When Joseph’s mother, Rachel, left the home of her father, Laban, the home where she had grown up, where she had married Jacob, where she had finally given birth to Joseph, she took with her—stole—her father’s household gods, her teraphim, the little clay creatures who might make the rain fall, the sun burn less harshly, the journey safe. But they had not kept Rachel from death, those little teraphim. They were idols, man-made things. What kind of power did they have? Why did Rachel treasure them enough to steal them from her father? To lie, in order to keep them? Why?
And where were her teraphim now that she was dead and the rest of the family was settled in Canaan? Had Jacob given them back to his father-in-law, Laban? Joseph—the questioner, the dreamer—had overheard the concubines talking about the lost teraphim and, secretly, had searched for them, but found no trace of the little figures.
The other brothers did not have the time or inclination for questions, or even to remember their dreams. Life was rugged. They had to tend the animals, take them to pasture, make sure the women brought enough water from the well for human and animal needs, keep the cook fires going, peg down the nomad tents in case of sudden wind. The more successful Jacob, the patriarch, became, the more work there was for his sons.
It was good for Jacob to keep busy. It helped to assuage his unremitting grief over the death of Rachel, the one woman he truly loved. The other women? Oh, they gave him sons, and sons were valuable, but it was Rachel who was loved, Rachel who died giving birth to Benjamin, Rachel for whom he grieved.
How hard it must have been for Leah, his first wife. The Book of Genesis suggests that Leah was cross-eyed. Certainly she was not beautiful, like Rachel. But she bore him six sons, and his undying grief for her sister may well have seemed to her yet another rejection.
But we do not choose who we love, and Jacob loved Rachel.
In these late years of the twentieth century it seems to be more usual for a woman to outlive her husband than vice versa. In the early Genesis days the patriarchs buried their wives, dead in childbirth, or worn out from childbearing. The patriarchs grieved, went on living, sometimes remarrying and having children in their old age like Abraham. Old age was treasured, revered, not hidden away because then, as now, it was a reminder that we all grow old and die. In Deuteronomy 34:7 we read,
And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.
What a triumph that Moses, dying at a venerable age, still had “his juices”!
Not long after I started working on this book my husband became ill, and I lived with the story of Joseph during his dying and his death. I grieve for my husband, and as time goes by the grief does not lessen. Rather, as the shock wears off, it deepens, and through my own grief I have at least a flicker of understanding of Jacob’s continuing grief for Rachel. Hugh and I were married for forty years. How long were Jacob and Rachel married? Not quite that long, but long enough. Dinah, the one daughter, Leah’s last child, born before Joseph and Benjamin were born to Rachel, was old enough to be married before Benjamin was born.
And love cannot be timed, judged chronologically. Love transcends time. And the love of one human being for another transcends animal sex (which is sheerly for the purpose of procreation). The human being, it would seem, is the only being whose love-making is not limited to the reproduction of the species, who makes love for the sheer joy of loving. It is the depth and width of love that makes us human.
Human. How do we become human? What does it mean to be human? We human creatures seem to become less and less human as this sorry century staggers to a close. We have been made dependent on Social Security numbers, on plastic credit cards; we are overwhelmed by paper forms in duplicate and triplicate and quadruplicate. The amount of legal/financial paperwork following Hugh’s death was staggering, not to mention the personal correspondence.
Jacob, after Rachel’s death, had no such problems with banks, Social Security, insurance. I’ve had to produce papers to prove that I was born (“Since I’m standing here, talking to you, it seems quite evident that I was born.” Still I was told, “You must produce your birth certificate.”), or that I was married; sign affidavits that I was still married to Hugh at the time of his death, that we were not divorced or living separately. Our joint bank account was frozen, and I was made very aware that this is still a male-dominated and male-chauvinist society, less paternalistic, perhaps, than in Jacob’s day, but equally male-oriented. Hugh and I had had that account for over twenty-five years, and yet I had to prove that I, Madeleine, the ux, the wife, in this case, was capable of having a bank account. (Occasionally, even today, in financial or legal documents, the wife is still referred to with the Latin ux, for uxor—woman.) Fortunately I also had my own personal bank account in another bank, or I would have been hard-pressed to pay my bills during the quarter of a year it took me to get that bank account activated. One reason I had always had my own bank account was that a friend, after her husband’s sudden death, had to live on the charity of friends until the bank where she had a joint account deemed that she had a right to have her own account there.
Someone said that all this paperwork gives the bereaved something to do. But I don’t think that’s it at all. The paperwork protects everybody who encounters the bereaved person from her—or his—grief. If there is a lot of paperwork to be done we can forget that we, too, may lose the one dearest to us. We can put out of our minds the fact that we, too, one day will die. The impersonality of paperwork emphasizes our inhumanity, whereas grief is one of the most human of all emotions.
Rachel died, and Jacob grieved. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had gone out into the desert and howled his anguish, away from the tents and the campfires, alone, on the strange journey to Canaan. The ancient people of Genesis were human. Imperfect, like us; but human.
