by Angela Hunt
He had run away.
She fell onto her couch, exhausted and humiliated. With each passing hour of the water clock she waited, anxious that he appear, and several times she rang her bell to summon him.
He did not answer.
Angry beyond words, furious at her vulnerability before a slave, she tore her dress and ripped handfuls of hair from her wig. She threw cushions, broke vases and upset the furniture in her bedchamber. At one point, she tore Yosef’s kilt, then watered it with tears in a wave of regret.
She would have no child. No throne. No love. The prophecy, this day, her expectations, were part of an elaborate jest Ramla had anticipated and arranged.
By the time the first servants returned to the villa, Sagira was weak from weeping. A slave girl found her lying across her mussed bed, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen. “My lady!” the girl exclaimed, stepping over broken pottery as she hurried to Sagira’s side. “Who has done this?”
Sagira lifted her head from the mattress and gazed toward the empty doorway. “Paneah.”
“Where is your mistress?” Potiphar tossed the reins of his chariot to the boy in the stockyard. “I came as quickly as I could.”
The wide-eyed boy pointed to the house, and Potiphar took the steps of the porch in three long strides. A host of silent slaves, white-faced and somber, stood outside Sagira’s bedchamber. He pushed the door open and found Ramla crouched in a corner of the room and Sagira lying on her back, her arms folded across her chest in the pose of the dead.
Potiphar glanced at the destruction in the room. “What happened here?”
“Ask her,” Ramla said, nodding toward his wife.
The still form moved. “Potiphar?”
He strode forward and sat on the bed, lifting Sagira into his arms. “What happened, little one? Why did you remain here without a guard?”
“I thought Paneah would take care of me,” she murmured, her voice as heavy as a sleepy child’s.
“I have given her a potion to calm her nerves,” Ramla explained. “She was hysterical when I arrived.”
Potiphar brushed damp strands of dark hair from Sagira’s eyes. A faint bruise marred her cheek, and he traced it with his finger. “How did this happen, wife?”
She groaned softly at his touch. “Paneah.”
“Where is he?”
“He—he threw me down. He came into my room and—” She lifted an arm and pointed to a dress thrown over a chair. Even from where he sat, Potiphar could see that it was ripped and torn.
Potiphar smoothed her brow. “Surely you are mistaken. Paneah would give his life to protect you—”
“Paneah attacked me.” Her eyes opened and blazed with fury. “See this?” Reaching forward, she pulled a man’s kilt from under a linen sheet on the floor. “I threw a vase at him and he ran. But he forgot his kilt. Don’t you recognize it?”
Potiphar looked at the garment and recognized the fine pleated kilt Sagira had recently ordered for Paneah.
“Whatever he says, don’t believe it.” Her eyes narrowed. “He is a Hebrew, and the Hebrews lie, husband. On their account Egypt has suffered before. And this Hebrew, this slave you bought, came in to make sport of me. As I raised my voice and screamed, he left his garment and fled—”
Potiphar patted her shoulder as she broke into honest weeping. “Break into teams of two,” he instructed one of the slaves who stood by the door. “Summon my guards for help. Search the grounds, the fields, the riverbank. No one sleeps tonight until Paneah is found.”
“There’s no need to search, master,” a voice called. “The man is here.” The assembled slaves parted as Paneah appeared, a ragged strip of linen tied around his waist.
Like an awakening giant, rage rose within Potiphar as he stood to face his trusted steward. “Should I repeat what my wife has told me?” he asked, his face burning.
Paneah did not answer, but lowered his gaze. Potiphar felt Sagira’s eyes boring into his back; outside the chamber, more than a dozen slaves waited to see how justice would be meted out to the greatest man in Potiphar’s house.
Potiphar pointed to the garment in Sagira’s hand. “Paneah, is that your kilt?”
Paneah lifted his head and met Potiphar’s eye. “Yes.”
“Did you come in here to sleep with my wife?”
Paneah glanced at the woman on the bed, then locked his gaze on Potiphar’s. “No, master, I did not.”
