Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis

by Robert Graves

  3. Shaking the edge of one’s cloak for ‘I will have nothing to do with this!’ remains a common gesture in the Middle East. Joseph’s enigmatic message to Jacob: ‘The rope has followed the bucket into the well,’ means: ‘This is the consequence of your sons’ having lowered me into the dry well at Dothan.’

  59

  JACOB IN EGYPT

  (a) Hearing that Joseph’s brothers had arrived, Pharaoh told him: ‘If your father Jacob should bring his entire household here, he can count upon my royal welcome. Provide wagons for the women and children; and since I have placed all the wealth of Egypt at his disposal, persuade him to leave behind whatever possession may prove cumbersome.’

  Joseph gave each of his brothers, except Benjamin, a handsome new robe; Benjamin received five such, also three hundred pieces of silver. Besides wagons and bales of fodder, he sent Jacob twenty asses laden with valuables and all manner of rich foods. His parting words were: ‘No harsh thoughts on the journey, pray!’415

  (b) The brothers were still debating how they should break their good news to Jacob, when Serah, Asher’s daughter, a modest girl though an accomplished musician, came to meet them near Hebron. They handed her an Egyptian harp, saying: ‘Go at once to your grandfather Jacob, pluck this instrument and sing as follows:

  Joseph is not dead, not dead;

  He wears upon his head

  The crown of Egypt’s land.

  He is not dead, not dead—

  Do you understand?’

  Serah did as she was told, singing the words softly to him over and over again, until she was certain that they had lodged in his heart. Suddenly Jacob recognized the truth. He blessed Serah, sighing: ‘Daughter, you have revived my spirit. May the shadow of death never disquiet you! Come, that song again I It is sweeter than honey to my ears.’416

  (c) Thereupon the brothers arrived, clad in royal garments. They announced loudly: ‘Joseph is alive, alive! He has become Viceroy of Egypt!’ Jacob saw the wagons and laden asses, and cried: ‘O joy! Glory be to God! It is true then? Shall I after all be restored to my favourite son?’

  He now shook off the ashes of mourning, washed, trimmed his beard, dressed in the royal garments which had been brought him, and invited every king in Canaan to a three-day banquet; after which he set out for Egypt with his flocks, herds, possessions, and a household of seventy souls, not counting wives and servants.417

  (d) At Beersheba, Jacob offered burned sacrifices, and God spoke in a dream: ‘Fear not, Jacob, to visit Egypt under My protection! I will make Israel a great people. Afterwards I will bring you back again, and Joseph shall close your dying eyes.’418

  (e) On hearing the news from Judah, who had ridden ahead, Joseph at once harnessed his chariot horses and drove down to Goshen. He and Jacob embraced tearfully, and Jacob sobbed: ‘I am ready to die, my son, now that we have met again!’

  Joseph told his brothers: ‘I shall inform Pharaoh of your arrival. If he inquires about your occupation, admit that you are shepherds. Although Egyptians regard shepherds as unclean, no harm will attend you here in Goshen.’419

  (f) He presented five of his brothers to Pharaoh, who appointed them overseers of the royal flocks, herds and droves in that region; then presented Jacob also. When Pharaoh politely asked his age, Jacob answered: ‘Unlike my immediate ancestors, I have aged rapidly. Few and evil have been the years of my life; a mere one hundred and thirty in all.’ With that, he blessed Pharaoh and went back to Goshen. But God reproached him: ‘Jacob, I saved you from Esau and Laban; I saved Joseph from the pit and made him Viceroy of Egypt; and I saved this entire household from starvation! Yet you dare complain that your days have been few and evil! For this ingratitude I will shorten them by thirty-two years.’420

  (g) At Pharaoh’s orders, Joseph settled his father in the district of Rameses, and provided food for all Israel while the famine lasted. Jacob lived another seventeen years—thirty-two less than God had granted his father Isaac.421

  ***

  1. Midrashic additions to this story, reflecting Israel’s two heroic revolts against the power of Rome, make Joseph’s brothers show warlike defiance when Benjamin is arrested, and rout Pharaoh’s entire army. Judah grinds iron ban to powder between his teeth, and utters so terrifying a shout that all the women who hear it miscarry, and the heads of Pharaoh’s guards twist sideways and stay fixed—a memory, perhaps, of Egyptian reliefs in which soldiers’ bodies face to the front, though their heads are in profile. He also burns the chariot given him by Pharaoh, because of its idolatrous decorations.

