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Vayeshev
The Joseph Story—Part I: Lost Literature Introduction to the Joseph Story Four parashiyot, or weekly readings, cover the Joseph story, the longest single narrative in the Book of Genesis. The essays of the next four weeks will treat general literary and ideological issues that are prominent in the Joseph story itself, while also bringing closure to the thematic concerns of Genesis. In this first essay on the Joseph story, Parashat Vayeishev, I wish to explore the relevance of genre and lost literatures. When we read literature today, we are at least subliminally aware of how various works intersect with other art forms, political events, and the like. My own kids, for instance, love reading fantasy and adventure novels. Though they might not articulate things with formal terminology, they readily recognize how aspects of any book they are reading share much in common with other books or films of the same genre. They can read Allende's Zorro (1)one week and then see a Star Wars movie the next, understanding that Zorro's sword and Luke Skywalker's (2) light saber are pretty much the same thing. When we read the Hebrew Bible, however, our ability to recognize what is drawn from a common, shared cultural repertoire is greatly hampered by certain insurmountable historical problems. The form of our Hebrew Bible is the result of an editorial process known as canonization. A canon is a closed set of works that some group, with sufficient authority, establishes as privileged and exclusive. The criteria for deeming a work worthy of inclusion within a canon can vary considerably. The most rigorous form of canon is that advocated by a religious community. When the authority figures of such a community establish a literary canon, the ideological values held by the ruling parties shape the selection process. Inevitably, the formation of a canon results in the demise of a great deal of literature. The Bible itself represents the quintessential religious canon, and there can be no doubt that many a book was lost because of its preeminence. The economics of literary production in antiquity required that someone have an interest in the copying of any given manuscript for reproductions to be commissioned. The dominant houses of scribes in antiquity were generally associated with monarchs and temples. Those institutions commissioned scribes to focus narrowly on works that furthered their interests, leaving the survival of other works to chance. Thus, it was inevitable that a great mass of literature was lost over time. While we can only have a vague sense of how much was actually lost, the evidence suggests the quantity to be quite sizable. There are, for instances, fragments of some old literature embedded in anthologies or quoted in contemporaneous writings that managed to survive. And then, periodically, there are those randomly discovered ancient manuscripts that shake our whole sense of the way the world was. Such discoveries were so numerous during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that we could not possibly list them all here. But I wish to draw attention to one remarkable discovery to illustrate just how complicated a matter it is to reconstruct a lost literary repertoire. Surely, the most renowned discovery of manuscripts during the twentieth century is known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The parchments found in a variety of caves near Qumran were copied predominantly during the last two centuries b.c.e. They appear to have been hidden in caves around the time that Jerusalem fell to the Romans in 70 c.e. While the library sequestered at Qumran included every book of the Bible (except Esther), it also preserved writings of different political and religious parties whose identities have since been lost. Some of these fragments are unique. Without them, we would know nothing of their contents' existence. Yet other documents found among the Dead Sea Scrolls managed to survive in isolated contexts for some time after the fall of the Second Temple. An example of such a work emerged from the remarkable discovery of Jewish manuscripts made toward the end of the nineteenth century at the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat, or"Old Cairo."There, Solomon Schechter uncovered the synagogue genizah, the traditional storage place for damaged documents that bore Hebrew letters. The common practice was that Jewish communities stashed damaged documents in a genizah until there had been accumulated a critical mass worthy of burial in a Jewish cemetery. For reasons unknown, the Fustat Jews allowed the contents of this unique stash to accumulate from the late ninth century well into the nineteenth century without ever taking efforts to empty it. Among the manuscripts, Schechter identified and published a remarkable work called"Fragments of a Zadokite Work"(1910). Nothing of this document was known when Schechter brought it to print. Thirty years later, the Dead Sea area yielded its famous Qumran documents. One container from Cave IV preserved parchments whose content agreed substantially with passages published by Schechter. In other words, copies of the document hidden at Qumran around the turn of the first millennium apparently remained in circulation for so long that a copyist reproduced it for someone in the tenth century c.e. Soon thereafter, it was discarded in the Cairo Genizah. Without Qumran, we would never have been able to establish the antiquity of this document's origins. That is, we would simply have assumed its content derived from around the time the manuscript was created. Had only the Qumran but not the Cairo Genizah version survived, we would have believed the document disappeared with the hiding of the Qumran library. With the two together, separated by almost one thousand years, we are left with far more questions than answers. Who knew of this text after the documents at Qumran were hidden? What did they think of it? Why did it survive until the tenth century, but not beyond? Who owned it during the tenth century? Why did they commission its copying? What influence did its content have on those who read it? None of these questions will ever be answered. But the fortuitous discovery of these two documents teaches a very important lesson—the lesson I am seeking to convey with regard to this week's parashah: our knowledge of an ancient writer's cultural repertoire is very sparse. Before we make judgments regarding the meanings of stories, we need to remember the humble state of our cultural awareness when it comes to the world that produced our biblical stories. Without a broad appreciation of the cultural repertoire from which the biblical writers drew their material, it is difficult to assess how writers stood against the backdrop of their own era. Were they innovators or conformists? Is their writing polemical or in harmony with dominant cultural trends? With these concerns in place, we