“Did you—” Potiphar pointed toward the torn dress “—do that?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
Paneah pressed his lips together as if he waited for someone to confess, then he closed his eyes.
“I suppose there is no one else who could have done this,” Potiphar said. “You were the only one here. If you will not speak in your defense, I can only assume you are guilty.”
Sagira wailed afresh, the sound grating on Potiphar’s nerves. Something came up behind Paneah’s eyes; he was defending someone or something, but Potiphar had neither the time nor the patience for games. Too many eyes were watching, too many tongues would carry the tale from this chamber.
He stood and looked at his steward. “You have never lied to me,” he said, an unchecked emotion clotting his throat. “You have been like a son. So instead of ordering your execution, I order you to prison. Go from this house, Paneah, and do not return again.”
The proud head bowed before the sentence, and Potiphar watched the servant he had trusted as a friend turn and walk away between two guards.
Yet as Sagira whimpered behind him, he wondered if he would not be better served by ridding himself of his faithful wife and keeping his unfaithful servant.
Yosef
And Yosef’s master [Potiphar] took him, and put him into the prison, a place where the king’s prisoners were bound: and he was there in the prison.
Genesis 39:20
Chapter Twenty-One
With a show of fierce protectiveness, Ramla urged Potiphar to leave Sagira’s chamber. The whispering crowd of servants and guards dispersed, and the priestess closed the door. Turning to Sagira, her malformed hand stroked her chin in a thoughtful gesture. “Was he not all you thought he would be?”
Sagira scowled. “Have you no respect? I was attacked, injured so badly that I cannot rise from my bed—”
“Tell the truth, Sagira. Your handsome Hebrew would not have you, would he? The little cobra was delightful in form, but decidedly deadly in an embrace.”
Sagira lifted her chin, seeing no reason to deny the truth. Ramla knew her far too well. “He had the gall to deny me,” she whispered, humiliation assaulting her anew. “On the appointed day, after years of preparation, he who swore undying obedience and love refused me!” Tears stung her eyes. “He was ready, Ramla, he belonged to me, but then he cried out to his god and ran as if I had sprouted horns!”
“His god?” Ramla lifted a brow. “The Hebrew god who sees and knows all?”
“What does it matter which god he called? In that moment I realized that my precious, priceless love meant nothing to him. I loved him truly, Ramla, I did! He awakened feelings I never knew existed, yet in one instant he spurned not only my body, but my heart and soul.”
She shuddered and lowered her voice. “And my love, as limitless as the Nile, has turned into an abhorrence I shall carry to my grave. I hoped Potiphar would slay him before me so I might steal the kisses I crave from his dying body, and yet my husband ordered him to the prison.” She released a dreary laugh. “And so I lie on my bed while my much loved and hated Paneah rots in a prison cell only a few steps from my chamber. My nerves are on edge. I cannot sleep. I will lie here and listen for his cry in the night. I tremble to think that he might escape and try to kill me in the darkness. For I know any feelings he ever had for me have become a hate as strong as mine. The love that might have blessed us both has become an enmity that will destroy one or the other of us.”
“Or both of you,” Ramla said, her eyes as hard as the god
dess’s stone gaze.
Sagira sat up and crossed her arms, ready for the fight she’d been anticipating. “Enough about Paneah, I want to talk now about you, Ramla. You and your divining bowl have lied to me. You said this night was ordained for my child’s conception, yet there will be no child. You said I would live forever in the memories of men. You said Paneah would walk before all Egypt and every knee would bow at his approach.”
Her eyes locked on Ramla’s. “You lied, Ramla, now I see it clearly. A foreign slave cannot become King! I don’t know how you convinced me to believe you. You have never spoken a true word. You use your powers to prey on wealthy women. I demand to know why you have manipulated my life!”
