IV.
Viceroy of All Egypt
Pharaoh’s Dreams
THE IMPERIAL PRIVATE BEDROOM was decorated in yellow and blue, Pharaoh’s favorite colors, emblems of sun and sky. He had decided to sleep alone tonight, giving himself a respite from the sexual needs of his nine wives and three concubines. He walked onto the terrace and stood there for ten minutes, leaning on the marble balcony, looking out over the vast expanse of the Nile, which lay before him glittering in the moonlight. Then he walked back into the room, picked up a corner of the blue-and-yellow duvet, and climbed into bed. It was early. He was very tired. The guards outside the door were under strict instructions to let no one in, however urgent the request might be.
He was a tall, vigorous man in his early forties—a good general, an efficient lawgiver, and a skilled manager, who had little patience for the inessential. He seldom remembered a dream, and when he did, he dismissed it with a smile, as you might dismiss a child who has been caught in a piece of inconsequential mischief.
But this dream was different. He had never before dreamed about the Nile, from which all blessings flow, and here he was, standing on its bank alone, with no courtiers around him, looking out not contemplatively but in expectation. And as if feeling had immediately become flesh, a cow poked her head from beneath the surface of the waters and ambled out onto the shore. She was plump and beautiful, her coat a dark reddish brown. As she stood in the sunlight with the water dripping from her flanks, another cow surfaced, walked out of the river, and stood beside her, and then another—seven in all, all of them healthy, plump, beautiful creatures, who stood there contentedly, facing away from the Nile as the water dripped from their flanks in the sunlight. Pharaoh looked on in amazement.
But now there was a sense of foreboding, and again feeling became flesh, and as he looked at the great river, seven more cows emerged from beneath the surface, one after the other—but these animals were emaciated and repulsive to look at. They moved toward the seven plump cows and then, to his horror, they devoured them, sucking them in from the tails until there was nothing left but the reddish-brown muzzles sticking out from their distended mouths, and then the muzzles too were sucked in, and everything about them was gone, and the seven gaunt cows looked as emaciated as before. At this point Pharaoh shuddered. He didn’t know whether it was his body standing beside the Nile that shuddered or his body waking up in bed.
He tried to get back to sleep, but the sense of foreboding tossed and twisted his body from one position to another. When he finally fell asleep again, he had a second dream. Seven healthy ears of grain, full and ripe and golden-yellow, were growing on one stalk. Then seven other ears, thin, dry, and shriveled by the east wind, sprouted close behind them. And the second stalk bent over toward the first stalk, and the thin, dry ears swallowed the full, healthy ears.
He woke up again, in a sweat.
Indecipherable
THE DREAMS HAD A SENSE OF urgency encoded in them, though it wasn’t clear who or what was calling for a response. Pharaoh knew he had to act quickly. But how? What was he supposed to do, when the meaning of the dreams was indecipherable, like words written in an unknown script?
He hated uncertainty. As he walked from one end of his bedroom to the other and back again, hours before sunrise, his mind couldn’t find a resting place, and his agitation grew. Like his revered ancestors, he had been entrusted by the gods with the welfare of the whole land, which depended on him the way a young child depends on its father and mother. It was his sound judgment and planning that secured the blessings of prosperity for every subject in his realm, from nobleman to peasant. Yet how could he even begin to assess the situation in his present state of confusion?
He felt as if his arms had been wrapped tight and bound to his torso by thick coils of rope from which he couldn’t burst free. He wanted to pick up one of his priceless ancient vases and hurl it against the wall. He wanted to strangle someone.
The Dream Interpreters Deliver Their Conclusions
ELEVEN IN THE MORNING. After a two-hour recess to consult the necessary lists and charts, the dream interpreters stood again before Pharaoh in their white pleated robes, holding their ebony staffs before them. One by one they delivered their conclusions.
