Sold into Egypt

by Madeleine L'engle

  My mother, growing up in a southern town, was surrounded by uncles and aunts and cousins. At the four corners of Saint John’s Episcopal Church lived four great-uncles. Almost all my mother’s friends were cousins.

  My mother-in-law lived in a southwestern city—a new city in a new state—where the people in the neighbourhood were divided into the Baptist families, the Methodist families, the Presbyterian families. At a further remove were the Episcopalian families. Further out yet, the Roman Catholic families. And, almost on another planet, the Jewish families.

  This artificial barrier of culture and religion and race was at least lowered when a Jewish woman came to spend the High Holy Days at my Baptist parents-in-law’s house, since she had to be able to walk to the synagogue and could not take public transportation or drive during those special days. This became a yearly occurrence, and though the requirement seemed outlandish to my Baptist mother-in-law, the two women became, in their own way, friends, able to share stories of children and child-raising, to swap recipes. There was at least as much to bring them together as to separate them, which seems to have been a salutary surprise to them both.

  And whose God was more real? Did they not both worship the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?” How essentially different were their Gods? This is a question I do not presume to answer. In Psalm 50, we are warned not to think that God is like us:

  You thought wickedly, that I am like you, but I will reprove you.

  God reproves us whenever we decide that El is like us, or like our own particular group. There is only one criterion to use in deciding whether or not the image of God we are finding within us is really God’s image, or a projection of ourselves. The one thing we know about God for certain is that God is love. Where there is not love, even if there is righteousness, or justice, it is not God.

  This is perhaps the most difficult lesson of all to learn. If we love God, then we must also love each other. Indeed it would be a good and joyful thing if all God’s children could learn to dwell together in unity.

  Can the heavenly kingdom come until this happens? Joseph’s relationships with his brothers are an example of disunity, and there would be no rest in Joseph’s heart until at last there was reconciliation.

  Reuben was the eldest of the twelve sons, and the one most interested in reconciliation. But he was not favoured.

  REUBEN

  I was never anybody’s favourite. Elder sons tend not to fare well in my genealogy, despite the emphasis on primogeniture. Cain killed his younger brother and is not likely to be forgotten for it. Ishmael was sent into exile, leaving the favoured younger brother, Isaac, at home. Of my Grandfather Isaac’s two sons, my father, Jacob, the younger son, got all the plums. And there’s an old story of a younger son who took all his share of his father’s money and squandered it on women and riotous living, and yet, when he hit the bottom, and came home, his father gave a big party, and the elder brother went out and sulked. It is not an advantage to be the firstborn.

  And I was a disappointment to my mother, Leah, who had hoped that when she gave my father a son he would come to love her. But he had eyes only for the younger sister (the younger, again!) Rachel, the beauty, and the clever one. My mother was loving, and tender-eyed, and wouldn’t have been considered bad-looking if she hadn’t always been compared to Rachel.

  It wasn’t that my father disliked me. He was pleased to have a son. But my mother was Leah, not his adored Rachel, and my birth didn’t turn his—well, fondness is the best I can call it—for Leah into love. I was a disappointment all round.

  So were my mother’s next three sons, though her fourth-born, Judah, ended up doing pretty well for himself. We four were fairly close in age, and we played together a lot, quarrelled, hit each other in anger, and stood up for each other whenever anybody criticized us.

  But none of us made our mother truly happy because our births didn’t change anything between her and our father. On the other hand, our Aunt Rachel was jealous because our mother, Leah, had babies, and she was barren. She was beautiful, oh, was our Aunt Rachel ever beautiful, and when I was little I would have liked to sit on her lap. But when I tried to climb up on her she pushed me away and burst into tears.

  Our mother didn’t conceive again immediately after her fourth son, Judah, was born, and she was still trying to get our father to love her. It was a long time before I understood that a man could go to a woman’s tent, and do all the things done to a woman who is loved, without love being there. Our father tolerated our mother. Yes, he was even fond of her. But he did not love her. He loved Aunt Rachel.

