Reading Genesis, page 15
One verse foreshadows the turbulence that will plague Jacob and his family—and carry forward providential history, since their conflicts bring them into Egypt. We are told that Jacob’s oldest son, Reuben, “went and lay with Bilhah his father’s concubine: and Israel heard it.” The text has established repeatedly that the world of their wanderings did not approve of relations with a married woman. A concubine was a wife of lower standing, but a married woman all the same. Leah had married her maid to Jacob so the maid, Bilhah, could bear children to him and, by the custom of the time, for her. Moses would forbid this relationship of a man with his father’s wife, as he would also forbid Jacob’s marriage to sisters. But before the law of Moses, what Reuben has done was already clearly scandalous. The words “Israel heard it” imply ongoing consequences, not only for Reuben’s good name but for Jacob’s status as the leader of Israel, which seems to be cohering as a political community. In antiquity a claimant to leadership might seize the ruler’s concubines, as Absalom will do in his attempt to supplant his father, King David. So, more than moral issues are involved here.
In his old age, Jacob will “bless” his sons. More precisely, he will tell them what he thinks of them and what they can expect. Reuben, though Jacob calls him “the beginning of my strength,” is told “you shalt not excel; because thou wentest up to thy father’s bed; then defiledst thou it: he went up to my couch.” Among other things, this episode touches on the question of primogeniture, which, as in the case of Jacob, counts for nothing against countervailing circumstances.
How can it be that a God of righteousness can be forgiving to the point of permissiveness or indifference? Is the destruction and looting of Shechem a pattern of behavior acceptable to God? Jacob fears, very reasonably, that condign vengeance will be inflicted on him by the people of the land, the destruction of his people and all that he has. But the Lord protects him from any consequence at all, except his own fear and shame. Abraham is notable for the careful equity with which he deals with strangers. He worried that righteous people might be caught up in the destruction of Sodom. There is no reason to assume that Shechem was an evil city, yet it is looted even of its children. This comparison is unfair to Jacob, who was aware of the crime only after it was committed and was appalled. Still, how can those who have departed so far from any standard of righteousness be protected by God?
We are being told a story different from epic or fable, and different from conventional history. The mind of the text hovers over a very long span of time, during which an absolutely singular providence works itself out through and among human beings who are fallible in various ways and degrees and who can have no understanding of the part their lives will play in the long course of sacred history. The scale of the unfolding of this history is touched on in the genealogy of Esau, which is also the emergence of Edom as a people. It names “the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.” The first Israelite king was Saul, the second was David. From the narrative point of view, clearly kingship was an established custom in Israel when these old stories were recorded in their present form. So they are seen in deep retrospect, as they appeared after the descent into Egypt and the captivity there, after Moses and their wanderings in the wilderness, after the claiming of Canaan and the period of the judges, and into the period of the kings, that is, after a number of eventful centuries. Providence can become visible in retrospect. It might seem especially clear when Israel was prospering under David and Solomon, when the king was writing brilliant poetry or building a glorious temple. Or the text might have a deeper insight into a grander providence, not transitory, as history and prophecy both tell us the greatest epochs are. In any case, granting that this narrative concerns itself with the singular history of a chosen people, one not primarily meant to offer examples of virtue or heroism or to support generalizations about ethical conduct but meant instead to trace the workings of God’s loyalty to humankind through disgrace and failure and even crime. Again, my old rabbis practice a generous rigor in not having obscured this essential meaning by editing or eliding the tales on which it depends. They have preserved the world’s best hope.
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The genealogy of Esau closes a series of stories centered on Jacob. The next section is introduced as “the generations of Jacob.” In the stories that follow, his sons, especially Joseph, assume great importance, though Jacob is always there in the background, gravely aware of what might be passing among his sons. The narrative takes up when Joseph is seventeen, already officious, bringing bad reports about his brothers to their father. He is not an unfamiliar type, currying favor with authority, antagonizing his peers. The situation is worse, more galling in his case, for several reasons. He is the son of the beloved and deceased Rachel, which gives him status his older brothers do not enjoy, favor signified by the splendid coat his father has had made for him. The text mentions that he made an ill report against “the sons of Bilhah, and … the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives,” who were the maids recruited to supply the family with more sons. Notably, the mothers, not the sons, are named here. If Jacob’s tenderness toward Joseph, which is understandable and touching, created perceived ranks of preference among the brothers, this would no doubt exacerbate their irritation with Joseph, who would always come first in their father’s eyes. Joseph is young, bright, and self-infatuated, blind or indifferent to the resentment that is stirring around him, though his brothers “hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him.” He is, in literary terms, a great character.
