Joseph and his brothers, p.54
Joseph and His Brothers, page 54
"Fine," Joseph said happily, "if you like I shall tell you my vision, it is worth telling, if only for the sake of interpreting it. For the dreamer should never interpret, but rather someone else. If any of you dream, I'd be glad to interpret the meaning, it costs me nothing, for if I ask the Lord, He provides it. But it's different with one's own dreams."
"Do you call that 'no further ado'?" Gad asked.
"So listen ..." Joseph began. But Ruben tried to stop him at the last moment. He had not let the master of the veil out of his eye the whole time, and he did not think this boded any good.
"Joseph," he said, "I don't know your dream, for I was not lost in sleep with you, for you alone were there. But it seems to me it would be better that each be left with his own dreams and that you keep to yourself what you dreamt, so that we can go to work."
"We were at work," Joseph said, picking up on his words, "for I saw us, the sons of Jacob, all together out in the field, and we were harvesting wheat."
"Magnificent!" Naphtali cried. "The things you dream, eminently dreamable—let no one deny it. Miraculous, one must say—so remote, so wild and gaudy is your dream!"
"But it was not our field," Joseph continued, "but someone else's, a curiously strange field. And yet no one remarked on it. We went silently about our work and bound sheaves, after first cutting the grain."
"Well, that is a dream to set before the Lord!" Zebulun said. "A vision beyond compare! Were we supposed to bind them first and then cut the grain, you fool? Do we really have to hear this to the end?"
Some of them had already stood up with a shrug and were about to leave.
"Yes, hear it to the end!" Joseph cried with upraised hands. "For
now comes the marvelous part. Each of us bound one sheaf of wheat, and there were twelve of us, for Benjamin, our youngest brother, was with us in the field and bound his little sheaf along with you in the circle."
"Enough rubbish!" Gad demanded. "How can it be 'with you in the circle'? What you mean to say is 'with us in the circle.'"
"No, not at all, Gaddiel, but rather just the opposite. For you eleven had formed the circle and were binding sheaves, but I stood in the middle binding my own sheaf."
He fell silent and looked into their faces. Every man of them had arched his eyebrows and, shaking his head, laid it back until his Adam's apple protruded. There was scoffing amazement, warning, and worry in those shaking heads and raised eyebrows. They waited.
"Now hear what happened and how wonderful my dream was," Joseph said again. "Since we had bound our sheaves, each his own, we left them and walked away as if we had nothing more to do, but said not a word. We had walked together about twenty paces, or forty, and behold, Ruben looked around and silently raised his hand to point back at the place where we had been binding. It was you, Ruben. Everyone stood and looked, shading his eyes. And behold: my sheaf is standing in the middle, straight up, but yours, gathered round it in a circle, bend low to it, bend low, bend low, but mine stands upright."
A long silent pause.
"Is that all?" Gad asked curtly, his low voice breaking the silence.
"Yes, then I awoke," Joseph replied, crestfallen. He was rather disappointed with his dream, which as he dreamt it—especially when Ruben silently pointed back at the sheaves acting all on their own^had about it something quite exceptional that both troubled and cheered him; but now, put into words, it looked comparatively meager, indeed foolish, and to Joseph's mind could not have had any effect on his audience whatever—a feeling reinforced by Gad's "Is that all?" He was embarrassed.
"What a this and a that," Dan said after another silent pause, in a choked voice, or more precisely, with only the first syllables anything more than a strangled whisper.
Joseph raised his head. He found new courage. It looked as if the dream, just as he had told it, had not entirely missed its effect on his
brothers after all. "Is that all?" had been disheartening enough, but Dan's "this and that" was comforting and full of hope, for it meant "You don't say!" and "Quite a mouthful!"—meant "Damnation!," that sort of thing. He looked into their faces. They had all turned pale, with deep vertical creases between each pair of eyebrows, a strangely impressive effect against their pallor, the same effect that comes from widely flared nostrils in a pale face or a lower lip clenched between the teeth—and these, too, were much in evidence. And they were all breathing hard besides, but since it was not in unison, the sound was a tenfold irregular muddle of snorts there beneath the awning, all the result of his storyteUing—and taken with the general pallor it surely ought to have disconcerted Joseph.
