Joseph and His Brothers, page 187
His words dried up for a few minutes, and he smiled with closed eyes, as if his mind were wandering in those same charming hills that he had suddenly pictured in blessing Joseph.
When he began to speak again he appeared to have forgotten that Joseph's head was under his hand, because for a while he spoke of him, too, as if of some third person.
"Seventeen years he lived for me and by God's grace lived for me yet another seventeen years; but in between lay my numbness and the fate of a man set apart. Foes lay in wait to snare his charms— what folly, for these were bound up as one with a cleverness that brought their covetousness to naught. More alluring than any man's eye has ever seen are the women who climb up to look upon him from walls and towers and from windows, but look in vain. And so they made life bitter for him and assailed him with the arrows of slander. But his bow held in strength, his muscles held in strength, and the hands of the Eternal held him fast. Not without rapture will his name be remembered, for he succeeded where few ever succeed: to find favor before God and man. That is a rare blessing, for one usually has the choice of pleasing either God or the world; but to him was given the spirit of charming mediation, so that he pleased both. Be not proud, my child—need I warn you? No, I know that your cleverness shields you from arrogance. For it is a lovely blessing, but not the highest or most stern. Behold, your precious life lies in all its truth before the eyes of a dying man. It was play, it was allusion, a confiding, cordial state of favor, hinting at salvation and yet not fully summoned and admitted to true seriousness. It is such a mixture of high delight and sadness that it stirs my heart v/ith love— and none can love you so, my child, who knows only the luster of your life, but does not see, as does a father's heart, its sadness. And
Restoration '^A77
so I bless you, my blessed son, from the strength of my heart and in the name of the Eternal, who gave you and took you and gave you and now takes me from you. My blessing shall ascend higher than the blessings of my fathers upon mv own head. Be blessed as you are, with blessings from above and blessings from the deep below, a surge of blessing from the breast of heaven and the womb of earth. Blessing, blessing upon Joseph's head, and those who come from you shall bask in the sun of your name. Broad be the river of song that celebrates the playful story of your life, singing it ever new, for it was a holy game, and you suffered and could forgive. Just as I also forgive you that you have made me suffer. And God forgive us all."
He finished and hesitantly withdrew his hand from that head. So one life takes leave of another and must depart; yet a little while and the other will depart as well.
Joseph stepped back to join his brothers. He had not exaggerated when he said that he, too, would receive his due share and be judged by a dying man's sense of truth. He took Benjamin by the hand and brought him forward, for the old man had failed to call him. His strength was obviously at an end, and Joseph had to place the hand of blessing on his little brother's head, for it would no longer have found its way on its own. The old man surely still knew that it was his youngest who awaited his judgment, but what his faltering lips muttered had nothing to do with the little man. Perhaps they would make sense to his descendants. Benjamin, they strained to hear, was a ravenous wolf who devours the prey of the morning and will divide the spoils of evening. He was baffled to hear it.
Jacob's final thoughts were once again about the cave, that double cave in the field of Ephron, son of Zohar, and his wish to be buried there beside his fathers. "I charge you to do it," he rasped. "It has been paid for, purchased by Abram from the children of Heth for four hundred shekels of silver according to weights current at. . ." Here death interrupted him, he stretched out his feet, sank back deep into his bed, and his life stood still.
And when it happened, their breath, their lives, stood still a little too. Then Mai-Sakhme, who was Joseph's steward, but a physician as well, calmly approached the bed. He laid an ear to the silent heart, placed a feather to the mute lips, and drawing his own lips in a little circle of concentration, he observed the down, which did not stir. He
Struck fire before the pupils, but they paid no attention now. Then he turned to Joseph, his master, and reported to him: "He is gathered to his people."
With a motion of his head, Joseph indicated, however, that Judah and not he should receive this report. And while the good man stood before his brother and repeated, "He is gathered to his people," Joseph stepped up to the deathbed and closed the dead man's eyes— for that is why he had directed Mai to Judah, so that he might do this. Then he laid his brow to his father's brow and wept for Jacob.
