first. Without it neither the settlement there by Jacob's people nor subsequent events could ever have come about. They had been living in tents outside Shechem, at the entrance to its valley, for almost four years before the trouble started; they planted wheat in their field and barley in its rich soil; they won oil from their trees, they grazed their herds out in the country, dealt in sheep and goats; they dug a well where they settled, fourteen ells deep and very wide, lining it with stones, Jacob's Well. ... A well that deep and wide? What did the children of Israel even need with a well? After all, the city with which they were allied had one at its gates and the valley was likewise full of them. Yes, true, they didn't need it right away, they did not dig it immediately after settling in, but rather a little later on, when it turned out that, when it came to water, being independent and having a plentiful supply of it in their own ground, a source that would not run dry even in the worst drought, was one of life's necessities for them, the Ibrim. The treaty of concord had been concluded, and anyone who quibbled with it would pay with his bowels. But it had been concluded by the chiefs, though to the approval and applause of the citizenry, and in the eyes of the people of Shechem Jacob's people would remain strangers in the land, immigrants—who, moreover, were not all that tractable and harmless, but rather arrogant and preachy, the sort who thought they had some spiritual precedence over the rest of the world, who knew how to see to their own advantage when trading in cattle and wool, to the point that one's self-esteem actually suffered when one dealt with them. In short, the amity did not go very deep, it suffered certain setbacks, as for instance when, by way of keeping the Ebrews somewhat in check, they were soon denied access to the available sources of water—which, by the way, had not been mentioned in the treaty. And that was the reason for Jacob's large well, itself a monument to the fact that even before more serious trouble broke out, relations between the tribe of Israel and the people of Shechem stood as they usually stood between encampments of Habiru tribes and older legitimate residents of the land—and not as they should have stood after the meeting beneath the city gate.
Jacob both knew and did not know this, which is to say: he
looked the other way, turning his gentle interest to family and spiritual matters. Sweet-eyed Rachel, won at great cost, abducted at great peril, and rescued and brought to the land of his fathers, was still alive at the time, his true and dearest wife, the delight of his eye, the banquet upon which his heart feasted, the balm to his senses. Joseph, her branch and offspring, the real son, was growing up; the toddler was becoming a boy—and what a charming time it was!—a boy so beautiful, witty, beguiling, and enchanting that Jacob's soul overflowed at the sight of him; and even then the older sons began to exchange glances at the folly the old man displayed in his dealings with his glib scamp of a son. Jacob was away from the business of the tribe several times, by the way—he went on journeys. He established relations with comrades in the faith in both the city and countryside, visited places sacred to Abraham's God in the valleys and upon the mountains, and engaged in many discussions about the nature of the One and Most High. And above all it is certain that, after a long separation lasting almost a generation, he turned toward the south, there to embrace his father, to show himself in his fullness, and to reconfirm a blessing that had so obviously benefited him. For Yitzchak still lived, an ancient man who had long ago become totally blind, whereas Rebekah had descended into the realm of death years before. That, however, was also the reason why Isaak had transferred the altar of his burnt offerings from the tree Yahweh el olam at Beersheba to the oracle terebinth near Hebron, that is, to the immediate vicinity of the double cave where he had laid to rest his cousin's daughter, his sister-wife, and where in due time he himself, Yitzchak, the averted sacrifice, would, after a long and eventful life, be interred and wept over by Jacob and Esau, his sons—but that would happen later, when a broken Jacob would depart from Bethel after Rachel's death, bringing with him the Httle murderer, her newborn son, Ben-Oni, Ben-Yamin. . . .