  Jacob is credited with prescience of the Mosaic Law: he introduces the Feast of First Fruits before leaving Canaan, and fells the sacred acacias at Migdal beside Lake Gennesaret for Moses’ use when the Ark of the Covenant should be built.

  2. The chronicler of Genesis records that Jacob’s household consisted of seventy souls, exclusive of the patriarchs’ wives; but even if Jacob himself is counted, the names given add up to no more than sixty-nine. Commentators offer several irreconcilable explanations of this apparent error; one of these, by analogy with Daniel III. 25, reckons God as the seventieth soul. The only two women listed are Dinah, and Serah daughter of Asher. Serah, like Dinah, may have been a matriarchal clan.

  3. There is no discrepancy between the famine caused by the Nile’s failure to rise, and the provision of grazing in Goshen. Nile floods depend on heavy snows in Abyssinia, not on local rainfall. Jacob would hardly have starved at Beersheba while he could still pasture his flocks, none of which seem to have died there from drought. Perhaps southern Palestine depended on Egypt for its com supply even in good years, and Hebrew pastoralists had come to treat bread as a necessity rather than a luxury.

  60

  THE DEATH OF JACOB

  (a) Jacob, aware that his death was approaching, summoned Joseph to Goshen and said: ‘Swear that you will lay me to rest not among Egyptians, but in the Cave of Machpelah at Hebron.’

  Joseph answered: ‘Am I a slave, that you demand an oath from me?’

  ‘Nay, but put your hand beneath my thigh, and swear!’

  ‘It is unseemly for a son to touch his father’s circumcision. Nevertheless, I swear by the Living God that you shall be buried at Hebron.’422

  (b) Joseph brought Ephraim and Manasseh to Jacob’s death-bed. Jacob sat up with great difficulty, and said: ‘God once blessed me at Luz in Canaan, promising that my sons should become tribes and hold Canaan as their everlasting possession. Though these sons of yours, Ephraim and Manasseh, were born before I visited Egypt, I count them no less my own than Reuben and Simeon. But let your younger children rank as their sons.’ Then his mind wandered: ‘When I left Padan-Aram, my wife Rachel died in Canaan, at some distance from Ephrath…’ He was evidently grieved that his body would lie next to Leah’s, not to his beloved Rachel’s; but saw no help for it.423

  (c) Noticing Ephraim and Manasseh, he asked forgetfully: ‘Who are these?’

  ‘They are my sons; born, as you say, in Egypt.’

  ‘I will bless them.’

  Joseph brought the lads forward, and Jacob sighed: ‘I never thought to see your face again, let alone your sons’. God has indeed been very merciful!’424

  (d) Bowing reverently, Joseph set Ephraim to Jacob’s left, and Manasseh to the right. But Jacob, crossing his arms, rested the right hand on Ephraim’s head, and the left on Manasseh’s. He said:

  ‘The God of my fathers Abraham and Isaac,

  The God who has always been my shepherd,

  The Holy One who has saved me from evil,

  Let Him bless these lads, whom I name my sons,

  As He blessed my fathers Abraham and Isaac;

  They shall grow to a multitude over the earth!’

  When Joseph tried to alter the position of Jacob’s hands, protesting: ‘Not so, my father; because Manasseh is the first-born. Pray set your right hand on his head, not on Ephraim’s,’ Jacob replied obstinately: ‘I know, my son, I know! But though Manasseh will
become great, Ephraim will become greater still.’

  Having blessed them both with: ‘May it always be fortunate in Israel to wish: “God prosper you like Ephraim and Manasseh!”’, Jacob told Joseph: ‘He will bring you safely back to inherit, in Canaan, the royal portion which I have denied your brothers: a Shoulder seized from the Amorites with my sword and bow.’425