The first interpreter said that the seven plump cows were seven powerful kings who would be utterly destroyed by the leanest of forces from Pharaoh’s invincible army; the seven ripe ears were seven potential diseases that would be obliterated by the ministrations of Pharaoh’s skilled and faithful physicians, whose thinness signified their constant concern for their master’s welfare. The second interpreter said that the seven plump cows were seven foreign princesses who would be sent as brides to Pharaoh with offers of alliance, and the lean cows were the resulting children who would suck at their mothers’ breasts. And so on.
Each interpretation was delivered with absolute confidence. After the last one, the assembled sages announced through their foreman that whichever particular interpretation Pharaoh in his wisdom should be pleased to decide on, the purport of his dreams was absolutely clear: that heaven’s grace would shine on His Serene Majesty now and forever, and that the future could only bring him still more of that glory which he enjoyed at present and which he was destined to enjoy for eternities to come.
Pharaoh shook his head in disgust. All the interpretations were mere flattery and formulaic nonsense. What did they have to do with the dread he had woken up with?
Then the chief butler remembered. It returned to him in a flash: the young barbarian, the prediction, the release, the exhilaration of being back in his master’s good graces. He was deeply ashamed that he had broken his word. There was no remedy for it but to lay the whole story before Pharaoh. The young man deserved at least that.
As soon as the butler had finished speaking, Pharaoh ordered that Joseph be summoned from prison.
The Summons
THE PAPYRUS SCROLL WAS TIED with a golden ribbon and sealed in purple wax with the imperial scarab. The warden brought it to Joseph, then discreetly withdrew. (He also left a fresh white robe of the highest-quality linen and a pair of expensive sandals.)
Joseph opened the scroll. The message was written in the hieratic script, with black and red ink. He was to appear before Pharaoh in two hours.
Ah. So the chief butler had mentioned him at last.
The summons must have something to do with dreams; that is what the butler would have reported. Pharaoh must have had an important dream, and Joseph was being called on to interpret it. He didn’t know how he would do this, but he knew that he could.
He lathered his face and skull,* stropped his razor, and looked into the small chipped mirror that hung above the washbasin. The eyes that looked back at him shone with excitement.
But beneath the excitement, he could feel a deep calm. Don’t expect Pharaoh to acknowledge you. As the thought surfaced into consciousness, he smiled. Was it a warning? A superstitious charm against disappointment? Or was it itself a recognition of the futility of trying to force the present into one of a trillion possible futures, none of which can be judged in advance?
The razor glided down his cheek, and he could feel the momentary resistance of the stubble, then the letting go. Where the blade had cut a swath through the white lather, the skin was as smooth as a baby’s.
“Not I”
CROWDS OF COURTIERS PARTED to let Joseph and the two guards walk through the throne room. Now he stood right before the steps that led up to Pharaoh’s throne. The throne was overlaid with gold and adorned with semiprecious stones. Its two lion’s-head finials stared threateningly at Joseph, as if they were about to let out two miniature roars.
“I had a dream,” Pharaoh said, in a voice booming with authority, “but no one can discover its meaning. I have heard about you. I am told that you know how to interpret dreams.”
“Not I,” Joseph said. “Not I but God will give Pharaoh the correct interpretation.”
What g
od was the young barbarian referring to? Pharaoh examined him carefully. He tried to read his face. He could see no signs of trickery in it, but he could find no wisdom either. The face was impenetrable. Was it just that the young man’s beauty deflected any deeper probing into the character that lay beneath it?
Joseph’s confidence was not in himself—or rather, it was not in any self that he could identify. It was in what remained when he stepped aside from the self he knew as Joseph. In that state of inner alertness, he became the listener, with no intentions, no preconceptions, no opinions to defend, no outcome to wish for. The still, small voice that arose inside him was the voice of God, but it was also the voice of reason, stripped of the ordinary selfish distortions that desire and aversion impose. It existed beyond the concepts of good and bad, fortune and misfortune, since God was beyond all opposites, and His presence was infused through the world so intimately that Joseph couldn’t help hearing the word misfortune as a failure of insight. A misfortune is a blessing that has not yet been recognized. In Joseph’s experience there was only God’s blessing, and behind its sometimes fearsome disguises it was always waiting to be discovered. Whatever apparent misfortune these dreams might foreshadow could be turned to the benefit of all, if only Pharaoh would pay attention.