Which to a certain degree it did, but in the sense that it all seemed to him like a continuation of his dream, whose peculiar twofold nature, encompassing both an eerie joy and a joyful eeri-ness, reinforced this impression. For the effect achieved on his brothers was not one of joy, true, but it was obviously much stronger than Joseph had momentarily dared hope, and his relief that his story had not been a failure, as he had first had to fear, acted as a counterbalance to his uneasiness.
Nor did anything change when, after another general pause full of snorting and lip-gnawing, Jehuda exclaimed in a throaty, hoarse voice, "I have never heard more disgusting nonsense in all my life!" For this, too, was without doubt an expression of high—if not exactly happy—emotion.
And again, silence, pallor, gnawing reigned.
"You brat! You toadstool! Blowhard! Stinking breakwind!" Shimeon and Levi suddenly roared. Unable to speak in tandem, one after the other, as they usually did, they outshouted one another, both at the same time, their faces crimson, the veins on their foreheads swollen—and it turned out the rumor was true, that when they were enraged, the hair on their chests bristled, as it had, for example, during the frenzied attack on Shechem. It was really true, one could suddenly and clearly see the hair along their collarbones stand on end. And meanwhile their oxlike voices bellowed in confusion:
"You sack of filth, upstart, dog's ass, and bald-faced liar! What do you claim you dreamt? What happened there behind your eyelids, you scoundrel, you thorn in the flesh, you stumbling block, that we are supposed to interpret and explicate it for you no less, you
putrid sheaf? 'Bend low, bend low!' What? You dare dream it, you vile sneak, and force us honest men to listen? So our sheaves all waggle limply in a circle, while yours stands upright! Has anything more disgusting ever been heard in the world? Sheol, filth, and spit upon you! You want to rule as father and king, do you? Here over us? Because, charlatan and pilferer of birthrights that you are, you viciously stole the ketonet behind the backs of your older brothers. We'll teach you a lesson in standing and bending. We'll show you who's master, till you admit your name to us and own up to your insolent Hes!"
These, then, the savage bellows of the Dioscuri. And with that all ten emerged from under the awning and still pale and red, still gnawing at their lips, walked out into the field. Ruben, however, said as he departed, "You heard it, boy." Joseph sat there a while yet in a brown study, confused and depressed, because his brothers had not wanted to believe his dream. For that is in fact how he had heard it— they didn't believe him, since the twins had shouted several times something about lying and sneaking. That depressed him, and he asked himself how he could prove to them that he had said not one word too many and had merely honestly told what he had actually dreamt in their midst. If only they would beheve him, he thought, the foul mood they had displayed would abate. For had he not openly proved his brotherly faith in them by informing them what God had showed him in the dream, so that they might share in the wonder and joy that he felt and advise him as to its meaning? It was impossible that they could fault him for believing in the unshakable basis of their fellowship, for that was what had moved him to reveal to them God's thoughts. He was, to be sure, raised up over them in the dream; but the idea that his older brothers, to whom in a certain sense he had always looked up, might not be able to bear the thoughts of God—that would have been too great a disappointment for him even to imagine it. Since he realized that for today it was impossible to rejoin them in cheerful, untroubled work, he decided not to return to the field with them, but instead went home, seeking out Benjamin, his dear little brother, to report to him how he had told the older men a, so to speak, thoroughly modest dream—adding its particulars. But they had not wanted to believe him, and the twins had been furious, although when compared to his dream of the jour-
ney to heaven, about which he had said not a word, the vision of sheaves had been the humblest thing in the world.