  (e) Jacob summoned his other sons, and said: ‘I will now disclose the fates of all your posterity. Gather around, and listen!’ Each of them expected a blessing; yet he punished Reuben for the lasciviousness that had prompted him to lie with Bilhah, by denying him his rights as the first-born; he also lamented the massacre done at Shechem by Simeon and Levi, cursing instead of blessing them—their fate, he said, was to be divided and scattered in Israel. Nevertheless, he praised Judah’s lion-like courage, promising him a royal sceptre and an abundance of wine and milk. Zebulon, he announced, would become a tribe of merchants and seafarers. He compared Issachar to a strong pack-ass, cheerfully labouring in a pleasant land; Dan, to a serpent lurking by the highway, that stings passing horses and un-seats their riders; Naphtali, to a swift doe running with fawns at her heels; Benjamin, to a hungry wolf. He told Gad: ‘You will raid and be raided, but come off victorious in the end’; and Asher: ‘You will harvest good corn and bake fine bread.’ His chief blessing was reserved for Joseph, whom he compared to a strong young bull beside a fountain, scornful of sling-stones and arrows. God would destroy Joseph’s enemies, and bless him with abundant rain, perpetual springs, rich flocks, fertile wives, and ancestral pride. Jacob did not, however, reveal the whole future—because God made him forget his promise. He merely repeated what he had told Joseph: that he must be buried in the Cave of Machpelah beside Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and his own wife Leah.426

  (f) Joseph had Jacob’s body embalmed, which took forty days; and ordered seventy days of public mourning throughout Egypt. Having asked and obtained Pharaoh’s permission to visit Canaan and bury Jacob there, he marched off at the head of a vast mourning train—not only his brothers and the Viceregal household, but representatives from every city in Egypt—attended by a heavily armed escort.427

  (g) They entered Canaan, followed the highroad into Gilead, where they wailed and wept seven full days at Atad’s threshing floor. Because the wondering Canaanites cried: ‘This is indeed a solemn mourning of the Egyptians!’, the place was ever afterwards known as Abel-Mizraim. Thence the cortège circled back towards Hebron, laid Jacob to rest in the Cave of Machpelah, mourned seven days more, and returned across the frontier.428

  (h) Some say that Jacob’s brother Esau was still alive, and that his Edomite household accompanied Joseph on the progress through Canaan. At Hebron, however, they blocked the approach to Machpelah, and Esau shouted: ‘I shall never let Jacob be buried in this cave, which is mine by right!’ Fighting broke out, and Dan’s deaf-and-dumb son Hushim beheaded Esau with a sword. The Edomites fled, carrying off his trunk to Mount Seir, but leaving the head behind for burial.429

  (i) Jacob being now dead, the brothers feared that Joseph would take tardy vengeance on them, and sent a message: ‘Our father, before he died, told us to beg your forgiveness. You will, we trust, respect his wishes.’

  Joseph called them to the Palace, and when they once more abased themselves, crying ‘We are your slaves!’, answered: ‘Have no fear! Though you plotted against my life, God turned this evil act to good account: saving innumerable lives through me. I shall therefore continue to provide for Israel.’ They went away reassured.430

  (j) Others say that because Joseph embalmed Jacob’s body, as if God could not have preserved it, also letting Judah style Jacob ‘your servant’ without protest, he was outlived by all his brothers.431

  ***

  1. Jacob’s blessing gives mythological authority for the political future of Ephraim and Manasseh. It postulates an original tribe of Joseph consisting of several clans which, after invading Canaan under Joshua, formed a federation with the already resident Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah tribes. Joseph’s two most powerful clans then claimed to be independent tribes, each equal in rank with its new allies, and adopted the lesser clans—Joseph’s unnamed younger sons in the myth—as ‘sons’ of their own. Manasseh had originally been senior to Ephraim (or whatever the clan was first called which occupied Mount Ephraim—see 45. 2), but now admitted itself junior. Similar shifts in tribal status and structure still occur among Arabian desert tribes (see 42. 4–5 and 50. 3).

  Jacob’s final blessing on his grandsons is repeated to this day by orthodox Jewish fathers each Sabbath Eve. Touching their sons’ heads, they say: ‘God prosper you like Ephraim and Manasseh!’

  2. Two early versions of the myth, one Ephraimite and the other Judaean, have here been somewhat carelessly combined, so that Jacob’s speech rambles in a manner attributable to a failing memory. Ephraim and Judah, of course, come off far better than the other tribes; and even the late priestly editor has refrained from converting Jacob’s curse on Levi into a blessing.

  3. Joseph’s funeral progress to Gilead with an armed escort suggests that he was asserting Israel’s sovereign claims over all Canaan; a hint exploited by late midrashim, which make him reconquer the country as far as the Euphrates. But that Atad’s threshing floor—atad means ‘camel thorn’—lay beyond Jordan, is a late gloss on the Genesis text, perhaps suggested by a misreading of ‘the stream’, namely the Torrent of Egypt (Genesis XV. 18), alias the River Zior, which formed the Canaanite-Egyptian frontier. In other words, Joseph’s followers performed the mourning ceremony at a Canaanite village just beyond the border. Abel-Mizraim means no more than ‘the Egyptian meadow’—ebel, ‘mourning’ is another word altogether. Syrian weddings and funerals are still celebrated on the level surface of threshing floors.

