In case we doubt whether this double meaning is really there in the text, the next verse but one resolves the doubt. The brothers say, ‘Come, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these wells…then we’ll see what comes of his dreams’ (37:20). Here, the irony could not be more explicit. The words mean one thing to the brothers, the opposite to us, the listeners.9 Once we have reached the end of the story and go back to read it a second time, we realise that the very act intended to frustrate the dreams by killing the dreamer is the beginning of a sequence of events that will make the dreams come true. We have here a Hebraic counterpart of the story of Oedipus. Laius, Oedipus’ father, is told by the Delphic oracle that he will be murdered by his son. To prevent this, he leaves him as a baby, nailed to a rock to die. This too is the first of a sequence of events that leads to the oracle being fulfilled. The irony is the same in both cases. The difference is that the Greek story is tragic, the biblical one non-tragic.
From this point on the story moves rapidly forward through a series of reversals and unexpected shifts of fortune. Persuaded by Reuben, the brothers refrain from killing Joseph. Instead, throwing him into one of the cisterns, they leave him to die (Reuben had intended to rescue him, but does not, in the end, have the opportunity). Then Judah proposes selling him into slavery. He is taken to Egypt. There he becomes head of the household of Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials. Potiphar’s wife conceives a fancy for him, but he refuses to betray his master. Instead he himself is betrayed. Potiphar’s wife accuses him of attempted rape. He is thrown into prison, where once again he shows talent as an administrator.
He is also an interpreter of dreams, and successfully deciphers the dreams of two of his fellow prisoners, Pharaoh’s erstwhile butler and baker. Two years later Pharaoh himself has a pair of dreams. Troubled by them, he asks the court magi to explain their significance, but is satisfied with none of their explanations. At this point the butler, restored to office, remembers Joseph, who is brought out from the prison and gives Pharaoh an interpretation that makes sense: there will be seven years of plenty, followed by seven of famine. Without pausing, Joseph then proceeds to solve the problem he has diagnosed: take a fifth of the harvest during the years of plenty, store it, and there will then be food during the years of drought.
Impressed, Pharaoh appoints Joseph as his second-in-command and dresses him in royal robes. He gives him a new name, Zaphenath-Paneah. Joseph marries an Egyptian wife, Asenath, daughter of an Egyptian priest. The years pass, the plenty comes and the drought begins. Jacob, facing famine in Canaan, sends the ten sons to Egypt to buy food. There they enter the presence of the man in charge of Egypt’s economy and prostrate themselves before him. He tells them he is their long-lost brother Joseph and asks them to bring the rest of the family to Egypt. They arrive. Jacob and Joseph, his beloved son, are reunited. The family settle in Egypt under Joseph’s aegis.
End of story. The dreams have come true. Joseph has risen to great heights. As he foresaw, his family has bowed down to him. Not merely in his father’s affections but also in terms of worldly estate, the younger has succeeded; the older brothers have not. We have yet another typical displacement narrative – except that this isn’t the story at all. It should have been, had the Bible followed narrative convention. But the Bible does not. Instead it subverts it, for profoundly moral reasons. Rarely is this done more subtly than in the Joseph story, the last and most explicit of Genesis’ treatments of sibling rivalry.
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What actually happens when the brothers arrive in Egypt is wholly counter-intuitive:
Now Joseph was the governor of the land, the one who sold grain to all its people. So when Joseph’s brothers arrived, they bowed down to him with their faces to the ground. As soon as Joseph saw his brothers, he recognised them [vayakirem], but he pretended to be a stranger [vayitnaker] and spoke harshly to them. ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked.
‘From the land of Canaan,’ they replied, ‘to buy food.’
Although Joseph recognised [hikir] his brothers, they did not recognise him [hikiruhu]. (Gen. 42:6–8)
This is unexpected. The story is nearing closure. Joseph has become a ruler. His brothers have bowed down to him. All that remains is for Jacob and Joseph’s young brother Benjamin to be brought to Egypt. There they will make their obeisance and the end foretold at the beginning will be complete. We cannot but expect this to happen, given the story thus far.
It does not. Instead Joseph accuses the brothers of being spies. He places them in custody for three days. He then tells them that to verify their story – that they have come to buy food – they must bring him their youngest brother. This is illogical. The existence of another brother has nothing to do with whether or not they are spies. Indeed, were they to bring a child, there would be no way an Egyptian ruler would be able to tell whether he was their brother or not. The strangeness of the request does not, however, raise doubts in the minds of the brothers. They know they are in trouble; that is all. One of their number, Simeon, is put in prison as a hostage against their return. On the journey back, they discover that the silver they have paid for the grain has been returned to them in their sacks. They tremble: ‘What is this that God has done to us?’ (42:28).
They go back and tell Jacob what has happened. There is a sense of foreboding. Jacob has now lost two of his sons, and no longer trusts the brothers. The demand that Benjamin go with them to Egypt touches Jacob’s most sensitive nerve. Benjamin was the other son of Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel. She had died giving birth to him. How can he let him go and risk losing him? But how can he not let him go when they are facing starvation? Reuben offers to leave his own two sons with Jacob as hostages. It is a pointless offer, and Jacob rejects it. Eventually Judah says that he will personally accept responsibility for Benjamin’s safe return. Jacob agrees.
