Joseph and His Brothers, page 156
universal and reassuringly clear, could not be considered onerous in a land with a fertility yielding on average a thirtyfold harvest of seed sown. Besides which, this quota had a certain spiritual beauty and mythical appeal, since it was wisely and deliberately based on the sacred epagomenal number: the five extra days added to the year's three hundred and sixty. And, finally, people were pleased that Joseph unhesitatingly applied it as well to those nome barons with their claims of absolute independence and, what was more, demanded that for the good of the nation they bring their estates up to contemporary standards. For the spirit of defiant backwardness that prevailed among them was likewise expressed in the fact that the irrigation systems on these estates were outdated and inadequate, and not merely out of laziness, but on tendentiously reactionary principle, so that the soil did not yield all that it could. Joseph expressly ordered these gentlemen to improve their systems of canals and wells—and he recalled how Eliezer had told him that Sheleph, a grandson of Eber, was the first to "to turn brooks onto his land" and was considered the inventor of irrigation.
But as for those extraordinary measures for piling up grain in storehouses, any explanation for why this decree of Joseph's likewise pleased the children of Kerne must again take its cue from the Egyptian national belief in foresight and precautionary safeguards. Joseph's own personal tradition of the Flood and the clever idea of building an ark to save the human race and the animals after their kind from perishing entirely, was joined here with an old and vulnerable civilization's instinct for security and defense, for it had grown old under precarious conditions. Its children were even inclined to see something magical in Joseph's storehouses; for they were accustomed to protecting themselves against the invasions of demonic evil, which always lay in wait, by weaving as impenetrable a web as possible of magical symbols and charms—which was why in their minds the notions of "precaution" and "magic" were interchangeable and such sober safeguards as Joseph's granaries could appear in a magical light.
In a word: it was the general impression that Pharaoh, young as he was, had scored a success in appointing this young Father of the Harvest, this Spender of Shade. His authority would surely grow over the course of years, but it benefited here and now from the fact that the Nile had grown very large this year, so that under the new
administration a well-above-mediocre harvest—particularly of wheat, spelt, and barley—had been brought in and an abundance of sorghum could be gleaned from the stalk. We doubt that it is legitimate to include as part of Joseph's prophecy a year whose prosperity was already decided even as he was standing before Pharaoh and to count it as a year of the fat cows. But that is what happened later in the attempt to bring the number of years of blessing to a total of seven—even if this did not prove completely successful. In any case it was to Joseph's benefit that he took over the enterprise under conditions of rejoicing and abundance. There has always been something venerably absurd about popular opinion—and there still is. It is perfectly capable of concluding that a minister of agriculture appointed in a year of fruitful harvest has to be a good minister of agriculture.
That is why when Jacob's son drove through the streets of Wase, the public greeted him with uplifted hands, crying, "Adon! Adon! Ka-ne-Keme! Eternal life to the Friend of the God's Harvest!" And many even cried out, "Hapi! Hapi!" and then pressed thumb and forefinger of their right hand together and set them to their lips— which was going a bit far and must be attributed largely to their childish enthusiasm for someone of such beauty.
He did not drive out into public often, however, for he was very busy
Urim and Thummim
The deeds and decisions of our lives are determined by proclivities, sympathies, fundamental attitudes, and critical experiences of the soul, which color our existence, tingeing all our actions and providing a far more genuine explanation for them than any of the rational reasons we put forward not only for others' actions, but for our own as well. That only a short time after taking office, Joseph—very much contrary to Pharaoh's wishes, who would have liked to have him always nearby for discussions of his father in heaven and for assistance in his labors at improving his doctrine—that very soon the king's Supreme Mouth and Lord of Provisions moved his residence and all his offices from the capital of Nowet-Amun to Menfe in the north, to the House of the Wrapped God, was based on the honest
and certainly superficially justifiable reason that Menfe of the thick walls was the balance scale of the Two Lands, its midpoint, the symbol of Egypt's equilibrium, more or less predestined to be the place of oversight, the most comfortable and serviceable home imaginable for the Lord of Oversight. Granted, what was said about its being the balance scale and Egypt's equilibrium was not quite correct, for Mempi lay well to the north, close to On, the city of blinking eyes, and to the cities of the river's seven mouths, and even if one thought of Egypt as extending only as far as Elephant Island and the Island of Pi-lak and did not include the land of the Negroes, the city of King Mire, the place where his beauty lay interred, was in no sense the balance point of the Two Lands, but rather lay as far to its north as Thebes lay to its south. But ancient Menfe nonetheless enjoyed its reputation as the midpoint of Egypt, the city that held it in equilibrium; that it provided a commanding view in both directions, upstream and down, was an axiom on which the Egyptian Joseph based his decision, and Pharaoh himself could not refute his contention that commerce with maritime Syrian cities who sent their ships down to fetch grain from their "granary"—for that was how they viewed the Land of Black Earth—could be better implemented if he were located in Menfe rather than in Per-Amun.
