Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness, page 4
The Ishmaelites were disappointed. They had fastened feed bags onto their camels’ snouts and tied up the animals’ callused knees for a morning-long session of negotiations. The subtle back-and-forth movement of the price was one of the joys of the merchant’s profession, and it seemed like an insult to have their first price accepted, as if the Hebrews didn’t think them worthy opponents. But they quickly realized that something fishy was going on, something that probably had to do with the young man’s bruises, which were, the brothers explained, the result of a bad fall. And the price was remarkable enough to make up for the loss of their sport. So they rode off chuckling to themselves. The new slave would be worth at least two hundred silver coins when they arrived in Egypt.
Did you notice that Joseph was silent during this transaction? He could have cried out against his brothers and, with his considerable eloquence, tried to move the Ishmaelites’ hearts to take him home, where his wealthy father would pay them a large ransom. But he didn’t utter a word. He realized again, with an awe that made protest seem foolish, that it was not his brothers but some vast intelligence that had cast him into the pit and brought him up out of it, and was about to send him, bound hand and foot, on the winding path down into the black land of Egypt.*
Beyond Comfort
AFTER THE CARAVAN LEFT, the brothers slaughtered a kid and soaked Joseph’s coat in its blood. As you may remember, Jacob had slaughtered a kid to carry out his deception when he stole the Blessing from his brother, Esau, and here is another kid and another deception, and in the Judah and Tamar story there will be a third. Is this divine irony? Poetic justice? Or simple coincidence, in an age when slaughtering a kid was like our going to the refrigerator? The brothers took a visceral pleasure in soaking Joseph’s coat in the blood. Its whole surface turned dull. The vibrant colors disappeared. The two angels stiffened.
They drove the flocks and herds home. When they arrived, they brought the coat to their father and said, with hypocritically troubled faces, “Father, we found this. It looks like your son’s.”
“Oh dear God,” Jacob cried out, “my son’s coat! A wild beast ate him! Joseph is torn to pieces!” and he sank to the ground, sobbing. When he was able to stand up, he tore his clothes and dressed in sackcloth.
Leah, the concubines, the daughters-in-law, and Benjamin all tried to comfort him. The other sons added some double-edged words. Appalled at the intensity of their father’s grief, they now had pity added to their witches’ brew of rage, resentment, and guilt.
But Jacob refused to be comforted. He had no way of reaching a comfort that could encompass this devastation. None of his close encounters with the divine had the slightest effect on his despair—not even the night at Bethel, when in a dream trance he had seen a staircase rising from the ground all the way to heaven, with angels moving up and down it, as if to a solemn music that he could not hear; not even the wrestling match at the ford of the Jabbok, when he had struggled with and prevailed over God, if God was that burly stranger with wide-set ox eyes that never blinked. “I will never stop mourning,” he wailed. “I will mourn for my son every hour of every day, until I myself go down to the grave.”
He had lost his beloved for the second time, and neither memory nor prayer could lift him out of the mental pit he had fallen into.
Leah
IT BROKE LEAH’S HEART to see him like this.
She had grown into a woman of deep feelings, from the rather shallow, unpleasant girl of long ago. When she was young, she had felt constantly outshone by Rachel, the Lamb, especially after Rachel and Jacob had fallen in love, and during the seven years he had served for his beloved she had retreated into the haughty-young-lady-of-good-family role. In comparison with her vivacious younger sister, she was dull—a dullness of spirit that you could see in her eyes; some kind of mental fog seemed to have rolled in behind them. She had also manifested at least one of her father’s more unpleasant traits, which she was embarrassed to recall: a moral insensitivity beneath the social veneer, a merchant’s way of sizing people up and figuring out how he could get the most out of them for the least expenditure.
Since she had been a dutiful daughter, she had gone along with Laban’s duplicity in substituting her for the rightful bride. But she had been shaken by Jacob’s anguish and rage in the morning; she’d had no idea that he would be so wounded by her very presence. And in the following years, though he managed to satisfy her sexually, she craved affection from him, and she felt demoralized at its absence from her life. She saw how he and her sister doted on each other, and it hurt her, since she loved Jacob too. Even though she was as fertile as a woman can be—and in those days fertility was a woman’s glory—nothing she did could win the love of her husband. If it hadn’t been for her children and the love she felt for them, she would have been crushed by the weight of her loneliness. After Joseph was born, she was also saddened by Jacob’s blatant preference for him over her own children, though she understood it. Joseph was a remarkable child.
Then Rachel died at the age of forty-two. Leah thought that this would be some kind of release for her, but it wasn’t. In spite of her jealousy, she loved her sister. She loved Jacob too, and it was impossible to see him suffer so greatly and not want to take him into her arms. But he refused all comforting—brushed her away, said that he couldn’t bear it—and in the end she could come up with nothing to help him but her tenderness, unproffered but always there. She understood how important Joseph was to Jacob, how he was the only thing standing between that good man and utter despair. She tried to explain this to her sons, but whenever she began, they would interrupt her with their fiery grievances.