Judah, the heir, ordered all things proper to the occasion: the hiring of male and female mourners, as well as singers of both sexes and flute players, and the washing, anointing, and wrapping of the corpse. Damasek-EHezer burnt an offering of incense there in the tent: stacte, periwinkles from the Red Sea, galbanum, and frankincense mixed with salt; and as the spicy clouds enveloped the dead man, the guests at his bedside streamed from the tent, joining those who had been standing outside, and departed with them, eagerly discussing the judgments and decrees that Jacob had meted out to the twelve.
Now They Wrap Jacob
And so this story, one grain of sand at a time, has silently, steadily run through the neck of its glass; the sand lies in a mound below, and only a few grains are still left in the chalice at the top. Nothing remains of all its happenings except to tell of what happened to the dead man. But that is no small thing—so take our advice and watch reverently as the last grains run through and gently come to rest on those heaped below. For what happened to Jacob's mortal shell was something quite extraordinary and the ceremonies honoring it were almost without parallel. No king has been borne to his grave as was this man of solemnity—all according to measures designed and ordered by his son Joseph.
After his father's demise, he indeed left the first preliminary arrangements to his brother Jehuda, the inheritor of the blessing; later, however, he took the matter in hand himself, for only he could plan things and issue decrees for which he first had to be empowered
by a quickly assembled council of brothers. These plans were dictated by circumstances, dictated by Jacob's charge and testament, and with all his heart Joseph was glad such was the case. For in having been set apart for so long, he thought like an Egyptian, and his ardent wish to commemorate his father and treat his remains in only the finest and most expensive fashion was in perfect accord with the Egyptian way of thinking.
Jacob had not wished to be buried in the land of dead gods, but had made them swear that he would be interred with his fathers in that cave at home. This entailed a major transport, for which Joseph had exceedingly grand plans that would demand time: time for equipping the solemn transport and time for the journey itself, a matter of at least seventeen days. The corpse, moreover, had to be preserved, preserved according to the arts of Egypt, pickled and embalmed; and if the man now gathered to his people would have found that idea objectionable, then he should have refrained from enjoining them to carry him home. His instruction that he not be buried in Egypt meant that he had to be buried in the Egyptian manner, be splendidly stuffed and laced as an Osiris mummy—which may offend some people. But we have not lived in Egypt for forty years as his son Joseph had, have not been nourished by the juices and attitudes of this peculiar land. In his sorrow, he found it both a joy and a consolation that his father's testament allowed him to treat these precious remains according to that land's most exquisite rites of honor and to bestow permanency upon them, cost what it might.
Accordingly, no sooner had he returned home to Menfe, where he went into mourning, than he sent men to Goshen, for whom the brothers used the term "physicians," though they were nothing of the sort, but specialists in mummification, eternity artists, the most skilled and sought-after in their trade, nor was it by chance that they lived in the city of the wrapped god. With them came carpenters and stonemasons, goldsmiths and engravers, who at once set up a workshop beside the dead man's house of felt, while inside the "physicians" performed on the corpse what the brothers termed "anointing." But that was not the right word. With a hooked iron tool they extracted the brain through the nostrils and filled the hollow skull with spices. An extremely sharp knife of Ethiopian obsidian, wielded with great elegance and fingers spread wide, was used to
open the left side of the abdomen so that they could remove the viscera, which were destined to be preserved in special alabaster jars whose lids would bear the image of the deceased. They rinsed the empty abdominal cavity with date wine and replaced the innards with their finest wares: myrrh and the spicy bark from the runner roots of the laurel. They did it with the devotion of craftsmen, for death was their artistic medium, and they took joy in making the man's body look so much tidier and more appealing than when it had contained a living soul.
They then carefully sewed up the incision and laid the corpse in a caustic saltpeter bath for a total of seventy days. During this time they were on holiday, with nothing to do but eat and drink, and were paid for every hour. When this period came to an end and the dead man was well pickled, the wrapping could begin—a task of great importance. Bandages of byssus, four hundred ells long and painted with a sticky gum, were wrapped around Jacob, with the finest of these endless strips of linen placed closest to the body—wrapped round and round, now in parallel, now overlapping, and in between they laid a golden collar around his tightly bound neck and on his breast another piece of jewelry cut from hammered gold: the image of a vulture, its wings outspread.
