Joseph and His Brothers, page 141
"Shall I now interpret it for you?" Joseph asked.
"As you like," the baker responded.
"The three baskets," Joseph said, "are three days. In three days Pharaoh will lead you out of this house and will raise up your head
by binding you to a crossbar and to an upright post, and the birds of the heaven will eat the flesh from your body. And that, unfortunately, is all."
"What are you saying!" the baker cried, then sat down and hid his face in his hands, while tears flowed out from between his heavily ringed fingers.
But Joseph comforted him and said, "Do not weep so very hard, Your Excellency and Chief Baker, nor should you melt into tears of joy. Master of the Wreath. Rather, both of you should bear this with dignity, because that is how things are and how you are and how things will happen. There is also a wholeness to the circle of the world and it has its top and its bottom, its good and evil; yet one should not make too much fuss over that duality, for in the end the ox is like the ass and they are interchangeable and together they make up the whole. You can see from the tears you both weep that the difference between you two gentlemen is not all that great. You, my esteemed Crier of Good Cheer, have no reason for conceit, for you are good only after a manner of speaking, and I believe your innocence consists in your not having even been approached in this evil matter because you are a chatterbox and you were not to be trusted, and so you never heard about the evil. Nor will you remember me when you come into your kingdom, although you have promised—I am telling you this beforehand. Or you will do so only much later, after you bump your nose against the memory of me. When you remember me, remember also that I told you beforehand that you would not remember me. As for you. Master Baker, do not despair. For I believe you conspired with evil because you thought it was dedicated to an honorable cause and you confused it with good, as can very easily happen. Behold, you belong to the god when he is below and your companion belongs to the god when he is above. But you are both God's, and the raising up of the head is the raising up of the head, even if it is on the post and crossbar of Usir, on which an ass is sometimes seen as well, as a sign that Seth and Osiris are the same."
These were the words Jacob's son addressed to the two gentlemen. Three days after he had interpreted their dreams, however, they were removed from the prison, and both had their heads raised up, the butler in honor, the baker in shame, for he was bound to the crossbar. The butler, however, forgot Joseph entirely, for he did not like to think of the prison and so not of Joseph either.
Part Two
THE SUMMONS Neb-nef-nezem
After these events Joseph remained in prison, in his second pit, for another two years, in order that he might reach the age of thirty before being removed from there in great, indeed breathless haste—but this time it was Pharaoh himself who had dreamt. For two years later Pharaoh had a dream. He had two dreams, yet since they essentially came to the same thing, one can also say that Pharaoh had a dream, but that is of no real importance and the least of it—the main thing, the point to be emphasized is, rather, that when we speak of "Pharaoh'' here, the word no longer (in a personal sense, that is) has the same meaning it had at the time when the baker and butler dreamt their dreams of truth. Pharaoh is always the same word, and Pharaoh is always Pharaoh; but at the same time he comes and goes, just as the sun is always the sun, but likewise goes and comes. But in the meantime, that is, very soon after Joseph's wards, those two gentlemen, had had their heads raised up in very different ways, Pharaoh had indeed gone and come; and with that we allude to all the things that Joseph missed while he lay in the hor (that is, in his pit and prison), or concerning which only a feeble echo found its way down to him: a change of sovereigns, a mournful farewell to one day in this world and the jubilant dawn of a new age, from which people expected a turn for the better, toward happiness, even if the previous age had been, within earthly limits, a quite happy one, and in which they trusted injustice would be driven out by justice and "the moon would come right" (as if it had not "come right" before); in short, that they would live in laughter and amazement—reason enough for the whole nation to hop on one leg and drink for weeks, that is, after a time of mourning in sackcloth and ashes, which was in no way a mere hypocritical convention, but can be attributed to genuine sorrow at the departure of the old age. For man is always a muddled creature.