  And still Aunt Rachel did not conceive. So she sent her maid, Bilhah, in to our father, and Bilhah, too, gave him two sons, and still he was not satisfied.

  So my mother, Leah, sent her maid, Zilpah, in to our father, to give him more sons. Zilpah, in her own foreign way, was beautiful, so our father had no objection, and she gave him two more sons. What a passion he had for sons!

  I was quite a big boy when one day I came across some mandrakes. Mandrakes are a plant shaped like a human man’s body, and have magical powers, so I brought them to my mother, thinking to please her. If she wanted our father, Jacob, to love her, I wanted her to love me. Neither of us was very successful.

  But she was pleased with the mandrakes, if not with me, but then Aunt Rachel saw the mandrakes and wanted them, and my mother and my aunt had one of their quarrels. But my mother kept the mandrakes, and my father came in to her that night, and she conceived and had another son, and then yet another, and then our little sister, Dinah, who was beautiful and loving. I was her big brother, her biggest brother, and at last somebody loved me, really loved me. I would carry her about on my shoulders, as soon as she was big enough, and throw her into the air and catch her, and she would shriek with terror and joy and cry, “Again! Again!”

  Not that there was much time to play. We all worked hard, tending the land, the flocks of camels and sheep and goats. We lived with our Grandfather Laban, our mother’s and Aunt Rachel’s father. Laban’s land was our home. We were all born there, and I think he regarded us as his sons.

  One day we saw Aunt Rachel looking as though she’d walked out of the sunrise. At last she was pregnant, and had a son, Joseph. You should have seen our father. Lambs were roasted. Wine skins were emptied. You’d have thought he’d never had a son before. You’d have thought the ten of us meant nothing to him at all.

  I tried to talk to my mother, but she sent me off to take care of my two youngest brothers—not precious Joseph, of course, but my mother’s two youngest.

  But Zilpah was taking care of them. It was her job, not mine, anyhow. Bilhah saw me and asked what was the matter.

  I told her.

  Bilhah was always kind to me, kinder than any of the other women. She took my face in her hands and looked at me with her gentle, deep eyes, blue as dawn. “You’re nearly a man now, Reuben,” she said. “If your father is to love you, he will love you for what you do as a man. Let him have pleasure in this new baby. Now he has eleven sons and a daughter and I hope he is satisfied.” She dropped her hands from my face. “You’re a handsome youth, Reuben. And you’re kind. You’re much the biggest and the strongest, but you never hurt the younger ones. You’re never mean. One day you will make a woman happy. Don’t fret about the way things are now. It will pass.”

  I had always loved Bilhah, fairer even than Zilpah, with hair that reached almost to her knees.

  When I was younger and fell and scraped my knees it was only Bilhah who paid any attention. Zilpah, my mother’s maid, knew that my mother did not love me because my birth had not made her find favour in my father’s eyes, so she pushed me away. But Bilhah would wipe away my tears and kiss my hurt to make it better.

  If I had a nightmare and woke up screaming, it was Bilhah who came hurrying through the night to comfort me, who stroked my forehead until I stopped being afraid and could go back to sleep.

  One evening, after I had found the mand
rakes and given them to my mother and so, inadvertently, been the cause of yet two more brothers, I followed Bilhah as she left the noisy cluster of tents. I watched her as she passed the place where the animals were tethered, stroking the mangy-looking camel she usually rode, and giving it a handful of mashed lentils. Then she headed for a sandy hill with palmettos and tawny grasses blowing in the desert wind. She sat down, digging her toes into the sand and putting her head down on her knees so that her hair fell about her like a golden curtain. With one hand she picked up some sand and let it dribble out of her fingers.

  Bilhah wanted to be alone, and so did I, but I felt I could be alone better with Bilhah. I made a noise so that I wouldn’t surprise her, approached her, and sat down beside her. She smiled at me, sidewise, without lifting her head, pushing her hair away from her face. Without thinking I raised my hand and stroked her hair, feeling the fine silkiness, soft as rain. To my surprise a great shudder ran through her, and I drew away before she did.