  4. The Cave of Machpelah has been for centuries hidden by an Arab mosque, to which neither Christians nor Jews are admitted, and its contents remain a holy secret. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Machpelah in 1163 A.D., wrote that the six sepulchres occupied a third and innermost cave. According to Josephus, they were built of the finest marble.

  5. The ‘Shoulder’ bequeathed to Joseph was Shechem (see 49. 3. 5).

  6. A midrashic embellishment of Jacob’s death-bed blessings attributes to him the first use of Moses’ Shema, ‘Hear, O Israel!’ (Deuteronomy VI. 3), which still remains the chief Jewish prayer.

  61

  THE DEATH OF JOSEPH

  (a) Before dying at the age of one hundred and ten years, Joseph had great-grandchildren to dandle on his knees. One day he told the brothers: ‘Our God will assuredly lead you back to Canaan, the Promised Land. Since I have now reached the end of life, pray take my body there with you, and He will repay your kindness.’

  These were his last words. He was duly embalmed and laid in a sarcophagus on the banks of the River Sihor. All Egypt mourned him for seventy days.432

  (b) Some say that Joseph made the brothers swear to bury him near Shechem, where he had once gone in search of them; and to bury Asenath in Rachel’s tomb beside the road to Ephrath.433

  (c) Pharaoh also died. His successor reigned without a Viceroy and, when he saw Israel multiplying faster than the Egyptians, remarked: ‘A dangerous people! If Egypt should be invaded from the East, they might well choose to assist my enemies.’ He therefore treated even Joseph’s descendants as serfs, appointing taskmasters who forced them to build the treasure cities of Rameses and Pithom, and who made their lives a burden. This bondage continued for many generations, until Moses arose and led Israel out of Egypt to the Promised Land, taking with him the bones of Joseph, in fulfilment of his ancestor Levi’s promise, and burying them at Shechem.434

  ***

  1. The River Sihor (or Zior), is identified with the Torrent of Egypt (now the Wadi el Arish—see 60. 3). Thus Joseph’s sarcophagus was placed as close to the Canaanite frontier as possible.

  2. The Genesis myths suggest that Israel’s early religion compromised between an
cestor worship and the cult of an Aramaean tribal war-and-fertility god, not much different from those of Moab or Ammon, whose power could be effective only in the particular territory occupied by his people—thus Naaman the Syrian later imports two mule-loads of Ephraimite earth in order to worship the God of Israel at Damascus (2 Kings V. 17). No references to any goddess are included, and in parts of the Joseph myth He is clearly equated with Akhenaten’s monotheistic conception of a supreme universal god (see 56. 4).

  3. When a dead man had been duly mourned, he was thought to have joined the honourable company of his ancestors in Sheol, or The Pit, where they lay fast asleep (Job III. 14–19). Mourners who approached the clan’s burial ground removed their shoes (Ezekiel XXIV. 17), as before visiting places traditionally sanctified by the tribal god’s appearance (Exodus III. 5 and Joshua V. 15). The souls of the dead, however, did not slumber but were credited with powers of thought. They could be consulted by divination (1 Samuel XXVIII. 8–19), and were called ‘the Knowing Ones’ (Leviticus XIX. 31; Isaiah XIX. 3) because aware of their descendants’ acts and fates. Thus Rachel mourns from the grave for her distressed children (Jeremiah XXXI. 15). The dead were, in fact, underworld deities, or elohim (1 Samuel XXVIII. 13–20).

  4. Unless buried among his ancestors, a dead man was banished to an unknown part of Sheol and denied proper worship. Hence Jacob’s and Joseph’s repetitive demands for burial in Canaan, and the terrible punishment inflicted on Korah, Dathan and Abiram by God, when the earth swallowed them up without the obligatory funeral rites (Numbers XVI. 31 ff). Sheol was still considered to be outside God’s jurisdiction (Psalms LXXXVIII. 5–6; Isaiah XXXVIII. 18). But the body had to be complete, and even so the soul perpetually bore marks of its death, whether by the sword as in Ezekiel XXXII. 23 or by grief, as when Jacob feared that his grey hairs would go down in sorrow to the grave (Genesis XLII. 38). Esau’s loss of his head was considered a shameful calamity for Edom.