Joseph and His Brothers, page 160
Perhaps not ten either—God knew, but let Him keep that to Himself—and over time, as the days and years multiplied, the question lost its critical importance. It did so above all because Jacob, once he had ceased to bicker with God, had gradually come to the
viewpoint that God had not forcefully imposed this Isaak-like sacrifice on him, but that he had made it of his own free will. As long as the initial pain still raged, the idea had been totally out of the question; he had simply felt himself cruelly mistreated. But as pain receded, as habit set in and death asserted its benefits—that is, keeping Joseph safe in its protective womb as an eternal seventeen-year-old—his tender, passionate soul had seriously begun to imagine itself capable of Abraham's sacrificial act. This flight of imagination was in God's honor, and his own. God had not ravaged him like a monster and cunningly stolen what he held most dear, but had merely accepted what was knowingly and courageously offered Him: his dearest possession. Believe it or not, Jacob convinced himself of this and for the sake of his own pride swore to himself that in that hour when he had dispatched Joseph on his journey to Shechem, he had willingly performed his Isaak-sacrifice and out of love for God had surrendered what he loved all too well. He did not always beHeve it—at times he admitted in contrition and with tears flowing yet again that he would never ever have been capable, even for the love of God, of tearing from his heart what he held dearest. But the wish to believe triumphed—and did that wish not make it more or less irrelevant who had mutilated Joseph?
The suspicion—certainly it was there, it gnawed away at him, though gently and not hourly; in later years it sometimes dozed off, and then that was that. The brothers had imagined living under suspicion, or under half a suspicion, to be more wretched than it actually turned out. Their father was on good terms with them, there was no other way to put it. He spoke with them and broke bread with them; he shared in their business interests and in the joys and sorrows of their tents. He would gaze at them and only occasionally, only rarely at great intervals, would the smoldering duplicity and sullenness of suspicion cloud his aged eyes—and they would lower their own and words would fail them. But what did that imply? A man will lower his eyes simply because he knows that someone nurses a suspicion. It does not have to be an acknowledgment of guilt; it can even express chaste innocence and a sympathy with the person troubled by mistrust. And so at last a man grows weary of his own suspicion.
He finally lets it be, especially when confirmation of it can change nothing—not just as regards what has happened, but also in
terms of the future and the promise, of all that is and is yet to be. The brothers may have been ten-headed Cain, may have been fratricides—but they were what they were, Jacob's sons, the sons he had been given and who, one had to assume, were Israel. Jacob, you see, had decided to make it his habit not to apply just to himself individually the name he had wrested for himself at the Jabbok at the cost of being left halt in one hip, but to give it broader and grander meaning. Why not? Since it was his name, wrested with great effort at dawn, he could do with it as he pleased. Israel—it was no longer a name to be applied to him personally, but to everything that belonged to him, the man of blessing, from the next down to the latest but never last member in every branch of every collateral kinship: the clan, the tribe, the people, whose number was to be countless as the stars and the sand upon the seashore. The children who were sometimes permitted to play at Jacob's knee, they were Israel, he could call them that collectively all at once—much to his relief, for he could not remember all their names; he had particular trouble recalling the names of the children of the Ishmaelite and unequivocally Canaanite wives. But these women were "Yizrael" as well, including the Moabite and the slave from Shechem; but first and foremost and above all their husbands were "Yizrael," the eleven, deprived of their zodiacal number as a result both of an enduring fraternal strife that had begun early on and of his own heroic willingness to sacrifice— but still an imposing number all in all, Jacob's sons, the progenitors of that countless number, to whom they would give their tribal names: mighty men before the Lord, each just as he was created and despite whatever that lowering of the eyes in the face of suspicion might mean. Was that not the same as their remaining "Yizrael" no matter what? For Jacob knew this much, long before it was ever written—and it only stands written because he knew it: Yizrael, even when it has sinned, will always be Israel.
Within Israel, however, within the eleven-headed lion, there was one head, the inheritor of the blessing before all others, just as Jacob had been before Esau—and Joseph was dead. Once Jacob conferred the blessing, its promise then rested, or would rest, on one of them: from him would come the salvation to which his father had long sought to put a name—and Jacob had in fact found a provisional name, though no one knew it except the young woman who sat at his feet. But who from among the brothers was to be the chosen one
from which the promise would come? Who would be the man of blessing, though no longer chosen on the basis of love—for love was dead? Not Ruben, the eldest, who was like boiling, gushing water and had played the hippopotamus. Not Shimeon and Levi, who were personally nothing more than slippery louts and likewise had unforgettable deeds chalked up against them, for they had behaved like savage heathens at Shechem and acted like demons of the field in Hemor*s city. These three were cursed to the extent that Israel could be cursed; they had been cast aside. And so it had to be the fourth son who came after them, Judah—it was he.