Why are we so afraid to be human, depending on legalism and moralism and dogmatism instead? Jesus came to us as a truly human being, to show us how to be human, and we were so afraid of this humanness that we crucified it, thinking it could be killed. And today we are still afraid to be human, struggling instead with a perfectionism which is crippling, or which in some cases can lead to a complete moral breakdown. We are not perfect. Only God is perfect. And God does not ask us to be perfect; God asks us to be human. This means to know at all times that we are God’s children, never to lose our connection with our Creator. Jesus was sinless not because he didn’t do wrong things: He broke the law, picking corn, for instance, on the Sabbath. He was sinless because he was never for a moment separated from the Source.
We are called to be God’s holy and human people. What has happened? This falling away from our calling is nothing new. Jeremiah called the people of his day—the people of God—a horror and a hissing and an everlasting reproach. Jeremiah, once he had accepted his calling, did not hesitate to say what needed to be said, and nobody likes being called a horror and a hissing and an everlasting reproach.
What would that bank official, with his cigar, and his assumption that because I was a woman I wasn’t capable of having my own bank account, what would he have done if I had called him a horror and a hissing and an everlasting reproach? It would certainly have slowed things down even further, so I held my peace.
Those who are a horror and a hissing and an everlasting reproach have failed to be human. When we are totally centered on legalism, or when we are totally centered on self (as the adolescent Joseph was totally centered on himself and his vainglory), we are unable to be human. When we, like Joseph, are centered on our own power we have alienated ourselves not only from our brethren (or sistren or friends or bank clients or patients) but from God, and from the possibility of being truly human.
Odd contradiction here: This has been called the “me” generation; the emphasis on self-gratification is epidemic. Yet we are also a generation alienated by our legalism, I.D. cards, numbering, all the impersonalism that dehumanizes us. Perhaps the two go together
: Overemphasis on self results in loss of self.
Joseph, in his pride, alienated himself (it is interesting that psychiatrists used to be called alienists). But Joseph’s alienation was a result of his father’s favouritism, which turned a potentially nice child into a nasty brat. If Jacob had understood himself better he might have been a more understanding parent. But Jacob was a complicated man, unable to say “I’m sorry” for any of his trickery and cheating, and therefore unable to accept forgiveness. He was never able to acknowledge that his behaviour toward his brother Esau was selfish and unscrupulous, and so he was not able to accept himself.
Of course the assumption throughout the centuries (and, it would seem, especially today) has been that unscrupulosity is fine as long as you don’t get caught. It’s all right to cheat on an exam as long as nobody sees you doing it. It’s all right to fudge on income tax as long as you can get away with it. Shady business deals are simply the nature of the world.
Jacob’s cheating of Esau was in keeping with this philosophy of instant gratification at any cost—especially if the cost was to someone else. Some people seem to manage to cheat and lie and wheel-and-deal with no pangs of conscience—at least no conscious ones. But I suspect there is an inward gnawing, as there was with Jacob.
It is an amazing thing that Jacob wrestled with an angel and yet seldom wrestled with himself. And he bequeathed his complexity to his family as, indeed, in one way or another, do we all. The story of Jacob and his twelve sons and one daughter is a family story, and all interesting families are complicated, as I know from experience.
The psalmist sings, in Coverdale’s translation,
Behold, how good and joyful a thing it is, for brothers to dwell together in unity.
It is a cry of wistfulness rather than of triumph, because throughout Scripture, as through life, brothers seldom dwell together in perfect unity. Many of the Psalms are attributed to David, and certainly David’s children were not able to dwell together in unity. There was infidelity and lust. There was incest. There was Absalom turning against his father and battling him for the kingdom. There was quarrelling and bickering and jostling for power.
And so, it seems, it has always been with the human race, beginning with the family of Adam and Eve.
The first lines of Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina are, “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
What is a happy family—a perfectly happy family? I’m not sure. I suspect it doesn’t exist, the family that lives in constant concord, with no lost tempers, no raised voices, where everybody smiles and is unfailingly courteous. No. Wait. As a matter of fact I have encountered one family where everybody smiled and was unfailingly courteous, and underneath the surface perfection I sensed barely banked rage and terrible unhappiness.
Joseph and his brothers did not dwell together in unity. And yet as the story unfolds we see that they were family, in the deepest sense of the word. Happiness is not a criterion for the truest kind of family loving, any more than instant gratification is a criterion for joy. There seems to be an illusion in some of Christendom today that Christians are always happy. No matter what tragedies happen, Christians are supposed to be happy if they truly have faith. It’s only an illusion and can cause enormous trouble. Jesus was not always happy. He was, indeed, the suffering servant Isaiah talks about. Happiness, blind, unquestioning happiness, is not the sign of the Christian. Even the Holy Family was not, in the superficial sense of the word, happy. Simeon warned Mary that a sword of anguish would penetrate her own heart. And, indeed, it did.
Usually in Scripture when it is predicted that a sword is going to pierce the heart, it is the heart of the enemy, the marauder, the violent man, as in Psalm 37:
The ungodly have drawn out the sword, and have bent their bow, to cast down the poor and needy, and to slay such as be upright in their ways. Their sword shall go through their own heart, and their bow shall be broken.