  “You grow into a handsome man, my Reuben,” she said.

  I touched my upper lip and chin where curling hair was beginning to grow.

  She stood up, slowly, gracefully, stretching her arms starwards. “I must go tend to little Joseph or my mistress will be angry.”

  Why was it that both my mother and my Aunt Rachel were far more demanding of Zilpah and Bilhah after they had given my father man-children than they had been before?

  It came to pass that my father and my Grandfather Laban parted company over some striped and speckled cattle, and my father packed up all our tents and all our goods and took all our animals and ran off to the hill country of Gilead, where there was to be no balm for me.

  Grandfather Laban found us there, and he and my father shouted at each other, and the little children all huddled in the tents. But my father and grandfather made up, hugging and kissing each other, and we set off again, heading toward Mamre, where my Grandfather Isaac, my father’s father, whom I had never seen, had his tents.

  I had spent my entire life in one place, on Grandfather Laban’s land, going no further from home than to tend the flocks. And now we were on a journey across alien lands, to a place and people I had never seen.

  It was a terrible journey.

  We came to the land of the Hivites, in Canaan, and Dinah, our sister, but no longer our little sister, went out to visit the women of the land.

  Dinah, I was beginning to realize, was far more beautiful than our mother, easily as beautiful as Aunt Rachel, and looked, in fact, more like her daughter than our mother’s. This displeased our mother. I suspect it equally displeased Aunt Rachel.

  Bilhah said to me, “It is hard on your mother, to be surpassed first by her sister and now by her daughter.”

  And by you, too, Bilhah—I thought, but did not say it.

  Dinah met the young prince of that land, Shechem, and they lay together before betrothal, which is against all our customs. Some of my brothers said that he seized her against her will, and defiled her. To lie with a man before betrothal is, of course, defiling, but I do not believe it was against her will.

  Prince Shechem was not only honourable, he was wild to marry Dinah, willing to do anything to have her as his wife. She was the sun and the moon and the stars to him.

  My brothers Simeon and Levi, next to me in line, said that she had been disgraced. “Should our sister be treated like a whore?” they demanded.

  They were very loud. They did not listen to Dinah. They did not listen to me, although I was the eldest.

  Prince Shechem, and Hamor, his father, showed us great hospitality, offering us their land, suggesting that we marry their daughters, and it was apparent that Shechem was utterly dazzled by Dinah. He readily agreed to Simeon’s and Levi’s suggestion that he and all of the men of their tribe be circumcised, according to our custom, if that was what we wanted, before he married Dinah.

  And then, when Shechem and all the men of that place were weak and sore from circumcision, my brothers Simeon and Levi slaughtered Shechem, and his father, Hamor, and all the Hivites. It was to avenge Dinah’s honour, they said, but they also took all the gold and earrings and jewels they could lay their hands on.

  And Dinah screamed and screamed and clawed at them but could not stop them, and she flung herself upon the body of Shechem and was covered with his blood.

  “Defiled!” Simeon and Levi shouted. I picked Dinah up in my arms, her poor bloody young body quivering like a plucked bow string, and Bilhah and Zilpah and our mother took her away.

  We had to flee that place. My father made everybody give back all the gold and earrings and jewels they had taken. If Simeon and Levi were the killers, the others lost no time in scavenging from the dead. Ah, God, what an un-human lot we were! My father hid all the loot under an oak, and we took up our tents in haste and got on our camels and left.

  Who were Simeon and Levi to take the honour of Dinah onto their shoulders without consulting with me, the eldest?

  I never wanted to see blood again.

  So we went our way, with Bilhah and Zilpah trying to clean Shechem’s blood from Dinah, who had stopped screaming, and had become silent and still as a stone. Simeon and Levi rode together, whispering. And our father turned his back on all of us except Aunt Rachel.

  El. It was a sad journey.

  When we came to Beth-el, Aunt Rachel’s old nurse, Deborah, died, and was buried there. Aunt Rachel wept and wept. She was heavy with child and had counted on her nurse to assist in the delivery.