Ashtaroth
Did he know it was he? He could count it off on his fingers, and he frequently literally did just that, but never without taking alarm at being chosen as the heir, without plunging into painful doubt as to his worthiness and fear that he would ruin it. We know Jehuda; we have seen his anguished lionlike head with its stag's eyes among the heads of his brothers, and we also kept an eye on him during Joseph's downfall. All in all, he did not come off badly in that affair—not so well, of course, as Benjamin, who had been at home, but almost as well as Ruben, who had never wanted the boy's death, but saw to it that he was cast into the pit so that he could steal him from it. It had also been Judah's wish and proposal that they pull him from the pit and grant him his life, for it had been he who had suggested they sell their brother, seeing as they had really not known how in their own day to emulate Lamech of the ancient song. That excuse was irrelevant and a mere pretext, as most excuses are. Jehuda was fully aware that letting the boy perish in that hole was not one whit better than shedding his blood, and had wanted to save him. That he was too late with his suggestion, inasmuch as the Ishmaelites had already done their work and freed Joseph, was not his fault—he could well claim that, comparatively speaking, he deserved some praise in that cursed affair, since he had wanted the boy to escape.
No matter, the crime pursued him far worse than it did the others, who could have offered nothing for their own exculpation—but how could it not? Only dulled souls should commit crimes; they're not bothered, they live each new day with nothing pursuing them.
Evil is for dulled souls. But whoever displays even a trace of tenderness should keep his hand from crime if he possibly can, for he will have to pay for it and it doesn't matter if he can prove to have had some conscience in the matter—he will be punished precisely for having a conscience.
Judah was terribly grieved by the deed done to Joseph and his father. He suffered from it, for he was given to suffering, as those stag's eyes and something in the delicate nostrils and full lips led us to surmise right off; and the deed laid upon him a great curse and chastisement—or rather, whatever curse and chastisement he suffered, he attributed to it and saw as retribution for what had been done, for his share in it. And that in turn is evidence of a strange pride of conscience. For he could certainly see that the others—Dan or Gaddiel or Zebulun, not to mention the savage twins—walked about freely and quite unscathed, with nothing to repent of, which could have led him to entertain the idea that his torments, both his own and those inflicted by his sons, might be quite independent of what had been done, or of his share in it, might have emerged on their own, purely out of himself. But no, he wanted to suffer punishment all alone and gazed disdainfully on those whose thick skins left them untormented. And that is the strange pride of conscience.
The torments he endured all bore the sign of Ashtaroth, and he should not have been amazed that they came from that corner of the world, for he had always been tormented by his Mistress—or better, had been her slave without loving her. Judah believed in the God of his fathers, El-Elyon, the Most High, Shaddai, the Mighty One of Jacob, his rock and shepherd, Yahweh, from whose nose steam came when He was angry, and destroying fire that came forth from His mouth as lightning. He burned sweet-smelling offerings to Him, sacrificed bullocks and suckling lambs to Him whenever it seemed fitting. In addition, however, he also believed in the elohim of the nations—and there could be no great objection to that, as long as he did not serve them. When one observes how late in time, how far from their beginnings, Jacob's descendants would still have to be admonished with curses by their leaders to put away strange gods, both Baalim and Ashtaroth, and not share in the sacrificial feasts of the Moabites, one has the impression of a serious lack of steadfastness, a tendency down to the last generation to relapse and fall away;
one ought not therefore be surprised that someone at this early stage, a figure so near to the source as Yehuda ben Yaaqov, beHeved in Ashtaroth, who was a very popular goddess worshiped everywhere under a variety of names. She was his Mistress, and he bore her yoke, that was the vexing reality—vexing to both his spirit and his being chosen. But how could he not have believed in her? He did not sacrifice to her—not in a narrower sense of the word, that is, did not burn bullocks and suckUng lambs to her. But her cruel spear pricked him to make more vexing, more passionate sacrifices to her, which he did not make gladly, not with a willing heart, but under the coercion of his Mistress; for his spirit was at odds with his lust, and he never emerged from the embrace of one of her hierodules without hiding his head in shame and doubting in awful anguish his fitness to be the chosen heir.
From the day they had joined to remove Joseph from the world, Judah began to regard Astarte's torments as a punishment for his crime; for they increased, besieging him from without and pinching him from within; and the only way to put it is that since that day, the man had done penance in hell—in one the many hells that exist, the hell of sex.
Many will think: That can't be the worst fate. But whoever thinks that does not know the thirst for purity without which, to be sure, there can be no hell, neither this or any other. Hell is for the pure; that is the law of the moral world. It is for the sinner, and one can sin only against one's purity. If a man is a beast, he cannot sin and is unaware of any hell. That is how things are arranged, and it is quite certain that hell is populated by the better sort, which is not just—but, then, what is our justice!