But Simeon makes this prediction to Mary, the mother of Jesus.
When Mary’s days of purification according to the laws of Moses were accomplished, they brought [the baby] to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord. And there was in the temple an old man who had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Messiah. He recognized the baby as the Lord’s Christ, and took him up in his arms, saying, “Now, Lord, let your servant depart in peace.”
These words, the “Nunc dimittis” from Luke, are sung or said daily in the evening office in the Episcopal Church. During the long days of my husband’s dying they came to have new and poignant meaning for me.
After these familiar words Simeon goes on to say to Mary,
“A sword is going to pierce through your own soul.”
Surely this happened more than once. What anguish Mary felt when Jesus was a boy of twelve and disappeared, and his parents searched for him frantically. I remember my own sense of panic when my little boy vanished in a crowded department store, and the surge of relief when I found him. I expect most mothers have gone through a similar experience.
A sword must have pierced Mary’s heart again when she sought Jesus and he said,
“Who is my Mother?”
seemingly disowning her. She watched him moving further and further away from his family as his earthly ministry proceeded. And she watched him die, like a common criminal, on a cross, between two thieves.
And yet Jesus’ family was a holy family. As all families are called on to be holy; with all our differences, opinionatedness, selfishness, we are redeemed by a love which is deeper than all our brokenness, a love given to us when the Maker of the Universe came to Mary’s womb, to show incredible love for us all by becoming one of us. And so the holiness of all families was affirmed.
By the time that Jesus was born in Nazareth it had become the norm in his part of the world for a family to consist of one husband and one wife. But at the time of the story of Joseph and his brothers this was not so. Family and sexual mores had a pattern different from ours. It was a permissible (though not laudable) part of the moral code for both Abraham and Isaac to pass their wives off as their sisters to King Abimelech and his son, because the code permitted the Philistines to sleep with a man’s sister, but not his wife. Odd indeed that seems to us. But it was a different world, the world of the patriarchs, indeed a patriarchal world, and we will not even begin to understand it if we try to apply twentieth-century standards to it.
Jacob’s family, his two wives, their maids, and twelve sons and one daughter, was the family which began the twelve tribes of Israel. And how different Jacob’s children must have been, with four different mothers.
Jacob had been tricked into marrying Leah before he married his beloved Rachel, and Leah bore him Reuben, his first son. And then came Simeon, Levi, and Judah.
To Rachel’s sorrow she seemed unable to bear children. Sorrow and humiliation it was, for in those days if a woman was barren it was considered to be her fault. So, according to the custom of the time she sent her maid servant, Bilhah, to Jacob to have children for her, and Bilhah bore Dan and Naphtali. Then Leah, thinking that she was through childbearing, sent her maid servant, Zilpah, in to Jacob, and she bore Gad and Asher. Then Leah conceived again, and bore Issachar and Zebulun, and then her only daughter, Dinah. And then, at last, Rachel conceived, and gave birth to Joseph. And, in the end, to Benjamin. Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, (Dinah), Joseph, and Benjamin. And of all the brothers it is Joseph, the penultimate son, whose story we know best.
Joseph’s story starts with dissension. He brags of his dreams and infuriates his brothers. Then, when he is seventeen, he is out feeding his father’s flocks, as David was to do many generations later. Joseph was with his brothers, Dan and Naphtali, who were Bilhah’s sons, and with Gad and Asher, who were Zilpah’s sons. Bilhah was Rachel’s maid, and Zilpah was Leah’s maid, and the sons of the two maids may have been made to feel inferior to the sons of the
wives.
Joseph left the sons of the maids, and went to his father with an evil report. In the southern United States this would be called “bad-mouthing,” and in checking several Bible translations I have not found out exactly who was bad-mouthing whom, or what the evil report was. But someone was the teller of ill tales, and this never brings good.
But Joseph, the favoured one, went tattling to his father, for Jacob
loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a coat of many colours.
What about little Benjamin? Was he too poignant a reminder of Rachel’s death?
A family of twelve or thirteen children used to be commonplace. It is not, nowadays (though there have been times when I have felt that there are at least that many in our family). A family that size is a community in itself. Almost all human needs can be met within the family group.
The people who built Crosswicks, the old house my husband and I loved and lived in for so many years, and where we raised our children, could live off the less-than-one-hundred acres that made up their dairy farm. Two hundred plus years ago they grew all their own food, eating from the garden and from the herd. They made their own soap and candles, wove their own cloth. In the close-knit community of the village of Goshen, what one family did not produce, a neighbour did. In a much smaller and more trivial way, Hugh never planted zucchini or squash, knowing that we would get the overflow from our neighbours.
Today, with farms being broken up, many being sold for housing developments or condos, with more and more people working, if not living, in cities, the family is now what is called “nuclear.” The larger family of uncles and aunts and cousins is often a continent away, and so the grouping of community is necessarily different. Sometimes it is the people on the block. Or in the development. In a small village it is the nearest neighbours and the community of the church.
Sold into Egypt Page 2