Just One Meaning
PHARAOH TOLD JOSEPH HIS TWO DREAMS in as much detail as he could remember. “I described all this to my dream interpreters,” he concluded, “but none of them could come up with a meaning that made any sense.”
The remarkable thing about Egyptian dreams was not that they might be direct revelations of God—Joseph could see no reason to be proprietary about revelations, since, for all he knew, God was just as concerned about the welfare of the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, and the Canaanites as He was with the welfare of Joseph’s own tribe—but that the dreams hypostatized time as space. Three branches; three baskets. The threes had been easy to equate with days, since back then Pharaoh’s birthday lists had been on everyone’s mind. And the sevens: could they too be days? No, in the context of cattle and grain, good and bad seasons, they had to symbolize years. So: good years and bad years, one series after the other, years of abundance and years of deprivation, abundance eaten up by deprivation.
This conclusion was not reasoned out. It simply appeared to him, all at once, outside the confines of temporal succession. If it occurred in time, the reasoning had been compressed into a fraction of a second, inside which Joseph felt he had all the time in the world, just as a great athlete at the peak of his game can enter a mental zone in which a second expands to contain minutes, and a tennis ball, for example, hurtling forward at a hundred miles an hour, seems as if it is floating lazily over the net, fat as a melon.
“Pharaoh’s dreams can have just one meaning,” Joseph said. “God has told Pharaoh what He is about to do. The seven healthy cows are seven years, and the seven healthy ears of corn are the same seven years; the seven lean cows that followed behind them are the seven years that will follow, and so are the seven shriveled ears—they are seven years of famine. Seven years of great abundance are coming to Egypt, but they will be followed by seven years of famine, and the famine will be so severe that nothing will be left of all the abundance, and death will consume the land. So Pharaoh should look for a man who has foresight and wisdom, and he should put this man in charge of all the affairs of Egypt. Pharaoh should also appoint supervisors to gather all the surplus grain that is harvested during these years of abundance, to collect it under Pharaoh’s authority and bring it into the cities and store it there. That grain will be a reserve for the seven years of famine, and the people will be saved, and the land will not be destroyed.”
Silence. All eyes turned toward Pharaoh. All ears waited for his words.
The Man
“PHARAOH SHOULD LOOK FOR A MAN”? Joseph hadn’t planned on saying any such thing.
He was surprised as the words issued from his mouth, but as a listener he could feel the rightness of what he, as the speaker, was saying. It had been masterly, that leap from interpretation to suggestion, and it had been performed with such exquisite finesse that if anyone else had done it, Joseph would have clapped his hands in admiration. But it had been someone else; it was someone else; certainly, the self he was conscious of wasn’t the self that had spoken those words, so forceful and at the same time so courteous that they had made the suggestion seem modest, as if the invisible flashing arrows that now pointed straight at him were not his creation at all but sprang from Pharaoh’s own inspired insight.
However the idea had emerged, it was now a fact. He himself was the man he had suggested. He knew it, and everyone else in the room did too. It was clear to him now that he had been chosen for this job since the day of his birth—since the beginning of time. At this moment he had only a dim sense of what he would need to know or do to accomplish the great task. But he was certain that the details would reveal themselves to him as he proceeded. The solution had to be already present in the problem, as the meaning had been present in the dream.
In Charge
PHARAOH WAS DELIGHTED WITH THE PLAN.* He turned to his ministers and said, “How could we find anyone equal to this man, who is filled with the spirit of the gods?”
His rhetorical question had nothing to do with gods. He was not looking for inspiration, and he didn’t give a damn where Joseph’s brilliance came from. What he meant by “the spirit of the gods” was the spirit of practical wisdom, especially in political economy and statesmanship. Since he too knew how to listen to the still, small voice, on the rare occasions when it whispered to him, he had needed just a moment to perceive the young man’s outstanding ability, and he trusted this perception enough to bet the well-being of his whole empire on it.