The story of Judah's marriage and those of his sons, of the ruin to which those marriages brought them, is extremely strange and eerie and really quite obscure, which explains why it is not merely out of delicacy that they can be spoken of only sotto voce. We know that Leah's fourth son was married early on—a step taken out of a love for purity, so that he might commit and restrict himself and find peace, but in vain; it was a calculation made without his Mistress and her spear. His wife, whose name has not been handed down—perhaps she was seldom called by name, but was simply the daughter of Shuah the Canaanite, whom Judah had come to know through his
friend Hirah, the head shepherd of the village of Addulam—this woman, then, had good reason to weep over him and much to forgive him, a burden eased somewhat because she at least tasted the joy of motherhood three times, albeit a fleeting joy, for the boys she bore to Judah were nice only at the start, but then turned nasty, though that applied least to the youngest, Shelah, who was born a good while after the other two, since he was merely sickly, whereas his older brothers, Er and Onan, were nasty as well, sickly in a nasty way and nasty in a sick way, likewise both pretty and impertinent— in short, an affliction in Israel.
Boys such as these two—sickly and hardened, but nice for all that—are an anachronism at this place, a premature act of nature, which isn't quite herself for a moment and forgets just where she is. Er and Onan would have belonged more properly in late antiquity, in a senescent world of mocking descendants—let us say: in monkey-faced Egypt. They were out of place so close to the origins of a process aimed at a larger dimension, were born at the wrong time, and had to be destroyed. Judah, their father, should have grasped that and accused no one but himself for having begotten them. He chose instead to shift the guilt for their wickedness to Shuah's daughter, their mother, and blamed himself only inasmuch as he believed he had committed folly in taking a Baal-dazed wife. And he blamed their ruin on the woman to whom he gave them in marriage, one after the other, and whom he accused of being an Ishtar figure, who destroys her lovers by having them die of her love. That was unjust—both to his wife, who soon died of grief over all this, and certainly unjust in large measure to Tamar.
Tamar Learns About the World
Tamar, it was she. Deeply impressed by Jacob's expression, she had been sitting at his feet for some time now, Hstening to the teachings of Israel. She never leaned back, but always sat bolt upright, on a footstool, on a step of the well, on an extended root of the oracle tree, her back arched, her neck stretched forward, two creases of tension between her velvet eyebrows. She came from a hamlet on the sunny slope of a mountain in the vicinity of Hebron, where people made their living in wine and a little livestock. There stood the house
of her parents, small farmers who sent the girl to Jacob with sheaves of grain and fresh cheese, but also lentils and groats, which he purchased with copper. And so she came to him, found her way to him that first time for ordinary reasons, though in reality urged on by a higher need.
She was beautiful in her way, indeed not pretty and beautiful, but simply beautiful in an austere and off-putting way—that is, she seemed angered by her own beauty, and rightly so, for there was something bewitching about it that left men no rest, and to counter such unrest she had set those creases between her eyebrows. She was tall and almost thin, but her thinness was the source of a still greater unrest than any ample flesh would have caused, so that the unrest was really not one of the flesh but must be called demonic. She had remarkably beautiful brown eyes that spoke with great urgency, almost circular nostrils, and a proud mouth.
What wonder, then, that Jacob was taken with her and set her at his side as a reward for her wonderment? He was an old man fond of his own feelings and simply waiting to be able to feel something once again; but in order to awaken emotion in us old men, or at least some gentle and veiled reminiscence of the emotions of our youth, something special must come along to strengthen us even as we marvel at it—combining the quality of Astarte and a spiritual eagerness to hear our wisdom.
Tamar was a seeker. The creases between her eyebrows expressed not only anger at her own beauty, but also a strained effort to find truth and salvation. Is there anywhere in this world that one does not encounter a concern for God? It is found on royal thrones and in the most wretched mountain hamlets. Tamar was one of those who live with it, and the unrest she caused others disturbed and angered her because of a higher unrest she bore within her. One might have thought this country village girl's religious concerns were taken care of. But even before she heard Jacob speak, traditional worship of forest and meadow and nature had not satisfied her urgent needs. She simply could not make do with the Baalim and gods of fertility, for her soul guessed that there was something else far superior in the world, and she strained to track it down. There are such souls: something new that changes things needs only to come into the world and their solitary sensitivity is touched and seized by it and they have to set out to find it. Their unrest is not of the highest order, like that of
the wanderer from Ur, which drove him into a void where nothing was, so that he had to create the new out of himself. That is not the way with these souls. But once the new thing is there and in the world, even if at a great distance, their sensitivity leaves them no rest, they must make their pilgrimage in pursuit of it.
Tamar's pilgrimage did not take her far. Bringing wares to Jacob in his tent to exchange for weighed copper was surely only a ploy of her mind, a pretext born of unrest. She found her way to him, and now often, very often sat at the feet of the solemn old man weighed down with stories—sat bolt upright, her urgent, wide eyes directed up at him, so spellbound and motionless that the silver earrings dangling at her lean cheeks never swayed, while he told her about the world, that is, told her his stories, told of a family tree with many branches flung wide, the history of a family that had grown from God and was tended by Him, and, as a bold pedagogue, he presented it all as the history of the world.