  Why did Deborah, with all her skill, have to die just then? Was the journey too hard for her old bones, the assassination of Shechem and all his people too shocking, Dinah’s grief more than she could bear?

  Aunt Rachel started her labour and we stopped and pitched the tents when we were still some distance from Ephrath. It was a hard labour, and all the women were in the tent with her to help with the delivery, and there was no Deborah to clear them away and give Aunt Rachel space to breathe, and none had the skill of Deborah, and suddenly Aunt Rachel screamed, as Dinah had screamed when Shechem was slaughtered before her eyes, and then there was a long and terribly empty silence broken, at last, by a baby’s cry. And then there was laughter and joy and then silence again, a long silence. And then much sobbing from the women.

  Bilhah came out of the tent, carrying a swaddled baby to give to our father.

  It was Leah, my mother, who had to tell him that Rachel was dead.

  It was a journey of storms and tears, and I longed for home and the land around Grandfather Laban’s tents where I had been born and brought up. I knew that Grandfather Isaac was very old, and wondered if we’d make it to his tents before he died.

  We buried Aunt Rachel and set up a pillar of stones upon her grave, and then we journeyed on, because there seemed nothing else to do, and pitched our tents beyond the tower of Eder.

  My soul was dark. Our father mourned and groaned in grief. Dinah was still as stone, except when she took care of the baby, Benjamin, whose birthing had killed his mother, and I wondered if Benjamin would pull Dinah out of the frozen darkness into which she had been plunged since Shechem’s murder. Simeon and Levi kept away from me and that was just as well.

  I went into the tent where Bilhah was, combing her moon-bright hair. Her breasts were like roses. She looked at me, and her eyes were pools of calm. She opened her arms and I moved to her and into her and knew her.

  I knew her.

  And I felt loved. For the first time in my life I felt loved in a way that was very different from Dinah’s baby love of me. El, it was good.

  I was too drowned in love to hear the tent flap lifted, but someone must have peered in, because whoever that someone was told our father what I had done. What Bilhah and I had done.

  If Dinah broke a taboo in letting Shechem come in to her before they were married, I broke an equally rigid one by sleeping with my father’s concubine. At least he paid attention to me for awhile, the first time he had ever done that, even if it
was to berate me. He was still mad with grief for Rachel and hardly knew what he was saying.

  I left him and went to the tent where Dinah was sitting on the camel’s furniture, rocking our baby brother, Benjamin.

  “I paid, Reuben,” she whispered, “and so will you.”

  I left her with the baby. I wanted to go to Bilhah, regardless of my father’s wrath, but she shook her head.

  “No, my Reuben. It will only bring more trouble.”

  I did not go in to her. There was trouble anyhow.

  Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations.

  O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united: for in their anger they slew a man, and in their selfwill they digged down a wall.

  Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it was cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.

  GENESIS 49:5–7

  Simeon and Levi sulked because they were not praised for avenging Dinah’s honour. It was a time of trouble and it was a time of grief. Reuben grieved. Bilhah grieved. They were a large group travelling to Mamre to find Isaac, but their grief was solitary. Jacob kept apart, angry with all his sons—except Joseph. Reuben and Judah walked together, not talking. Dinah was white and silent as a stone. Simeon blamed Levi, and Levi blamed Simeon. Only Rachel, her pregnancy blooming, smiled as she rode along on her donkey. They were all together, but all more separate than they had ever been before.

  So was I. After Hugh’s death the phone rang constantly. Mail poured in. I was surrounded by love. But my grief itself was still solitary.

  I kept to my lecturing schedule because that was what Hugh would have wanted me to do, going, the first month, from Portland, Maine to Denver, Colorado. In Portland it was the phone that almost undid me, looking at the phone and knowing that I couldn’t pick it up and call Hugh to tell him that I’d arrived safely. But the work went well. I wrote in my journal, “Both yesterday and today the response was warm and generous. In a way, when people expect me to be ‘good’ they do half the work for me.”