Joseph has a series of dreams, which he describes to his brothers. They seem to require little interpretation. Certainly his brothers have no doubts as to their meaning. He and they were out binding sheaves. His sheaf arose and stood upright and theirs all bowed down to it. His brothers say, “Shalt thou indeed to reign over us?” And more to the same effect. But he dreamed again and described the dream to his brothers. This time, “the sun and the moon and the eleven stars” bow down to him. Even Jacob reacts. “Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?” His brothers are more resentful after hearing this dream, but Jacob “observed the saying.”
Joseph’s dreams are prophetic rather than visionary. These two seem at first to be projections of his own nature and preoccupations, his own egotism. The Lord does not appear in them, as He did in the dreams of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In the course of the narrative their meaning will become complex and deeply refined, visionary in another sense. Here they only exacerbate a conflict among brothers. Joseph will make his way in the world without angelic voices, but he will receive much practical help from the riddles that come to him and others in their sleep. He is the resourceful man, the problem solver, who, all unawares, first to preserve his life, then to enjoy the benefits of his competence, will carry forward God’s intention for Israel. As always, the path is not straight and Joseph’s success in Egypt is not entirely admirable. This is to say that providence, whose operations are of another order and scale than these mortals can imagine, is the crucial factor in it all.
We are told that Joseph’s brothers are pasturing their flock near Shechem. Jacob sends Joseph to see how things are with them. It is understandable that Jacob might worry, since the attack on that city seems entirely unresolved, and it had offended the people of neighboring cities. The text does not address this concern explicitly, but it does name Shechem three times in a brief passage that ends with the information that the brothers had gone elsewhere. Joseph manages to find them. They recognize him and begin scheming against him while he is still at a distance. Their first thought is to kill him “and cast him into some pit.” They will say that a wild animal has eaten him, “and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” Literally true. This is the irony of providence, that it is served by just those steps that are taken to defeat it.
Antagonism between or among brothers has recurred in Genesis, beginning with a first statement of the theme in Cain’s murder of Abel. It is assumed that Esau really might kill Jacob. The issue in both cases is a yearning for the blessing and approval of the Father or father, and bitterness that another enjoys it. So Joseph, in the coat that never lets his brothers forget he is the favored one, wanders into a very perilous situation.
People can indulge violent fantasies they have no intention of acting on. But the mentions of Shechem, which serve no other purpose, call to mind the fact that these men can indeed be violent, even murderous. In their assault on the city, they acted on intention, not impulse, as Cain did also in asking his brother to meet him in a field where his crime would not be seen. Only Simeon and Levi are mentioned by name in the narrative of Shechem. Dinah is their sister, so their desire for revenge would have been especially intense. In this case, a warm hatred for Joseph is shared by his brothers, so it is only in the course of the story that we find out which of them would kill him. Reuben, the eldest, talks them out of shedding his blood, quite easily, it seems. His intention is to return to the place on his own and help his brother out of the pit, and “to deliver him to his father again.” Jacob’s love for Joseph is a provocation, the source of extreme resentment and jealousy in them. It is also a great joy and tenderness in the life of the old man, whom they love.
Having put Joseph in a pit, “then they sat down to eat.” We have no idea how Joseph would have been reacting to all this. Resented as he was, and younger than his brothers, he had presumably been tormented by them before. He might have waited quietly in the pit for the joke to be over. Or he might have cajoled them, or wept and pleaded. They ate their supper as if nothing of particular moment were happening, a taunt. Then some Ishmaelites appeared with camels carrying trade goods to Egypt, and Judah struck on the horrible, and providential, idea of selling Joseph to them. “Judah said unto his brethren, ‘What profit is it if we slay our brother, and conceal his blood? Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our brother and our flesh.’” This is surely as shabby a moral scruple as is to be found in any literature. To give up a brother to slavery in a strange country for money is very, very nearly as abysmal as killing him outright. To put whatever harm might come to him out of sight, to make it the work of other hands is, for Judah, to lessen their guilt while satisfying the urge to be rid of him. In fairness, societies routinely manage to conceal from themselves profitable practices such as child labor by exploiting these practices in distant countries. The references to the spilling and concealing of blood, which they agree not to do, recalls the murder of Abel, whose blood the Lord heard “crieth unto me from the ground,” making concealment of the crime impossible. Perhaps it was only caution they had learned from that old story. Reuben thinks of their father.
It must be noted how unsparing the text is in its treatment of these great figures, the sons of Jacob. Levi took part in the raid on Shechem. Judah proposed that they profit from the sale of their brother. These are the ancestors of two of the greatest tribes. Moses, Aaron, and Miriam are Levites. The tribe of Judah becomes predominant in the later history of Israel. Yet here are their eponyms, their darkest sins memorialized into a future they could not have conceived of, when no more would have been needed than a sympathetic redactor to obscure culpability a little. Much modern interpretation of Genesis has proceeded on the assumption that the text was composed and edited by redactors with political or other agendas. Such a text would not preserve traditions or invent stories that establish so vividly the mere humanity of its heroes. This is a consistent feature of Genesis going back to Noah. Consistency with variation is another feature of the text that argues against the theory of its being made up of disparate, unreconciled documents with no unifying vision behind them.