“There is no one,” he said to Joseph, “with such foresight and wisdom as you. Therefore, I am putting you in charge of all Egypt, and all my people will obey your commands. Only in court matters will my authority be greater than yours.”
He took off his gold signet ring, which would enable Joseph to sign legal documents in Pharaoh’s name, and put it on Joseph’s finger, and he gave him a ceremonial robe of the finest white linen and a thick gold chain of office to put on. Joseph looked particularly handsome in this robe, with the gold chain of office around his neck.
God’s Little Joke
JOSEPH ACCEPTED THE POSITION as viceroy with appropriate grace, but inwardly he was wary, since he understood how easily wealth and power can corrode a man’s integrity, in gross or barely perceptible ways. He would have to be extremely careful not to confuse his own personal will, empowered now to the utmost degree, with the will of the supreme intelligence.
But he enjoyed his privileges. All the pomp and circumstance was amusing, actually, and he had to smile at God’s humor in having these slim young heralds with pomaded hair run ahead of his chariot crying, “Bow down! Bow down!” while the surging crowds obeyed, echoing and magnifying his dreams of thirteen years before, though only he and God could appreciate the joke.
Asenath
SO PHARAOH MADE JOSEPH RULER over all Egypt, and he bestowed on him the name Zaphnath-paneakh, which means Through Him the Living God Speaks. The imperial proclamation read as follows:
To my subjects, the people of the Black Land: I hereby command that you obey Zaphnath-paneakh, my newly appointed viceroy, as if he were myself, thinking with my mind and speaking with my tongue. From this moment forth, no one shall undertake or continue any project anywhere in Egypt or throughout the lands of my empire without my viceroy Zaphnath-paneakh’s written approval.
Pharaoh also married Joseph to Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, the high priest of Ra in the city of Ōn.
During Joseph’s moony romantic years, at fourteen or fifteen, he had imagined marrying within the tribe: a pretty Jewish cousin or niece. But obviously God had other ideas for him. Asenath was as Gentile as they came: short straight nose, honey-blond hair, creamy rose-tinged skin, lips like ripe plums, blu
e eyes that shone with joy, and a supple, elegantly accommodating nature that was the opposite of the sometimes unpleasant willfulness of Joseph’s great-grandmother Sarah or his grandmother Rebecca. (He knew them well through Jacob’s stories.)
Pharaoh had presented Asenath to him as a paragon among women, “precious beyond all things,” as the Book of Proverbs says, and Joseph fully realized her value and treasured her. He was monogamous by temperament. There were many temptations at the Egyptian court—women, that is, who might have tempted a man not entirely focused on the two things in the world that mattered to Joseph: his marriage and his work. Both these realms were the context for his reverence, the form that his worship of God took, since it was to them that he gave himself with all his heart. The dozens of women who shot him the unmistakable look of desire that he had seen in the eyes of Potiphar’s wife barely made an impression. He knew how to glide past them with a few kind words, then move on to what was important.
Life with Asenath
THEIR HOUSE IN MEMPHIS was far too big, but Asenath had grown up accustomed to such splendor, and Joseph wouldn’t have wanted her sense of abundance to be diminished in any way, especially since the obverse of her generosity to herself was her generosity to others. The house had been a gift from Pharaoh on their wedding day. Actually, it was difficult to think of it as a house; it was a palace, built of marble, limestone, and granite, and it had dozens of elegantly furnished rooms in it, most of which he and Asenath didn’t use except for the weekly ceremonial dinners they gave for the high nobility, the leading government officials, and foreign diplomats. The library was Joseph’s favorite room. It housed a comfortable armchair, an elegant secretary desk and chair, and ceiling-to-floor scroll cases stocked with the finest examples of Egyptian and Akkadian poetry, philosophy, and political economy.
Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness Page 8