This was all perfectly correct, and yet these were only the rational reasons for Joseph's decision to ask for Pharaoh's permission to live in Menfe. The real reasons lay more deeply determinative in his soul. And they were so all-embracing that they included his relationship to life and death. One can put it this way: They were reasons of cordiality set against a dark background.
It has been a long time now, but we all still recall how once as a boy he stood, alone and saddened by a misunderstanding with his brothers, on a hill near Kiriath-Arba and gazed down on the moon-whitened town in the valley and on Machpelah, the double cave, the rocky tomb that Abram had bought and where the bones of his ancestors lay. We remember in detail what a strange mixture of emotions formed in his soul that night, created by the sight of both the grave and the populous town that lay slumbering there—emotions of piety, which is a reverence for death and the past, were united in him with those of a half mocking, half genuinely cordial affection for the "city" and all the teeming tribe that filled the crooked streets of Hebron with humanity's smell and clamor and now lay with knees
drawn up, snoring in chambers inside houses. To estabhsh a connection between that early welling up of emotion in his breast—which ultimately was a matter of a few moments spent gazing—with his present actions may seem rather daring and arbitrary, and to trace such actions directly back to it even more so. And yet we have proof in hand that we are correct in establishing this connection in words spoken by Joseph on a day between then and now, spoken to the old man who had purchased him when they were together in Menfe, the tomb metropolis. He had casually remarked that he felt a fondness for this city, whose dead need not travel over the water because it already lay to the west of the river, that of all the cities of Egypt it might well suit him—and that had been so truly characteristic of Rachel's eldest, more than he himself might have reaUzed. And the pleasure he took in how the people there, whose similarity in such great numbers was the source of their ironic mood, had jauntily abbreviated the ancient funereal name Men-nefru-Mire to Menfe— that pleasure was close to being Joseph's essence, for it revealed the deepest depths of his nature, something very deep in every deed and moment, although the name by which it is designated is simply one of rather tame serenity: sympathy. For sympathy is a meeting of death and life; and genuine sympathy arises only when the sense for the one holds the sense for the other in balance. By itself a sense for death creates rigidity and gloom; by itself a sense for life creates a banal vulgarity devoid of wit. Wit, then, and sympathy arise only where a reverence for death is colored and warmed by a cordial regard for life, while the latter is made more profound and valuable by the former. This was the case for Joseph—this the source of his wit and his cordiality. This was his blessing—the double blessing with which he was blessed, from heaven above and from the deep that lies below, the blessing upon which Jacob his father expanded on his deathbed, acting almost as if he were spending and bestowing it, when in fact he was merely stating it.
In examining the moral world, which is a complicated world, one cannot do without some basic erudition. It had always been said of Jacob that he was tarn —that is, an "upright" man who lived in tents. But tarn is a strangely equivocal word for which "upright" is a very poor translation, for its meaning includes both the positive and the negative, the yes and the no, light and dark, life and death. This
root word is found again in the curious formula "Urim and Thum-mim," where, in contrast to the bright, affirmative Urim, it evidently stands for the world's dark aspects shadowed by death. Tam or Thummim is the light and the dark, what is above and what is below the world, both at once and interchangeably—and Urim is merely what is joyous, separated out in its purity. Thus Urim and Thummim is not actually a statement of opposites, but instead allows us to perceive the mysterious fact that when one separates one part from the whole of the moral world, the whole still stands in contradistinction to the part. It is not all that easy to make sense of the moral world, especially since its sunny component very often suggests what is underworldly. Esau, for example, the red man, the man of the hunt and the plain, was definitely a man of both the sun and the underworld. But although Jacob, his younger twin, is contrasted to him as a gentle shepherd of the moon, one should not forget that he spent a major portion of his life in the underworld with Laban and that the term "upright" is a more than imprecise designation for the means by which he was turned into a man of silver and gold there. He was most certainly not Urim, but in fact tam, that is a man of grief and gladness, like Gilgamesh. And so, too, was Joseph, whose rapid adjustment to the sunny underworld of Egypt likewise does not suggest a pure Urim-nature. Urim and Thummim should be translated as something like "Yes—yes, no," that is, with a yes and no prefixed by the coefficient of another yes. In purely mathematical terms that means of course that, since a yes and a no cancel one another out, only the additional yes is left over; but such pure reckoning has no color and this sort of mathematics disregards the dark coloring of the yes that evidently remains as an aftereffect of the canceled no. It is, as noted, all very complicated. The best we can do is to repeat that in Joseph life and death met, resulting in a sympathy that was the deeper reason why he obtained permission from Pharaoh to live in Menfe, the witty metropolis of tombs.