When Joseph disappeared, Jacob fell apart. It truly broke Leah’s heart to see him cowering before reality like a beaten child, unable to get out of bed in the morning, unable to talk, unable to eat, sobbing in his tent for hours at a time. This went on for months, and she thought he might never be able to crawl back up to the world of daylight from whatever pit of Sheol he had fallen into, wailing in the darkness with the rest of the disconsolate dead. Over the months and years, though, Jacob came back to life, if “life” means a joyless effort to endure each day.
There wasn’t much that Leah could do for him. Sometimes he would let her hold his hand. She knew better than to say anything unless he spoke to her first.
She also sensed that her sons must have had some connection with Joseph’s death. She had been there when they brought the blood-soaked coat to Jacob, and she could tell that they were hiding something. But she was afraid to ask them about it. She didn’t want to know if—how—they were involved. Her task was difficult enough now: waiting always on the edge of alertness to provide Jacob with her meager comfort. She didn’t have the heart to deal with her sons as well.
II.
Judah and Tamar
In Lieu of a Digression on Digressions
OUR STORY IS GETTING RICHER all the time, but I need to break off from the main plot now, gentle reader, and move on to the tale-within-a-tale of Judah and Tamar, because that is how our storyteller, who had a keen instinct for suspense, structured his narrative. If I knew you were interested, I might have inserted a digression on digressions here, tracing the history of literary detours, from the Ishtar story in Gilgamesh through The Iliad and The Odyssey to The Thousand and One Nights to Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy and Jacques le fataliste to Tolstoy and Proust and beyond: a glorious history, which, however, needn’t detain us. Those of you who can’t wait for the next installment of the Joseph story are welcome to skip to page 93. (I have to warn you, though, that you’ll miss an essential element in the formation of Judah’s character.) The rest of you should keep reading, as long as you realize that Judah is about to step into a metaphysical time warp. Time—that very elastic quality of our perceptual apparatus, in the illusion of which we live our lives—slows to a snail crawl now in the world of Joseph, and during the two weeks when he is being transported to Egypt, twenty-two years pass in Judah’s world: he marries, fathers three sons, and all three reach marriageable age. Then, just as suddenly as he had left home, there he is again in Hebron with his father, mother, and ten remaining brothers, an older and wiser man, bringing with him one son and a splendid, very pregnant daughter-in-law, whom we never hear of again.
Judah Departs
SO JUDAH LEFT HEBRON AND HEADED north, with his flocks and herds, into the time warp. He wanted to establish a new life for himself. His brothers’ company was painful. It constantly reminded him of the crime he had committed, though he didn’t need their presence as a reminder; often, as he lay in bed at night trying to seek refuge in sleep, he would see images of Joseph after he had been dragged out of the pit, with his wounds still raw and ugly. And the silence to which Judah felt bound, the complicity for which he thought he would never be able to forgive himself, stuck in his throat like a chunk of meat that he could neither swallow nor cough out.
It was all difficult for him, but the worst of it was having to live so close to his father’s grief. The old man was a fragment of his former self. Misery had hollowed out his eyes and made the flesh wither on his bones. On seeing him, Judah would be overwhelmed with guilt and pity. He wanted to say, “Don’t grieve, Father. It will all come right in the end,” but the words would have been a self-indulgence, with no reality to back them up. The only honest thing he could have said was, “We lied to you, Father. We sold Joseph into slavery. He may still be alive.” But would saying this be a kindness? Or would it break his father’s heart and push him right into the abyss?
Telling the truth wasn’t a choice, though; it wasn’t his decision to make. Or was this thought too a mere excuse for cowardice? Was loyalty to his brothers a virtue? Was it a betrayal of his father, or a way to keep his father alive, or both?
The whole matter was too complex and humiliating to contemplate. Better to pull up stakes, move to a place where no one had ever heard of his family, and begin again.
Tamar
HE SETTLED TO THE NORTHWEST, near Adullam, one of the royal cities. There he married the daughter of a Jebusite named Shua. The marriage was a good one; in fact, the two of them were so compatible that Judah felt no need for an additional wife or even for a concubine.
His wife gave birth to three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. But her health was fragile, and after Shelah was born they decided to avoid a fourth pregnancy. So they made love only when Judah’s desire overran its banks, and they were extremely careful when they did.
After Er grew up, Judah chose a wife for him, a Hivite woman named Tamar. At the time he couldn’t have guessed what a remarkable woman he had chosen. But he had seen enough of Tamar to have a sense of her character: honest, firm, respectful, affectionate, kind to animals, an excellent daughter and sister to her large family. She was like her name: (tamár), a date palm, tall, strong, and in all probability, with her womanly figure, fruitful; chances were that she would bear many children. He had spoken with her about her life, a simple one of devotion to her family, and about her sense of the divine. She was an idolater, of course, like all her people. But she wasn’t one of those girls who were enthralled with the worship of Ishtar, which to his mind was a mere excuse for licentiousness. She knew what was proper and what wasn’t. When she spoke of Baal’s creative power and of how he wishes humans to treat one another with decency and respect, Judah felt that she was not irredeemably lost in her pagan delusions. She listened to him with fascination when he told her that there is only one God, but her loyalty to her parents made it unthinkable for her to abandon her beliefs. Still, she was teachable, and at worst, he thought, she would turn out to be a loving wife and mother.