“You are pitiful.” Ramla stalked toward Sagira, her mouth drawn into a disapproving knot. “I have always spoken the truth to you. What I read in the future will come to pass. And as for missing the chosen night, the fault is completely yours. You have had more opportunities than any woman in Egypt, and yet you fail the goddess on every occasion.”
“I did not fail!” Sagira said, violence bubbling in her blood. “I did everything in my power! Paneah failed me! He failed the appointed time! But regardless of your prophecy, I shall yet be remembered, I can still have a child! I will find another man, Ramla, a man of strength and glory, a man in whose frame dwells the brightness of the sun and the beauty of the lotus. I will find such a man, and I will prove I am capable of bearing the first in a new line of pharaohs.”
Ramla lifted her head in a stiff gesture. “I told you not to attempt this liaison with a slave, but you would not listen. I waited as you set your plan into motion, and now you have failed. The goddess does not give second chances.” Her face emptied of color as she moved closer. “I am leaving. I had hoped to follow you to glory and power. I will not follow you into failure and self-pity.”
“You are leaving me? I am casting you out!”
Ramla turned to leave. “Good.”
“Wait!” Sagira cried. Ramla turned, one brow raised, and Sagira lowered her voice to a childlike whisper. “If you go, who will I have?”
A corner of the priestess’s mouth rose in a half smile. “You have the finest house in Egypt, a gaggle of slaves to wait on you hand and foot, and a husband who spoils you more than you deserve. Take pleasure in that—if you can.”
Yosef smiled in grim irony as he approached the tall wall dividing Potiphar’s house from Pharaoh’s prison. He had never given the prison much more than a disdainful glance, but Potiphar had just decreed that he would spend the rest of his life amid the squalid, sun-bleached stone buildings behind the wall Yosef had heightened and thickened. He knew he ought to be grateful, for Potiphar could have ordered his execution, but his nerves tensed when he thought of the situation that had brought him to this place. Sagira, the woman he had believed his friend, had lifted the veil of pretense and revealed herself as an indulged, lustful, bloodless creature. Far worse than Sagira’s defection was the knowledge that Potiphar no longer trusted him.
The guards wasted no time securing their prisoner, for night had swooped over the walls and no guard wanted to tarry in Pharaoh’s prison after dark. The chief jailer assigned Yosef to one of the deep, ancient pits he had chosen to hide rather than improve.
As the star-filled sky wheeled about its axis, the Hebrew who dreamed sat with his back against the warm stone and swallowed against an unfamiliar constriction in his throat.
Yosef awoke with memories of the previous day edging his teeth. Because he had chosen honor over ambition, he had become a prisoner for life. What had God done to him now?
He sat up and examined the pit into which he’d been lowered. Somber stone walls twice his height rose from four sides of the rectangular cell while thin streams of light poured through cracks in the thatched covering overhead. He pressed on the orange-tinted walls, testing the strength of possible handholds, and felt the dry mud crumble beneath his fingertips.
The cell held nothing but two leather buckets, one filled with cloudy water and the other intended to serve as a toilet. Last night he had been given a kilt of rough hemp that scratched at his skin. From studying the prison accounts, Yosef knew he would receive one daily meal, a bit of rough bread and greens, which would be lowered in a basket each morning. He would be allowed no visitors, no companions, no comrades, for henceforth he would be regarded as a non-person, the lowliest of all prisoners.
He leaned against a wall and crossed his arms. He did not deserve to be in prison; he had done nothing wrong. Surely God would rescue him.
For several days he waited for news of Sagira’s confession, but apparently that hard-hearted woman would not recant her story. The second week he expected Potiphar to appear and announce that he had experienced a change of heart and needed Paneah to resume control of the foundering household.
But Potiphar did not come. As Yosef paced in his cell, straining to hear sounds of normal life from Potiphar’s household, days melted into one another, periods of suffocating heat followed by cool darkness that chilled his bones and brought fever to his body.
Yosef lay on the sand in his cell and shivered like a dog even in the heat of the day. His mind wandered in the twilight world of illness and conjured up the faces of people God had taken from his life: Tuya, his father, his mother, eleven brothers.