The king, whose first concern had been an eternal dwelling for his Unique Friend—and it was already under construction—presented him with a bright, sunny residence in the city's most elegant quarter; it had a garden, a reception hall, a fountain court, and all the amenities of those late early times, not to mention a host of Nubian and Egyptian servants for the kitchen, antechamber, stable, and
salon, who swept, sprinkled, and cleaned the villa, placing flowers everywhere—and who were under the supervising stewardship of whom? Even the least enlightened and slowest thinker in our audience can surely guess that. For Joseph was a man who kept his word more faithfully and punctually than Nefer-em-Wese the butler had kept his; he promptly made good on a farewell promise he had given someone: that, if he should be raised up, he would send for him to follow and employ him; and even while he was still in Thebes, immediately after returning from his inspection tour, he had, with Pharaoh's approval, written to Mai-Sakhme, the commander of Zawi-Re, and invited him to be his majordomo, to stand over his house and concern himself with all those things with which a man like Joseph could not possibly concern himself. Yes, the same man who had once succeeded to the office of steward and been charged with overseeing Petepre's household and was now charged with a task of far greater oversight, now had in turn a man who oversaw everything that was his—his chariots and horses, his pantries, table, and menials—and that man was the imperturbable Mai-Sakhme, who was not at all shocked when he received this letter from the slave who had drudged for him, simply because he was not a man to be shocked, and, without even waiting for the newly designated warden to arrive, set off on the overland journey for Menfe, a somewhat old-fashioned city now surpassed by Thebes in Upper Egypt, but in comparison to Zawi-Re still a tremendously stimulating place, where the versatile Imhotep the Wise had once lived and worked and from where a very lovely job now beckoned his admirer. And he at once took up his position at the head of Joseph's household, assembled the servants, and made purchases to equip the house, so that when Joseph arrived from Wase and Mai-Sakhme greeted him at the beautiful gate to his villa, he found his residence prepared in finest fashion as befits the home of a great man. He even found an infirmary had been set up for those who might twist and turn in pain, and also a little pharmacy, where his steward could pestle and putter to heart's content.
The reunion was very cordial, although of course there was no embrace in the presence of the staff that had assembled to greet their master. That had taken place for good and all on the day of their farewell, at the only proper moment for it, when Joseph was
no longer Mai-Sakhme's servant and Mai-Sakhme had not yet become his.
The steward, however, said, "Welcome, Adon, behold—your house. Pharaoh gave it, and he whom you appointed has appointed it in every detail. You need only go to your bath, be anointed with oils, and take your seat for dinner. I thank you most warmly for having thought of me and removing me from boredom as soon as you found yourself seated in glory, once everything had happened just as your servant always felt it would happen, and for allowing me to share in such a stimulating environment—for all of which I shall earnestly strive to prove worthy every day."
And Joseph replied, "My thanks in turn to you, my good man, for having answered my summons and wishing to be my steward in this new life. Things happened as they happened because I did not offend my father's God by entertaining the smallest doubt that He would be with me. But do not call yourself my servant, for we shall be friends as we were before, when I served under your feet, and together we shall endure the good and bad times in life, the calm and exciting times—and I shall need you especially for the exciting times that may yet come. And for your painstaking service I thank you in advance. But it should not consume you to the extent that you do not find leisure to put reed to paper in your study as you enjoy doing and in time find a gratifying form for the story of three loves. Literature is a great thing. But greater still, to be sure, is when the life one lives is a story—and that we are in a story together, a most excellent one at that, I am more and more convinced with time. You, however, are part of it because I took you into my story, and when in the future people hear and read of the steward who was with me and lent a helping hand in exciting hours, then they shall know that this steward was you, Mai-Sakhme, the man of calm."
The Maiden
In the beginning God once caused a deep sleep to fall over the man that he had set in the Garden of the East, and while the man slept, God took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And from the rib He made a woman, for it seemed to Him that it was not good
that the man should be alone, and he needed her to be human, that she might be with him as company and helpmate. And the intention was very good.
Scholars have provided quite marvelous descriptions of this presentation—it happened, they say, in this way or that, and act as if they must know—and it may be that they truly do know. God washed the woman, so they assure us, He washed her clean (for, as an erstwhile rib, she was probably still somewhat sticky), anointed her, rouged her face, curled her hair, and in response to her fervent urging adorned her head, neck, and arms with pearls and precious stones, including sard, topaz, diamond, jasper, turquoise, amethyst, emerald, and onyx. And escorted by thousands of angels singing hymns and playing lutes. He presented her in her adornment to Adam, in order to entrust her to the man. There was a feast and a banquet—which is to say a festive banquet, in which, it would seem, God Himself affably took part; and the planets danced in a circle to their own music.
This was the first wedding feast, but we are not told that it was also a marriage right off. God had made the woman to be Adam's helpmate, simply as company for him, and had evidently thought nothing further about it. That she would know pain in giving birth to children was a curse that He did not lay upon her until she and Adam had eaten from the tree and both had had their eyes opened. Between the Feast of Presentation and the feast when Adam first knew his wife and she bore him a tiller of the soil and a shepherd, in whose footsteps Esau and Jacob would walk—in between these two first comes the story of the tree and the fruit and the serpent and the knowledge of good and evil, and they came first for Joseph as well. He too did not know a woman until after he had first learned what good and evil are—from a serpent who for the life of her would have loved to teach him what is very, very good, but evil as well. He, however, resisted her and knew the art of waiting until it was good and no longer evil.