They arrive in Egypt. Seeing them, Joseph orders one of his men to escort them to his house. They are terrified, suspecting that some evil fate awaits them. Instead, Joseph treats them with lavish hospitality. Simeon is brought out of prison to join them. They eat, buy their grain, and leave. No sooner have they left the city, however, than one of Joseph’s officers overtakes them, accusing them of stealing a goblet (it had been placed there deliberately on Joseph’s instructions). He searches their sacks, one by one, and finds it in the last, Benjamin’s. They return ignominiously to the palace and declare that they are all now the ruler’s slaves. But Joseph tells them: No, you are free. ‘Only the one in whose sack the cup was found must stay as a slave’ (44:17). This is the moment of crisis, and Judah rises to it. In an impassioned, eloquent speech he says he cannot go home without his youngest brother. He has personally guaranteed his safe return, and besides, his father loves him so much that were Judah to return without him, Jacob would die. ‘Let me’, he says, ‘be your slave, and let the child go free’ (44:33). At this point, Joseph finally reveals his identity. The brothers are speechless with surprise, but Joseph insists that they should not feel guilty:
‘I am your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt! Now, do not be distressed or feel guilty for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will be no ploughing and harvest. God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt.’ (45:4–8)
What is going on in this strange and apparently pointless diversion? Why Joseph’s false accusation? Why the deception and intrigue? Why force the brothers to bring Benjamin? How does it advance the narrative or tell us something we need to know? In terms of the dreams, it delays their fulfilment rather than hastens it.
The first explanation that comes to mind is revenge. The text, however, explicitly rules this out. At every stage of the stratagem, Joseph weeps. He weeps at their f
irst meeting (42:24), again at the second (43:30), and a third time at the end of Judah’s speech (45:2). People taking revenge do not weep. Joseph is doing something he finds personally painful yet morally necessary. He bears them – as he says when he reveals his identity – no malice. He has forgiven them. Why then does he put them through such fear and subject them to such a trial?
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I argued in chapter 2 that the source of violence lies in our need to exist in groups, which leads to in-group altruism and out-group hostility. The pathological form of this, as we saw in chapter 3, is the dualism that divides humanity into children of light and children of darkness, the one all-good, the other all-evil. It follows that the most profound moralising experience, the only one capable of defeating dualism, is to undergo role reversal. Imagine a Crusader in the Middle Ages, or a German in 1939, discovering that he is a Jew. There can be no more life-changing trial than finding yourself on the other side.
That, in essence, is what Joseph is forcing his brothers to do. He is putting them through the intensely painful yet morally transformative ordeal of role reversal. They suspected him of ambition. Now they learn what it is to be under suspicion. They planned to sell him as a slave. Now they know what it feels like to face enslavement. They made Jacob go through the grief of losing a son. Now they must witness that grief again, this time through no fault of their own. Above all, they treated their brother as a stranger. Now they must learn that the stranger, Zaphenath-Paneah, ruler of Egypt, is actually their brother.
What is at stake in this role reversal? One concept is implicit throughout the Bible, essential to the message of the prophets and made explicit in the book of Jonah. Yet it was only in the rabbinic period, following the destruction of the Second Temple, that it became the subject of systematic reflection. It is the idea of teshuvah, usually translated as ‘repentance’.10 Literally it means ‘return’ – in Christianity metanoia, in Islam tawba, in secular terms moral change and growth.
We know from the writings of Paul, especially the letter to the Romans, that he wrestled long and hard with the phenomenon of guilt.11 What we know we ought to do, he said, we often fail to do. The body does not obey the promptings of the soul. The result is guilt, all the more so in a religion like Judaism, full of commands. The very fact of command, he argues, generates its own resistance. Tell someone not to do something and he will immediately be tempted to do it. How can one live under such a burden of conscience?
The answer Paul gave was to construct, in essence, a Judaism without commands: a religion of the soul rather than the body, of faith rather than deeds. The answer given by the Jewish sages, however, was different. To be sure, we sin. Each of us has a yetser, an impulse to evil,12 but as God said to Cain, sin ‘desires to have you, but you must master it’ (Gen. 4:7). He does not ask for perfection. The whole thrust of Genesis is that God scales down his demands to the point where they become liveable, rather than a code for saints. When we sin, all we have to do is acknowledge that we have sinned, express remorse, and resolve to act better in future – in short, that we repent. This is how Maimonides defines it:
What is repentance? It consists in this, that the sinner abandon his sin, remove it from his thoughts, and resolve in his heart never to repeat it, as it is said, ‘Let the wicked forsake his way, and the man of iniquity his thoughts’ (Isaiah 55:7)…it is also necessary that he make oral confession and utter the resolutions he made in his heart.13
Repentance is an attitude to the past and a resolve for the future. What, though, shows that the remorse is genuine? The answer lies in the concept of ‘perfect repentance’ (teshuvah gemurah), which is not purity of heart but a simple, demonstrable change of deed. Maimonides again:
What is perfect repentance? It occurs when an opportunity presents itself for repeating an offence once committed, and the offender, while able to commit the offence, never the less refrains from doing so, because he is penitent and not out of fear or failure of strength.14
Perfect repentance comes about when you find yourself in the same situation but this time you act differently. That is proof in action of a change in heart.