For all this time the artisans who had come with the physicians had likewise been hard at work and could contribute their articles of beauty: ribbons, wrought from gold foil and inscribed with the name of the deceased and eulogies to his name, were bound around the wrapping linens, around shoulders, waist, and knees, and then tied to others that ran the length of the body at the front and back. Nor was that the end of it, for what had once been Jacob, was now an eternal, ornate doll of death, purified from all corruption, which they encased from head to foot in thin, supple plates of pure gold and then lifted into an aron, a perfectly measured casket in the shape of a human being, richly adorned with gemstones and colorful glass beads, all supplied by cabinetmakers, jewelers, and sculptors, who had been working all this time. One figure rested within another; the head of the external figure was of chiseled wood overlaid with a mask of gold foil and bore the beard of Usir on its chin.
This, then, was what happened to Jacob—with all due splendor and honor, though not in accord with his wishes, but solely with
those of his transplanted son. But it is probably best that these things are done in accord with the emotions of the man with living guts in his body, for it can make no difference to the other one.
To commemorate his father in death by elevating the man's final wish to an occasion of highest pomp and circumstance—that was Joseph's sole desire and purpose, and while the corpse was being readied for transport, the exalted son had taken steps to turn this journey into a grand triumph, a marvelous event worthy of chronicling. For this he needed Pharaoh's approval, but because he was observing several weeks of mourning with the attendant neglect of his own person, he could not speak with the god himself, but sent an envoy up to the city of the horizon, in the nome of the Rabbit, who in his stead begged the beautiful child of Aton for Joseph to be allowed to accompany his father's body to its resting place beyond the borders of the land. It was Mai-Sakhme, his steward, to whom he entrusted this mission—first because it offered the good man an opportunity to be part of this story until the very end, but also because he knew he could place highest trust in the man's calmness and loyalty when carrying out the delicate diplomacy the task required. For the point was to obtain from Pharaoh orders that one could only suggest to him, but not directly ask of him; the point was to win his consent to a full ceremonial state funeral for the man who had sired his First Servant, or, in other words, to induce him to decree a Grand Procession.
Once again we see that Rachel's lamb had become quite accustomed to thinking in the Egyptian mode. A Grand Procession was a peculiarly Egyptian notion, a festive and ceremonial spectacle beloved by the people of Keme, and Joseph had at once interpreted Jacob's last testament to include not only an embalmment in the highest price range, but also a Grand Procession that would be talked about beyond the Euphrates and as far as the Islands of the Sea. It was to vie with the most famous ambassadorial corteges that Egypt had ever sent abroad—to Babel, Mitanniland, or the great King Hattusil in the land of Hetti—and to deserve being recorded for posterity in the annals of the kingdom. Pharaoh would have to grant him official leave for seventy days so that he could join his eleven brothers, as well as his own sons and theirs, in accompanying their father along the special route of honor that he had selected and
that led to his grave beyond the border—this was the first and easiest part. But it was not enough, it was not a Grand Procession, not a king's cortege, and this worldly son wanted his father carried to his grave as no less than a king. Pharaoh had to be convinced to permit this, to order it; he had to command the state—that is, both court and army—to provide an escort, including a considerable military force to guard them on the long journey across the desert. And once the steward had spoken to him, the idea occurred to Pharaoh and he ordered it done, decreeing it in part because he himself was touched and wanted to show love and favor to his most deserving servant, who had done so much for him, but in part also because he was worried that if Joseph were to travel to the land of his origin without an Egyptian escort, he might not return in the end. That Meni was seriously worried about this, and that Joseph was also counting on his worry, can be seen clearly shimmering through the words our basic report puts in his mouth during negotiations at court: "Now therefore let me go up and bury my father; then I will return.'' It may be that he obligingly made this promise to return on his own; but it is equally likely that Pharaoh demanded it of him. In any case, there stood between master and servant the suspicion that Joseph might use his departure in order never to return, and Pharaoh was glad that he could unite favor and caution, that with the assistance of a heaT escort of honor he could prevent the loss of this irreplaceable man.