Amun's son—the son of Thutmose and of a child of the king of
Mittaniland—Neb-ma-Re-Amenhotep III-Nimmuria had sat enthroned, building and ruhng in pomp, for as many years as his chief butler and the general-superintendent of his bakery had spent days at Zawi-Re, that is forty; whereupon he died and was united with the sun, shortly after his sad experience with the seventy-two conspirators who had wanted to lure him into his coffin. He now lay in his coffin anyway—in a, needless to say, marvelous coffin studded with nails of pure gold—was placed in it after first being salted and bi-tumened, made to last for eternity with juniper wood, turpentine, cedar resin, storax, and mastic, and wrapped in four hundred ells of linen. Preparations took seventy days before the Osiris was ready to be placed upon a golden sledge that was pulled by oxen and atop which stood the oared galley bearing the lion-pawed bier shaded by a baldachin, and then—preceded by priests waving censers and sprinkling water and accompanied by a train of mourners evidently crushed with grief—brought to its Eternal Dwelling in the cliffs, a multichambered tomb furnished with every comfort, before whose door divine rites were held and the "opening of the mouth" with the foot of the Horus calf was performed.
The queen and the court were no longer sealed with the dead man inside his multichambered dwelling, to starve and rot there; the time when that was considered necessary or simply proper was long past, the custom had fallen into general disuse and been forgotten— and why? What had been the objection to it and why was it far removed from every mind? These people certainly indulged in endless ancient practices and diligently performed all sorts of magic, stuffed all the openings of the exalted cadaver with protective amulets and employed that calf-footed instrument with undeviating ceremony. But to seal the entire court inside—no, none of that, that was no longer done; not because they shrank from doing it and no longer regarded as a good idea something that had once been held in reverence—they didn't even want to acknowledge that the custom had ever been observed or thought a good idea; and neither those who once would have been sealed inside nor those who would have sealed them in gave the matter a single thought. Obviously the idea no longer bore up under the light of day, whether that day be termed early or late—and that is very remarkable. Many people might regard as remarkable the old observance itself—being buried alive inside those walls. Except that it is far more remarkable that one day,
mo JOSEPH THE PROVIDER
by common, tacit, and perhaps even unthinking agreement, it was simply no longer considered.
The members of the court sat with their heads upon their knees, and the entire nation mourned. But then the land rose up, from the borders of Negro lands to the river's many mouths, from desert to desert, to hail the new era, which would no longer know injustice and in which the moon would "come right"; it rose up to greet with jubilation the sun that had risen in succession—a charmingly unattractive boy, who, if they had counted correctly, was only fifteen years old, which was why Tiy, Goddess-Widow and Mother of Horus, would hold the reins of power for him for a while yet—rose up to enjoy the great feasts of his enthronement and crowning with the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, celebrated with ponderous circumstance both in the Palace of the West in Thebes and, for the most sacred rites, at Per-Mont, city of coronations, to which young Pharaoh and his mother, both tall in feathers, traveled a short distance upstream in splendid retinue on the heavenly barque Star of the Two Lands, amid cheers from both banks. When he returned, he bore these titles: Strong Warrior Bull, Favorite of Both Goddesses, Great of Kingship at Karnak; Golden Falcon Who Lifted the Crowns at Per-Mont; King of Upper and Lower Egypt; Nefer-khe-peru-Re-Wanre, which means "beautiful in form is he who is unique and him to whom he is unique"; Son of the Sun, Amenhotep; Divine Ruler of Thebes, Great in Permanence, Living in All Eternity, Beloved of Amun-Re, Lord of the Heavens; High Priest in the Horizon of Him Who Rejoices by Virtue of His Name "Fire that is Aton."
Those were the names of young Pharaoh after his coronation, and this combination was, as Joseph and Mai-Sakhme agreed, the painfully balanced product of long and dogged negotiations between the court, which was inclined to Atum-Re's obliging doctrine of the sun, and the zealous and oppressive power of Amun's temple, the result of which had been a few deep bows before the Lord of tradition, but only in recompense for certain clearly transparent concessions made to the Lord of On at the tip of the triangle, which is to say, the royal lad had in fact consecrated himself to the Power of the Seeing of Re-Horakhte, and, what was more, woven the antitradi-tional and didactic name of Aton into his long train of titles—despite all of which his mother, the Goddess-Widow, when addressing her
The Summons mi
Strong Warrior Bull, to which he bore not the least resemblance, simply called him Meni. The people, however, so Joseph heard, had another name for him, a tender and delicate name. They called him Neb-nef-nezem, "Lord of Sweet Breath"—though no one knew why for sure. Perhaps because it was known that he loved the flowers in his garden and liked to bury his little nose in their fragrance.