But Er died suddenly. Shortly afterward, Judah said to Onan, “Go and fulfill your obligation as a brother-in-law, as the law requires: lie with your brother’s widow and produce a child for him.”
Onan had sex with Tamar three times, but he couldn’t force himself to produce a child for his brother. Clearly, there had been some serious unresolved issues between them. Every time he entered Tamar and began thrusting, he thought of Er, and so much resentment boiled up inside him that he felt compelled to withdraw and ejaculate onto the ground. It had nothing to do with Tamar, whom he liked well enough. But he was damned if he was going to give that dead son of a bitch the satisfaction.
Then Onan too died suddenly. The youngest son, Shelah, was only twelve. Judah said to Tamar, “Go back to your father’s house until my third son grows up.” He assumed that Tamar was cursed and that if he did the right thing—instructed his son to impregnate her as soon as he was old enough, as the law required—Shelah too would die. He was choosing the lesser of the two evils: the sin of not fulfilling his obligation to Tamar, rather than the sin of costing the boy his life.
The proper thing to do, of course, would have been to tell her about his fear. But he felt too guilty for that.
Sheepshearing
THEN JUDAH’S WIFE DIED. She had been ill for some time, too ill to make love with him, so in addition to his grief, he was feeling sexually deprived. After the period of mourning was over, he decided to go to Timnah for the sheepshearing, together with his friend Hirah.
Sheepshearing was a time of celebration, thanksgiving, and revelry. People ate a lot and drank a lot of wine, and there were parties in the tents of the richest magnates, who would order priestesses of Ishtar to be brought in from Ekron or Beth-Shemesh, women whose lives were dedicated to the sacred mystery of sexual union and who, in opening themselves to the anonymous men who patronized them, became incarnations of the goddess and with their own bodies reenacted the cosmic marriage. The poet of Gilgamesh, Sîn-lēqi-unninni, considered these sacred prostitutes to be one of the principal glories of civilization, and he wrote of them with glowing civic pride:
the lovely priestesses standing before
the temple of Ishtar, chatting and laughing,
flushed with sexual joy, and ready
to serve men’s pleasure, in honor of the goddess.
On the roads there were also freelance harlots who did business at the festival. Most of the shepherds weren’t picky about the distinction between sacred and profane.
A Desperate Plan
JUDAH’S IMPENDING TRIP made the rounds of local gossip. Eventually, a neighbor mentioned it to Tamar.
She was twenty and Shelah fourteen, certainly old enough to perform his fraternal duty, and still there was no word from her father-in-law. It had been a long time since she last heard from him. She knew what was in his mind: that she was to blame for the sudden deaths of his two older sons. She had no way to prove that she wasn’t. All she could do, if he should ever blame her, was fall at his feet and beg him to fulfill his obligation, and even that seemed less and less of a possibility. She knew not only that she had an imperious need for children but that it was her legal right. Since Judah refused to cooperate, she would have to take the matter into her own hands.
As she was doing the laundry one day, a plan sprang into her mind. It was dangerous; it made her shiver with dread. It could also be seen as a revolt against her father-in-law’s authority, and because of the offense it might give him and the whole community, she was extremely reluctant to proceed. But what else could she do? However frightened she was, she felt that she would rather die than remain mute and childless.
So she took off her widow’s clothes, put on her best robe, walked to Enayim, covered her face with a veil, and sat down at the entrance gate, on the road to Timnah.
The Pledge
WHEN JUDAH SAW HER, he thought that she was a harlot, since her face was veiled and she was sitting alone at the entrance gate. Providentially, it was the custom of Canaanite harlots to cover their faces. This gave them a certain mysterious je ne sais quoi and allowed even beauty-challenged girls to ply a brisk trade. The men were willing to forgo the delights of kissing; they were primarily interested in breasts and genitals anyway, and in the kinky pleasures they didn’t dare ask of their virtuous, Baal-fearing wives.
To understand the situation better, you should know that during the patriarchal era, sacred prostitution was accepted by all cultures in the Near East. (This status quo lasted for another thousand years, until it was attacked by uncomprehending prophets such as Hosea and Ezekiel.) So according to the ethics of his time, Judah was doing nothing wrong here. It was perfectly kosher for a Jewish man to visit a prostitute, though it was forbidden for a Jewish woman to be a prostitute.
Judah walked up to Tamar and said, “Let me come into you.”
Tamar said, “What will you pay me?”
“I will send you a kid from my flock,” he said. This was the going rate. Being a fair man, Judah didn’t want to offend her by haggling over the price.
Tamar breathed a sigh of relief. Her whole plan hinged on Judah’s promising a payment. If he had insisted on paying her immediately (in silver, for example), the business would have been complete, and she would have had no proof that he was her child’s father.
“All right,” she said, “but leave me a pledge until you send it.”
Judah said, “What pledge?”
“Your seal and the staff you are holding.” The staff had carvings on it that identified its owner, and the cylinder seal, perforated and worn on a cord around the neck, was used to sign contracts. In those days no respectable man would be seen in public without one.