What Joseph is doing is, in effect, taking his brothers through the experience of teshuvah, change of heart. So in their first encounter, after he has accused them of being spies, they undergo the first stage of repentance:
They said to one another, ‘We deserve to be punished because of our brother. We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded with us for his life, but we would not listen. That is why this distress has come upon us.’ (Gen. 42:21)
This is regret, remorse, confession. The text adds that, at this point, Joseph turned aside and wept, and that the brothers did not know what was happening. Not only did they not recognise the Egyptian ruler as their brother. They did not even know he understood their language.
The scene is now set for the second act of the drama. They had sold their brother into slavery. How would they act if placed in the same situation again? Joseph plans the scene with meticulous care. He must create a situation in which they can purchase their freedom by leaving one of their number as a slave. It cannot be one of the brothers chosen at random. It must be one of whom they are jealous, as they were of Joseph. That is why he chooses Benjamin, the other son of Rachel, his father’s favourite wife. He has to add one further element. What provoked them to rage many years earlier was the physical emblem of favouritism, the richly embroidered cloak. That is why, in an otherwise inexplicable detail, when the brothers return with Benjamin and sit to eat their meal, ‘When the portions were served to them from Joseph’s table, Benjamin’s portion was five times as much as anyone else’s’ (43:34).
In effect, Joseph has constructed a controlled experiment in ‘perfect repentance’. When the cup is found in Benjamin’s sack and the brothers say, ‘We are all your slaves,’ Joseph replies, ‘Far be it from me to do such a thing! Only the man who was found to have the cup will become my slave. The rest of you, go back to your father in peace’ (44:17). He gives them the chance to walk away in freedom if they are willing to leave Benjamin as a slave. This is the moment of trial, and it is crucial that Judah rises to it, because it was Judah who had initially proposed selling Joseph as a slave (37:26–27). His long and emotive speech reaches a climax when he says, ‘Now please, let your servant remain here as my lord’s slave, and let the boy return with his brothers’ (44:33). As soon as Judah has shown that, placed in the same situation, he has changed – he is now willing to sacrifice his own freedom rather than let his brother be enslaved – the trial is over and Joseph can reveal his identity. Judah has fulfilled exactly the requirements of perfect repentance.
That is why Joseph can tell them their sin is forgiven. He does so a second time, when Jacob dies. The brothers fear the possibility that Joseph may simply have delayed taking revenge as long as their father was still alive.15 Joseph reassures them with majestic grace:
Joseph said to them, ‘Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You may have intended to harm me, but God intended it for good so that it would come about as it is today, saving many people’s lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.’ And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them. (50:19–21)
On this serene note, Genesis ends.
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The three dramas of sibling rivalry have all ended on a note of reconciliation, each time at a more profound level. With Isaac and Ishmael, it is implied. The text merely speaks of them standing together at Abraham’s funeral. The rabbis had to piece together the rest of the story from the text’s cues and clues. With Esau and Jacob, the brothers meet and embrace as friends, but they part and go their separate ways. With Joseph and his brothers, the entire process of reconciliation is told in painstaking detail. The issue is not forgiveness: Joseph forgives his brothers without their asking for it, without their apology, and long before he tells them who he is. The issue is repentance. Forgiveness is easy, repentance – true change of charac
ter – is difficult. Yet it is repentance, moral growth, on which the biblical vision depends.
By making the human person ‘in his image’ God has given us freedom: the freedom to do good, which also necessarily entails the freedom to do evil. In the early chapters of Genesis we feel God’s pain and disappointment as first Adam and Eve, then Cain, then the generation of the Flood use their freedom to bring chaos to God’s universe of order. Yet there is never a hint that God might create Homo sapiens without freedom. The free God desires the free worship of free human beings. The idea that God might create a billion computers programmed to declare his praise is, in biblical terms, absurd. Only a being with freedom is a true ‘Other’, and the freedom and dignity of otherness is central to the divine project.
Few things have been denied more often, and more variously, than human freedom. Fate, the Greek concept of ananke, is in the hands of the gods or the stars: so thinkers have argued since the birth of time. Later, it was attributed to divine (Calvin) or physical (Spinoza) determinism, economic forces (Marx), the experiences of early childhood (Freud), or genetic endowment (the neo-Darwinians). The Hebrew Bible argues, contrarily, that if our acts are no more than the effects of causes over which we have no control, then we inhabit a tragically configured universe, and time is no more than a cycle of eternal recurrences. Against this the Bible predicates its faith – God’s faith – in freedom. If we can change, then the future is not destined to be an action replay of the past. Repentance is the proof that we can change. The Judah who offers to sacrifice his freedom so that Benjamin can go free is not the same man he was twenty-two years earlier. And if we can change ourselves, together we can change the world. The Hebrew Bible is the West’s key text of human freedom – and more than it tells the story of man’s faith in God, it tells the story of God’s faith in humankind.
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