The Lord of the Two Crowns was no longer the youngest himself by now; the years of his life were more than forty, and that life had been fragile and sad. He himself had encountered death: one of his daughters, the second of six, Meketaton, the most anemic of them all, had died at age nine; and Ikhnaton, the father of daughters, had given himself over to far more tears than Nefernefruaton, his queen. He wept a great deal; quite apart from death, tears came easily to him just in general on any occasion, for he was lonely and unhappy, and the opulence of his existence, the soft civilized splendor in which he lived, did not help make him any less sensitive to loneliness and not being understood. True, he liked to say that whoever has things hard, should also have it good. But the two were combined for him only amid tears; he had things too good for it to be hard for him as well, and he wept a great deal over his lot. His little morning cloud edged in gold, the queen, and his diaphanous daugh-
ters were constantly having to use fine batiste to dry the tears from his now aging boyish face.
There in the splendid court of the magnificent temple that he had built for his father in heaven at Akhet-Aton, the sole capital, his one great joy was to offer sacrifices of flowers while choirs sang hymns to his god, whom he pictured as a gentle friend of nature who wept copious tears as well. But such joy was soured by his mistrust of the sincerity of his courtiers, who lived off him and had accepted the "doctrine," but who—as every test of their knowledge showed—did not understand it, for it was beyond them. No one could fathom the doctrine of a father who lived at an infinite distance in heaven and nevertheless blessed every little mouse and worm with his tender concern, of whom the solar disk was merely a mediating symbol, and who whispered the truth of his nature to Ikhnaton, his beloved child—no one, as he admitted to himself, believed any of it with all his heart. He was alienated from his people and shunned all contact with them. As for the reUgious powers of his kingdom, the temples and priests, and not just Amun, but all the other ancient and time-honored national divinities, he lived in hopeless strife with them all—with the exception, at best, of the sun's house at On—and out of pained zeal for his own revelation had gone so far as to issue orders and decrees to suppress and destroy Egypt's gods (and again, not just Amun-Re, but also Usir, the Lord of the West, and Eset, the mother, Anup, Khnum, Thoth, Setekh, and even Ptah, the lord of art), which only widened the chasm between him and his land, with its deeply rooted rehgious concern to preserve and remain faithful to its oldest traditions in all things, until, shut off in a world of royal luxury, he was a stranger in his own land.
Was it any wonder, then, that this dreamer's gray, half-veiled eyes were almost always red with weeping? And when Mai-Sakhme spoke before him as Joseph's envoy and presented his master's petition that he be given a leave of absence in connection with the news of Jacob's demise, he immediately began weeping—he was always on the verge of it, and his tears made good use of this occasion as well.
"How terribly sad," he said. "He has died? That very old man? That comes as a shock to My Majesty. He visited me, I recall, while he was still alive, and made no small impression on mc. In his youth
he was a rascal, My Majesty knows of some of his pranks, with hides and rods—I could still laugh until I cry even today. Now his life has attained its limit, and my little uncle, the Overseer of All That Heaven Gives, is orphaned? How infinitely sad! He is sitting there and weeping, is he, your master and my Unique Friend? I know that he is no stranger to tears, that they come easily to him, and for that reason my heart goes out to him, for it is always a good and dear sign in a man. When he revealed himself to his brothers with the words 'It is I,' he wept then too, I know. And he is requesting a leave of absence? A leave of seventy days? That is a good many for burying a father, no matter how great a rascal he may have been. Must it really be seventy? It is so hard to do without him. Somewhat easier perhaps than in the years of the fat and lean cows, but even in these steadier times I shall find it very difficult to spare the man who attends to the Kingdom of Blackness for me, since My Majesty understands little of all that—my interest has always been the light above. Ah, what small thanks one receives—people are much more grateful to the man who provides them blackness than to him who proclaims the light to them. Do not think that I bear any envy toward your dear master. He is to be as Pharaoh in the Two Lands until the end of his life, for far beyond any thanks I might render, he has helped My poor Majesty—as best it could be helped."