turn to the story of Joseph (Genesis 37–50). Assuming one understands just what the clan of Jacob is, the Joseph story constitutes a freestanding novella. One could read this story from beginning to end and understand all of its scenes without having read anything that comes before it in the Book of Genesis. What also emerges is that parts of the Joseph story were borrowed and adapted from literatures that were in circulation in antiquity. Consider, for instance, the scene responsible for landing Joseph in jail: He [Potiphar] left all that was his in Joseph's hands and gave no thought to what he had, other than the food that he ate. Now Joseph happened to be fair of form and fair of appearance, and after all this, his master's wife set her sights on Joseph and said,"Lie with me!"But he refused, saying to his master's wife,"Look, my master gives no thought to what is in this house; all that he owns he has put into my hands. There is none greater than I in this house; he has withheld nothing from me, other than you, inasmuch as you are his wife; how then could I do this great evil, and thus sin against God?"And so she would sweet-talk Joseph day after day, but he did not heed her plea to lie by her and be with her. On one such day, when he came into the house to do his work—and not one of the people of the household was there in the house—she took hold of him by his garment, saying,"Lie with me!"He left his garment in her hand, fled, and ran outside. When she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and fled outside, she summoned her household servants and spoke to them, saying,"See! He brought us a Hebrew man to toy with us. He came to me to lie with me, and I cried out in a loud voice; when he heard me raise my voice and cry out, he left his garment with me and fled and ran outside!"And she kept his garment with her until his master came home. She spoke to him in this manner, saying,"The Hebrew slave whom you brought to us to toy with me came to me; but when I raised my voice and cried out, he left his garment near me and fled and ran outside!" When his master heard his wife's words, namely,"Your slave did these things to me!"he was enraged. So Joseph's master took him and gave him over to the prison, the place where the Pharaoh's prisoners are kept. . . ."(Exodus 39:6–20) This soap opera–like scene derives from a literary motif that seems to have enjoyed considerable popularity in antiquity. While we cannot show direct dependence, Joseph's predicament with Potiphar's wife is not unlike that of Bata in the Egyptian legend known as the"Tale of Two Brothers."Here we have two brothers, the elder Anubis and his kid brother Bata, who lives with him and his wife. The two men are out working in the fields when they run out of supplies. Anubis sends his dutiful brother back to the village to retrieve additional sacks of seed. When Bata arrives, he finds his brother's wife braiding her hair. The young man takes hold of five heavy sacks of seed, a feat that proved quite impressive to his sister-in-law: Thereupon she said to him:"How much is what you have on your shoulder?"He said to her:"Three sacks of emmer and two sacks of barley, five in all, are on my shoulder,"so he said to her. Then she [spoke to] him saying,"There is [great] strength in you. I see your vigor daily."And she desired to know him as a man. She got up, took hold of him, and said to him:"Come, let us spend an hour lying together. It will be good for you. And I will make fine clothes for you.” As is the case with the Mrs. Potiphar scene, the woman is here the aggressor. And just like Joseph, righteous Bata will have nothing to do with this aggressor's advances. But his innocence does him in, as is the case with Joseph: Then the youth became like a leopard in anger over the wicked speech she had made to him; and she became very frightened. He rebuked her, saying:"Look, you are like a mother to me; and your husband is like a father to me. He who is older than I has raised me. What is this great wrong you said to me? Do not say it to me again! But I will not tell it to anyone. I will not let it come from my mouth to any man."He picked up his load; he went off to the field. . . . Mrs. Potiphar (who lacks a personal name, just like Bata's sister-in-law) latches hold of some of Joseph's clothing and uses it as evidence against her husband's trusted servant. Bata's accuser is a bit more direct: When evening had come, his elder brother returned to his house. . . . Now the wife of his elder brother was afraid on account of the speech she had made. So she took fat and grease and made herself appear as if she had been beaten, in order to tell her husband,"It was your brother who beat me."(Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian, vol. 2 [Berkeley: University of California Press,1975], pp. 203–5) Things don't go well for Bata from hereon out. Were it not for his perspicacious talking cow, he would have stumbled into the living room only to find his brother waiting with a dagger to kill him. There are enough differences between these tales so as to shed doubt on whether there is a direct channel of influence. Nonetheless, the use of the same theme in the two stories—a female seducer who accuses her young male target of physical abuse after having her advances rebuffed—would suggest that the cultures that produced the"Tale of Two Brothers"and the scene in Potiphar's house drew from a common cultural repertoire. Reliance on either lost Israelite literature or foreign sources should not be seen as demoting the value of biblical literature. My goal here is simply to place the biblical narrative in its human perspective. The value of literature lies in the way it is used and not in its intrinsic characteristics. Fairy tales, which have no historical reality to them whatsoever, may still transmit many culturally rich messages. These messages are not compromised in our imagination's eye when common people, not unlike ourselves, are thrust into phantasmagoric scenarios, where the absurd and the mundane refuse to be distilled from one another. As we will soon see, the story of Joseph has a great deal to do with ancient Jewish fantasies about the shape of history itself. Despite the prevalence of many common social and literary tropes, there will be little commonplace about these imaginative renderings of the allegedly distant past, all of which are shaped for the sake of influencing the author's contemporary world. (1) Isabel Allende, Zorro (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006). (2) Character in Star Wars, written and directed by George Lucas, 1977 and in other Star Wars films. (Return) David H. Aaron received his doctorate from Brandeis University and ordination from the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati. He is professor of Hebrew Bible and History of Interpretation at HUC-JIR, Cincinnati. His most recent book is Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue (T & T Clark, 2006). |