There in his hole, Joseph missed all this and the joyful tumult that had accompanied it, and the only echo of these events to find its way down to his prison was the three-day carousal that Mai-Sakhme's soldiers were permitted. He was not there to witness them, was not present on earth, so to speak, for the change of day, when tomorrow became today and with it, tomorrow's highest today's highest. He only knew that it had happened, and from down here in his pit he took notice of the highest. He knew that Neb-nef-nezem's sister-wife, another princess from Mitanniland, whom his father had wooed and won for him in correspondence with King Tushratta, had disappeared into the West more or less upon her arrival in the land to which she had been sent—but then, Meni, the Strong Warrior Bull, was used to such disappearances. There had always been a good deal of dying around him. All his siblings had died, some of them before his birth, some during his lifetime, including a brother; and only a late-born sister was left, though she likewise displayed such a strong inclination for the West that she was rarely ever seen. Nor, to judge by the sandstone and limestone images that the disciples of Ptah sculpted of him, did he himself look like someone who would live for ever and ever. But since it was crucial that the line of the sun should be propagated before he too might depart this life, he had been married yet again, while Neb-maat-Re-Amenhotep was still alive: to a child of the Egyptian nobility named Nefertiti, who had now become his Great Consort and Mistress of the Two Lands and on whom he had bestowed the radiant second name of Nefernefru-aton, "Beautiful Beyond All Beauty Is the Aton."
Joseph had also missed these marriage festivities, with their accompanying jubilation on both banks; but he knew of them and took notice of this young highest. For instance, he heard from his captain Mai-Sakhme, who learned many things through official channels, that immediately after he had lifted the crowns at Per-Mont, Pharaoh, with the permission of his mother, had issued an order that greatest haste be made at Karnak to complete the house
for Re-Horakhte-Aton that his father had commissioned before his departure to the West, and decreed that first of all there be erected in the temple's open court an exceptionally huge obelisk of hewn stone set upon a high pedestal—representing a doctrine of the sun adapted from tenets taught in On at the tip of the Delta and apparently intended as a direct challenge to Amun. Not that Amun would on principle have had anything against having other gods in his neighborhood. All around his great presence in Karnak there were a good many houses and shrines—for Ptah, the wrapped god; for rigid, erect Min; for Montu, the falcon; and for many others—and Amun not only benevolently tolerated their worship in his vicinity, but believed the multiplicity of Egypt's gods was of implicit value and importance for his own conservative views—always presupposing that he, in all his gravity, was king over everything, king of all the gods, and that from time to time they would wait upon him, in return for which he was even prepared to repay them with a visit on appropriate occasions. But being waited upon was out of the question here, for no image would be present in this great shrine, this House of the Sun now under construction, but only the obelisk, which threatened to be so presumptuously tall that it might seem as if one were still living in the days of the pyramid builders, when Amun had been small and Re very great in all his horizons, as if since then Amun had not absorbed Re into himself to become Amun-Re, the god of the empire and king of the gods, beneath whom Re-Atum might at most meanwhile continue to exist on his own after his fashion, or rather, should continue to exist for the sake of preserving tradition, but not in this presumptuous way and not as a new god named Aton making the sort of philosophical fuss over himself that was befitting only to Amun-Re—or, more precisely, not even to him, since thinking was uncalled-for and must come to a halt before the fact that Amun was king over all the traditional multiplicity of Egypt's gods.