The Grape Harvest
Four times the wheat and barley grew green and turned yellow on the fields of Shechem, four times the anemones in the valley bloomed, and Jacob's people had sheared their sheep eight times, for Jacob's spotted spring lambs grew fleece in the wink of an eye and he
took abundant wool from them twice a year, both in the month of Sivan and again in Tishri come autumn. And for the inhabitants of Shechem it was the time of grape harvest, of the festival of wine in the city and on Mount Gerizim's terraced slopes, held at the first full moon after the fall equinox, for the year was beginning anew. The world of both city and valley was all shouting and processions and harvest offerings, for they had picked the grapes, singing as they went, and had stomped them with bare feet in the stone winepress, turning their legs purple up to their hips and sending the sweet blood through the trough and into the vat, where they knelt and laughed, filling jars and wineskins to let it ferment there. And now that the wine was working, they announced the Feast of Seven Days, sacrificing a tenth of their firstling cattle and sheep, of their grain, must, and oil; they ate and drank, brought lesser gods into the house of Adonai, the great Baal, to wait upon him, and carried the god himself upon their shoulders in his ship, leading him in procession with drums and cymbals across the countryside, so that he might renew his blessing of the mountain and the fields. But in the midst of the festival, on the third day, they announced music and dancing outside the city, beneath the castle and in the presence of all who wished to come, including women and children. Out of the city came Hemor, carried on his chair, and fidgety Sichem—likewise carried—along with a panoply of women and eunuchs, with petty officials, merchants, and ordinary people, and from his tented camp cahie Jacob with his wives, sons, and servants. They all came together, sitting down at the spot where the music rang out, but leaving areas open for the dancing—there beneath olive trees in a wide part of the valley, where the Mount of Blessing with its rocky heights and sweet slopes made a grand curve, while in the cleft of the Mount of Curses goats scrambled in search of dried grasses. The late afternoon was blue and warm, its light gently enhancing every object, every person, turning golden the bodies of the dancing girls, who with embroidered ribbons around hips and hair, eyes artfully lengthened by paints, and glittering metallic dust in their lashes, danced before the musicians, rolling their bellies and turning their heads away from the little tambours they beat with their hands. Squatting musicians strummed lutes and lyres, filled the air with the shrill whistle of their short flutes. Others behind them simply clapped to the rhythm, still others sang, holding quivering hands
against their throats to produce a tight, supple sound. Men joined the dance as well. They were bearded and naked, with animal tails wrapped around them, and they leapt like goats as they tried to catch the girls, who escaped by arching their bodies. Balls were tossed, too, and the girls could deftly juggle several spheres in the air at once, even with arms crossed or with one sitting astride the hips of another. Great was the satisfaction of city-dweller and tent-dweller alike, and though Jacob was no lover of hubbub and jangle, for it numbed one's awareness of God, he put a good face on it for the sake of the others and now and then even politely clapped in time to the music.
And so it was that Sichem, the princeling, beheld Dinah, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Ibrim, and came to desire her until he could not ever cease to desire her. She was sitting with Leah, her mother, on a mat close to the musicians, directly across from Sichem's chair, and he could not keep his dazed eyes off her. She was not beautiful—she was a child of Leah—but at the time there was charm in her youthfulness, a viscous sweetness, like dripping threads of date honey; and as he watched Sichem was soon like a fly on honey-coated paper—he tugged at his sticky little legs to see if he might be able to get away if he wanted, though he didn't really want to, because the paper was so sweet, and was also frightened to death by the realization that, try as he might, he could not escape. And he hopped and squirmed on his little camp chair and blushed a hundred times over. She had a dark little face, with black bangs dangling at her brow from under the scarf covering her head; long dusky-sweet eyes that were almost sticky black and kept going cross-eyed under the smitten fellow's stares; a wide nose, a gold ring dangling from between the flared nostrils; an equally wide mouth, its red high-vaulted lips pulled in an agonizingly broad smile; and almost no chin. Her unbelted tunic of blue and red wool covered only one shoulder, while the other—bare—shoulder was utterly charming in its daintiness, the epitome of charm. And things got no better, but only worse, whenever she lifted that shoulder's arm to set it behind her head and Sichem could see the damp curls of her little armpit and her delicately firm breasts jutting out beneath her shirt and tunic. And there was more trouble—she had dark little feet with copper ankle bracelets and soft golden rings on every toe except the big
ones. But worst of all were her small, golden-brown hands—the nails painted and likewise decked out in rings—and the childish yet clever way she would play with them in her lap; and when Sichem thought of what it would be like to lie beside her on their wedding bed, with those hands caressing him, his senses reeled and he fought for breath.
But it was of a wedding bed that he thought at once—and then of nothing else. Custom did not allow him to speak to Dinah himself or flirt with her with anything other than glances. But even on the way home and then continuing once back in the palace, he dinned his father's ears with how he could not live, how his body would surely wither, without that Habiru lass, and asked old Hemor to go out and buy her as a wife for his bed, or he would wither in an instant. What else could gout-ridden Hemor do but have two men carry him out to Jacob's house made of felt, bow down before him, call him brother, and after much circumlocution finally come round to speaking of his son's heart's desire, while also offering a rich dowry should Dinah's father consent to the match? Jacob was both surprised and dismayed. The offer embarrassed him, awakened conflicting emotions. In worldly matters he was a respectable man, interested in establishing kinship relations between his house and one of the princely houses of the land if that might be of use to him and his tribe. But the transaction also called up memories of bygone days, of his wooing of Rachel with Laban, and how that devil had stalled him off, lied to him, and exploited his desires. And now he had slipped into Laban's role himself; it was his child who was the object of some lad's desires, and he did not want his behavior to resemble Laban's in any way. On the other hand he had very lively doubts about the higher propriety of this match. He had never worried much about Dinah, that little monkey, since his heart belonged to the enchanting Joseph, nor had he ever received any instructions from on high concerning her. But nonetheless she was his only daughter. For a prince to request her increased her value in his eyes, and he was mindful that before God he should not waste even this less appreciated possession. Had not Abraham made Eliezer place his hand under his thigh and swear that he would not seek a wife for his true son, Yitzchak, from among the daughters of Canaan where he lived, but rather fetch a wife from among his kin in the homeland