Turturra was glad no mention had been made of that stupendous dream of heaven, and for his part took such sincere delight in the dream of the sheaves that Joseph felt fully compensated for his rather lackluster success with his older brothers. For, you see, the little boy was so pleased that his sheaf had been in the circle with the others and had also bent low, that he leapt about and laughed at how perfectly it all corresponded to his own way of thinking.
The Conference
Meanwhile out in the field, the ten stood huddled together in distress and rage, propping themselves on their tools and deliberating beneath a setting sun. At first, in accord with signals given by Shimeon and Levi in their diatribe, the prevailing view—or, better, unspoken agreement—had been that the detestable fellow had invented the dream, or related it only in his lying fashion. They would gladly have held to this presumption, since it provided them all a means of defense. But it had been Judah who—just to make certain, so to speak, that nothing was omitted from their deliberations— pointed out the possibility that the lad had really dreamt the dream and was not bragging. From then on they all had to reckon with that view, and not just tacitly, but explicitly as well, dividing it, however, into two contingencies: either the dream, if actually dreamt, came from God, which was unanimously regarded as the greatest conceivable objective catastrophe, or it had nothing to do with God, but rather its sole source had been the smart aleck's gross arrogance, so gorged by possession of the ketonet that it was now conjuring up intolerable visions. During this debate, Ruben suggested that if God were involved, they were powerless and should worship Him—not Joseph, but the Lord. But if the dream were born of arrogance, they could simply shrug it off, leaving the Dreamer to his own folly. At the same time, however, he returned to the probability that the boy had childishly invented the dream and was teasing them, and for that he deserved a thrashing.
Indeed, big Ruben's proposal was for thrashing as punishment
for chronic lying. But since at the same time he also recommended shrugging it off, his could not have been a very serious suggestion, for one cannot shrug and at the same time thrash with any vigor. It should be evident, by the way, that Ruben was determined to believe the one possibility that, in his opinion, led to a thrashing. But if one listened more intently, it appeared as if he intended this linkage of ideas as a way to distract his brothers from other assumptions and wanted to entice them as well into holding fast to the lie hypothesis, out of worry that if they assumed God Himself had sent the dream they might very well not be inclined to regard humility and worship to be the best course, but rather something vaguely worse than a mere thrashing. And in fact he found them less than willing to separate the personal from the factual and thus allow their conduct toward Joseph to be determined by the distinction of whether he had dreamt out of pure arrogance or whether his dream cast light upon a real state of affairs, that is, upon God's will and plans. From what they said it was not apparent in which of these two instances Joseph would appear to them more despicable and serpentlike—though presumably this was more Hkely in the latter case. If the dream really came from God and was a token of election, then, to be sure, nothing could be said against God—just as there was nothing to be said against their father Jacob, given his venerable weakness. To their minds, it all came back to Joseph. If God had chosen him to their detriment and let their sheaves waggle ignominiously before his, then God, just like Jacob, had been duped by Joseph's plying the same dissimulation by which he undermined them with their father. God was great, holy, and beyond responsibility. But Joseph was a viper. One can see (and Ruben saw it, too) that their notion of Joseph's relationship to God perfectly matched the one the lad himself cultivated—they viewed it as the same relationship he had with their father. That was how it had to be, for only shared assumptions create real hatred.
Re'uben feared these trains of thought, which was why he did not try to defend Joseph by conceding that perhaps God had sent him the dream, but hoped to persuade them to believe these were fibs and to punish the rascal for them, albeit with a shrug. In reality he was no more of a mind to shrug things off than were the others. There was that queasiness in the pit of the stomach, the feeling that
outspoken Gad had first put into sketchy words and that not just the handmaids' four sons but all of ten of them felt now—and Ruben's soul perhaps endured the greatest measure of this eerie feeling, which arose from a deeply inbred horror attached to legends and prophecies associated with bartered birthrights, world dominion, and fraternal servitude, a horror that normally lay quiet but had now been stirred and awakened anew. Unlike the others, however, for him it was not translated into an unnamable rage against the man who aroused this queasiness, but into both an equally unnamable compassion for the chosen one's babbling innocence and an awestruck reverence for destiny.