He had been in a pit once before. This darkness was like that one, this pain akin to the other, these prayers like the petitions he had lifted to heaven after his brothers had turned against him. How could his brothers and his mistress profess to love him in one hour and devise to take his life in the next? What harm had he done? What quality in his personality compelled them to despise him?
After a string of days, the fever broke, but unanswered questions haunted Yosef’s sleep and his waking hours. He had only done what he ought to do. He had overseen his brothers’ activities because he was a capable manager; he had told his father about their mistakes because correction would benefit the entire family. He had managed Potiphar’s affairs because he wanted Potiphar to succeed; he had humored Sagira because she was his mistress and could not be scorned.
Why, then, had his brothers risen against him? Why had Sagira betrayed him after calling him her best and only friend? Why had Potiphar ignored years of faithful service and chosen to believe a lie?
At home he had been the favored son. In Potiphar’s house he had been the trusted steward, the de facto ruler of the mightiest estate in Thebes. Now he sat in a prison cell, alone but for the occasional sag-bellied rat that tumbled into the pit while searching for scraps of food.
Why, God? He lifted his face to the sliver of heaven he could see through the thatched cover over the mouth of his cell. Was I blinded by my dreams of power and authority? But you sent me those dreams; I have sought only your will for my life.
Sagira offered to fulfill his dreams and Yosef chose to honor God, the one who had left him to rot in a pit. Where was he in this hour? Why didn’t he answer? Yosef’s pit lay only a few paces from the chamber where he once lived as master of Potiphar’s house, yet a world of distance separated those two places.
No one will hear my cries, God, unless you listen. Sagira will not come, nor Potiphar, nor Tuya, nor my father, nor my brothers. All I have is you, and yet you are silent…
His thoughts rambled in an incoherent jumble. Two years before, he recalled, Tuya had seen Sagira’s intentions and warned him, but he had not listened. Many years before that, his father had admonished him against boasting and he had not listened. Pride blinded him to his brothers’ intentions, just as it led him to deny Sagira’s lust-laced infatuation.
You knew how she felt, an inner voice chided him. Tuya warned you, Sagira herself demonstrated her feelings. But you found secret satisfaction in her attentions. You avoided her presence, yet took pleasure each time she demanded that you appear. You pulled away from her touch, yet you hurried to her chambers each time she called you to work on another of her projects. She made you the greatest steward
in Thebes, and you allowed her to do it. You were proud of being her pet.
Pride. The word stung like the bite of a scorpion, for pride was the seismic fault of his life. He had craved the rich possessions of Egypt, furnishing Potiphar’s house with every treasure that struck his fancy. He had looked on Sagira and wondered “what if?” He had listened to the vain flattery of visiting nobles.
Yosef huddled over the ashes of his dreams and bowed his head to his knees. He had been proud to wear his many-colored coat before his brothers, flaunting his position as the most-beloved son among twelve. He had been proud of Potiphar’s trust in him, placing his position even before Tuya’s unselfish love. He had been proud of Sagira’s inappropriate interest and confident of his ability to keep the tigress at bay. Pride had enticed him into her den; only prayer got him out.
And haughty eyes and a proud heart were loathsome to the Almighty God.
The endless monotony of confinement forced him to look at himself, and for the first time he saw Potiphar’s Paneah through eyes blessed with humility. God had gifted him with Rahel’s beauty, Yaakov’s keen intellect, his brothers’ strength and the Hebrews’ divine covenant of blessing. But Yosef had accepted these qualities as his own, not recognizing that the gifts of God had been channeled to him through others.
“Would that I had been born ugly, dull and weak,” he murmured. “Then I would not have cause to lift up my heart against God.”
Still bent into a position of submission, he extended his hands and curled the palms toward heaven in supplication. “Speak to me, God, as you have spoken before,” he whispered, his face resting on the ground. “Speak to me though I have not spoken to you in many months. Do not forget me as I have forgotten you.”