As it happens, Joseph’s brothers don’t kill him and they don’t sell him, either. Passing Midianites pull him up from the pit, and a band of Ishmaelites buy him from them for twenty shekels of silver. The note in my Bible says that a merging of two traditions has occurred here, as it may have. Redactors may have exploited the fact that there were versions of the story that make either the Ishmaelites or the Midianites Joseph’s captors.
For all this to have happened without their knowing, Joseph’s brothers must have been a considerable distance away from the pit. The same is true if Reuben thinks he can come back alone to rescue Joseph. Surely his brothers would not have stood by passively had they known this sale was occurring. Judah and presumably some of the others were moved by the thought of profit. And Reuben, when he returns, is surprised to find the pit empty. The text, being so precise about the amount of the sale, assures us that a transaction did take place, if not between Jacob’s sons and one of these tribes, then between the two tribes. The Midianites have Joseph, the Ishmaelites have the shekels, and Joseph’s brothers have nothing but the coat that is the sign of their father’s love for him and the miserable scheme they devised in the first place to conceal his murder. If they had told their father that Joseph had been abducted by a band of foreigners, or had simply vanished on his way home, they could have left their father with the hope that he might still be alive. Lie that this would be, it would not be as black a lie as the one they tell him. They could have simply disposed of the coat somehow, since Joseph’s absence would be proof enough that something had befallen him. Instead, they bloody his garment to show to the old man as proof of this unbearable death.
There is nothing in these anomalies to indicate that they are more than a lapse in the narrative, except that they are so interesting. Reuben, when he finds that Joseph is gone, goes to his brothers and says, “The child is not; and I, whither shall I go?” As he is the eldest, he may feel and be considered especially at fault for not keeping his brother safe. He thought of the rescue he intended as returning Joseph to their father, and now he must see his father’s grief, and must maintain this deception for as long as his father lives. The words “Whither shall I go?” suggest that he has lost his place in his father’s house, whether expelled from it or unable to live with the old man’s grief and the lying he must trust his ten unruly brothers to sustain, for years. The family is poisoned by the deception. The effect of the truth would be unimaginably worse.
Strikingly, among the brothers it is as if they had acted on their first and darkest impulse, the murder they had intended before second thoughts, qualms, and calculations began to enter their conversation. The ritual quality of their killing a goat for its blood, which is not an act the loss of Joseph required, simply a reenacting of the original homicidal plan, might appear as a substitutionary sacrifice, an animal dying in the place of “the child,” as Reuben calls him. I suppose it could be an attempt to undo the death, pouring the lifeblood of the creature onto the coat that epitomized their brother. The blood is the life, the old law says.
Then again, they are preparing to present their father with evidence that Joseph has suffered a terrible death, bloodying that coat and filling his mind with an image of mortal suffering that is purely their invention. Either/or are not categories that apply to motives or emotions. And Jacob’s favoring of Joseph is the grounds for their bitterness. So guilt and dread could involve vengeful anger toward their father: See what you did by slighting the rest of us. Did Jacob believe what they told him? If he did not, he lived for years among sons who he thought did away with their brother. Later events suggest he suspected them. He knows as well as anyone could that fathers are sometimes bitterly deceived.
Things that were indeterminate would have taken what seemed to be their definitive form during this episode of the selling of Joseph. Joseph, standing among these haggling traders, must have looked around for any sign of his brothers, hoping that he had not been utterly abandoned. While his purchaser checked his limbs for soundness, a thought with the force of realization must have overcome him. They really did hate him this deeply. His father, Jacob, must have thought, while he sat pondering the bloody coat, Perhaps my sons really are murderers. Perhaps the kind of provocation that lay behind their attack on Shechem was not required to bring out viciousness in them.
But if the Midianites and the Ishmaelites had happened by a day later, Reuben would have rescued Joseph from the pit. The brothers would have arrived at a reconciliation of some kind, telling themselves that the worst kind of evil was never really intended, as even Joseph would be ready to believe. Events are conditioned by accident. The Midianites might have chosen to treat “the child” as a youth in need of help rather than as abandoned property, theirs to sell. The text has established repeatedly that the people of the land could be honorable. Because these particular traders happened along, Joseph will be confronted years later by brothers who, so far as he could know, had agreed to leave him to die. He might have experienced captivity itself as a rescue and adapted to it on these terms. In any case, his father would live out long years among sons who were burdened with secrecy and guilt, always suspecting them, his divinely promised descendants, of a crime he might detest them for. Now his comfort would be Benjamin, Rachel’s other child, who would have been too young to have any direct knowledge of these events but would have felt their effects all around him. If all of this were explored as fiction, he would be a great point-of-view character.