"The only thing missing was for him to have said 'bow down,'" Gaddiel exploded between clenched teeth.
"He said 'bend low,'" raw-boned Issakhar remarked. He basically loved his peace and quiet, was willing to accept and suffer some things for its sake, and had now mentioned a detail that might possibly have a mitigating effect.
"I know that," Gad repUed. "But first, he may have said it merely out of cunning, and second, it's the same filth either way."
"Not quite," Dan rebutted. He was a quibbler—that was part of his image, and in pious devotion to his image he never failed to display it. "Bending low is not exactly the same as bowing down—it is, we must admit, something less."
"Why's that!" Shimeon and Levi shouted, determined to manifest their savage obtuseness, whether the occasion suited or not.
Dan and a few of the others, including Ruben, advanced the theory that "bending low" carried less import than "bowing down." They said that with "bending low" it was not certain if it was done out of inner conviction or if it was not an external and empty gesture instead. One also "bent low" only now and then; whereas one was constantly "bowing down" with one's heart, for that was a way of sincerely paying facts their due, so that, as Ruben explained, one could "bend low" out of prudence without truly "bowing down," but that one could also "bow down" and yet remain too proud actually to "bend low." Jehuda disagreed, saying that this distinction could not be maintained in practice, for they were dealing with a dream after all, and in a dream "bending low" was merely the pictorial expression for the behavior that Ruben wanted to reserve for the
term "bow down." Sheaves in a dream were, of course, not too proud to "bend low," if those who bind them have been ordered to "bow down." At which point young Zebulun objected that they were now happily engaged in the very work that Joseph had so shamelessly proposed and that they had utterly scorned to do—that is, interpreting his dream. And this statement—amid cries by Shimeon and Levi that it was all hemming and hawing, that a man neither bent low nor bowed down to such insults, but put an end to them, just as they had done at Shechem—provoked such exasperation that the conference was broken off on the spot, its only upshot an unappeased bitterness.
Suriy Moon, and Stars
And Joseph? Quite unaware of how the ten were agonizing over his dream, he was worried only by the notion that they had not wanted to believe him, and so could think of nothing but of how to confirm their belief—in a twofold sense: in both the reality of his dream and its truth. How best to do that? He urgently asked himself that question and was later amazed to realize that he had no answer, but that the answer had to be given to him or, rather, had had to give itself to him. He simply dreamed, you see, another dream, actually the same dream, but in a form so much more grandiose that the confirmation it carried was far more impressive than if his vision of the sheaves had simply repeated itself. He dreamed it at night, under a starry sky, lying on the threshing floor, where during this season he often spent the night with several brothers and servants, guarding grain that had not yet been fully threshed and returned to storage pits in the fields. It is in no way an explanation for the source of dreams to note that viewing the scene of heaven's hosts before sleep may well have shaped and influenced his dreams. The proximity of his companions in sleep, some of whom were those he wished to convince, may also have secretly provided a strong stimulus to the mechanism of dreaming. Nor should it be left unmentioned that on that same evening he and old Eliezer had discussed the subject of Last Things beneath the oracle tree, touching on topics like the judgment of the world and the time of blessing, on God's final victory over all those
forces to whom the nations had been burning incense for so long, on the triumph of the Savior over heathen kings, astral powers, and zodiacal gods, which He would break and cast down, locking them in the lower depths, to mount up, then, in glorious and sole dominion over the universe.... It was of this that Joseph dreamt, but in such a confused fashion that he drifted into a childish mistake, equating the eschatological divine hero with his own dreaming person and beheld himself, the boy Joseph, as lord and ruler over all the rolling worlds spinning through the zodiac—or better, he felt it, for it really was quite impossible to narrate the dream as a visible scene, and in telling it Joseph was forced to put it in the simplest, briefest words and simply describe his inner experience without developing it as a sequence of events. None of which helped make it any more acceptable to his hearers.