Even under King Neb-maat-Re, the court had seen a good deal of fashionable thinking and wild speculation, and this appeared now to be on the verge of running rampant. In honor of the obelisk's erection, the young Pharaoh had issued a decree to be chiseled into stone as a testimony to a sophisticated attempt to provide a new and antitraditional definition of the nature of the solar divinity, a definition so incisive that it could not help suffering from its own tortu-ousness: "There lives," the definition read, "Re-Hor of both
horizons and he rejoices on the horizon in his name of Shu, who is the Aton."
That was obscure, although it spoke of clarity and brightness and wanted to be very clear. It was complicated, although it aimed at simpHfication and unification. Re-Horakhte, a god among the gods of Egypt, was threefold in form: animal, human, and heavenly. His image was a man with a falcon's head, above which stood the solar disk. But as a heavenly body he was also threefold: in his birth out of night, in the zenith of his manliness, and in his death in the west. He lived a life of birth, of death, and of regeneration, a life that stared at death. He who had ears to hear and eyes to read the inscription in stone understood that Pharaoh's doctrinal message did not want the god's life to be viewed in that same way, not as a coming and going, a becoming, perishing, and becoming again, not as life attuned to death and therefore phallic, indeed not as life at all, inasmuch as life is attuned to death, but rather as pure being, as the changeless source of light subject to neither rise nor fall, from whose image both the human and the bird were henceforth to be removed, so that only the pure, life-radiating solar disk remained, and its name was Aton.
This was understood, or not understood, but in any case was a topic of lively discussion in city and country, both among those qualified to comment on it and among those who lacked all qualifications and therefore simply chattered. Such chatter even found its way down into Joseph's pit; Mai-Sakhme's soldiers chattered away about it, as did convicts in the quarry once they could catch their breath, and they all understood that at the least this was an offense to Amun-Re, just as were the great obelisk that had been set before his nose and Pharaoh's other far-reaching decrees tied to this philosophic definition of the name—and those did indeed reach very far. The quarter of the city in which the new House of the Sun was being erected was to bear the name Radiance of the Great Aton; yes, it was also rumored that Thebes itself, Weset, the city of Amun, was to be called City of the Radiance of Aton, and there was no end of chatter about that. Even those who lay dying in Mai-Sakhme's infirmary shed summoned their last energies to talk about it—not to mention those who suffered only from leprous stings and eye irritation—the result of which was a serious challenge to the captain's system of organized calm.
The Lord of Sweet Breath, it appeared, could not do enough in
this regard and continued to pursue the matter—the matter, that is, of his beloved doctrinal god and the construction of his temple— with such great haste and urgency that every stonemason from Jehu, the Elephant Isle, down to the Delta was set to work at it. And yet even this vast enterprise did not suffice to provide the House of Aton with the kind of structure befitting his eternal residence. Pharaoh was in such a hurry and so driven by his own impatience that he dispensed with those great blocks used for building the tombs of gods, for they required careful hewing and were difficult to transport, and gave the order that the temple of changeless light be constructed of small stones that could be tossed from man to man, which in turn meant a great deal of mortar and cement had to be applied for the walls to be smooth enough for the dazzling painted bas-reliefs that were to adorn them. Amun simply sneered at this, so it was generally reported.
The repercussion from these events likewise found its way down to the world of Jacob's son, though he was not on hand to witness them, if only because of the heavy demands Pharaoh's hasty construction methods placed on those drudging in Mai-Sakhme's quarry; and Joseph, bearing his staff of authority, had to spend a good deal of time there, making sure that pickaxes and spikes were in constant use, so that the warden would not receive any unpleasant letters containing nasty veiled threats from higher-ups. But otherwise, there at the side of his calm captain, he continued to lead a tolerable convict's life at Zawi-Re, and though it was as monotone as the captain's speech, it was nourished by expectation. For there was a great deal to be expected, from both near and far—but first, the near. Time passed for him as it tends to pass at its familiar pace, which can be called neither fast nor slow; for it passes slowly, especially if one lives in expectation, but when one looks back, it has passed very quickly. He lived there until, without his paying much attention, he had turned thirty. Then came the day of breathlessness and a winged messenger, a day that would almost have taught Mai-Saklime what shock is had he not always expected great things for Joseph.
