Shechem’s love for Dinah was real. Prince Hamor pressed Jacob to let her marry his son – in return, he said, he would give Jacob and his sons whatever they might ask. Answering him ‘deceitfully’ (34, 13) Jacob’s sons insisted that they weren’t allowed by religious law to give their sister to a man who had not been circumcised – or even one who came from uncircumcised people:
But in this will we consent unto you: If ye will be as we be, that every male of you be circumcised; Then will we give our daughters unto you, and we will take your daughters to us, and we will dwell with you.
And so it was. Hamor and Shechem agreed to their terms, ‘and every male was circumcised’ (34, 24).
But two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, remained unreconciled and – still ‘sore’ (34, 25) – ‘took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males.’
They took their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that which was in the city, and that which was in the field, And all their wealth, and all their little ones, and their wives took they captive, and spoiled even all that was in the house.
In revenge for the rape of their sister by Shechem’s ruler, Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi, with their followers, fall upon the city and massacre its menfolk, carrying off their women and children to serve them as slaves.
‘And he knew it, and said, It is my son’s coat; an evil beast hath devoured him’.
GENESIS 37, 31
What profit is it if we slay our brother, and conceal his blood? Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our brother and our flesh.
The deal was done, and all that remained was for the brothers to cover their tracks (37, 31):
And they took Joseph’s coat, and killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood; And they sent the coat of many colours, and they brought it to their father; and said, This have we found: know now whether it be thy son’s coat or no. And he knew it, and said, It is my son’s coat; an evil beast hath devoured him; Joseph is rent in pieces.
In a frenzy of grief, Jacob tore his clothes ‘and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days’ (37, 34) – although Joseph was actually very much alive.
He was, however, in Egypt, where he had been sold into the household of Potiphar, captain of the Pharaoh’s palace guard. Here too, he quickly became a favourite (39, 4):
And Joseph found grace in his sight, and he served him: and he made him overseer over his house, and all that he had he put into his hand.
An Amorous Mistress
The special trust he had in Potiphar’s house, and the privileged access he enjoyed, were to bring unfortunate consequences after a time. ‘His master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph,’ (39, 7); ‘and she said "Lie with me."’ But Joseph flatly refused to betray his master.
Joseph’s brothers count their profits as Joseph is carried off by slavers in Konstantin Flavitsky’s painting of 1855. Joseph would himself one day have the power to buy and sell them when they journeyed to an Egypt under his effective rule.
Jacob was inconsolable at the news of his son’s ‘death’. The coat of many colours – now stained with red blood – seemed to prove it. Jacob tore his own clothes, mourning his son for many days – though Joseph was actually alive and well.
One day, however, when the other servants were out and Potiphar’s wife saw Joseph:
She caught him by his garment, saying, 'Lie with me': and he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out.
What began as bedroom farce took on an uglier aspect entirely when Joseph’s mistress, thwarted, cried out that he had tried to rape her. He had fled when she called for help, leaving his garment in her hand, she said (39, 15). Joseph’s fall from grace was still more rapid than his rise had been: he was taken from his master’s house, and thrown into prison.
Dream Drama
It was not long, however, before Joseph was joined by the Pharaoh’s baker and butler. They had fallen foul of their irascible master and had been jailed. Both, in the space of a single night, had strange dreams, and neither could imagine what they had meant. Mentioning the fact to Joseph, he asked them to tell him what they’d seen and offered his own explanation: the Pharaoh was going to think better of his earlier anger with the butler and set him free, he said. As for the baker, his case was very different: within three days he too would be taken from the prison – but only to be put to death, said Joseph.
A diminutive Joseph struggles in the unwanted embrace of Potiphar’s wife. The steward’s scrupulousness with all that belonged to his lord was later to be rewarded when he was given the care of the Pharaoh’s kingdom.
Back in the imperial household, and in the Pharaoh’s favour, the butler remembered his friend in prison when his master himself reported a pair of perplexing dreams. In the first, he recalled, he was standing by the river when seven ‘well favoured’ and ‘fatfleshed’ cows came up out of the water; followed by a further seven, who were ‘ill favoured and leanfleshed’ (41, 3). The second group ate up the first – at which point the Pharaoh woke up, bemused and seriously unsettled. His second dream did nothing to improve his mood (41, 5):
Behold, seven ears of corn came up upon one stalk, rank and good. And behold, seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind sprung up after them. And the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full ears.
Although the Pharaoh sent for all his advisers and magicians, none could tell him what his dream had meant. Then the butler told him of the Hebrew prisoner he had still languishing in jail and how he had successfully interpreted his own – and the baker’s – dreams.
Joseph was sent for and told of the Pharaoh’s visions: there was no hesitancy in his reply. ‘What God is about to do,’ he said, ‘he sheweth unto the Pharaoh’ (41, 28):
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout the land of Egypt; And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt; and the famine shall consume the land.
So severe would the shortage be that it would quite erase the memory of the plenty that had gone before. It was for this reason that the Pharaoh had been sent substantially the same warning twice. God, said Joseph, wanted the Pharaoh to appoint a ‘man discreet and wise’ to take charge in Egypt and to confiscate corn in quantity through the good years so that it could be laid up in reserve to see Egypt through its years of famine.
‘all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt; and the famine shall consume the land’
GENESIS 41, 28
The Pharaoh, much impressed, made Joseph his chancellor: ‘See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt,’ he told the sometime slave (41, 42); ‘Without thee shall no man lift up his hand or foot’ (41, 44).
Seven ‘well-favoured’, ‘fatfleshed’ cows and then another seven scrawny ones … A medieval-looking Pharaoh has his famous dream: seven ‘fat’ years of plenteous harvests are to be followed by seven searing years of famine and of want.
A Family Reunion
The ‘famine was sore in all lands’ (41, 57) and Canaan was no exception. Without the benefit of Joseph’s guidance, Jacob’s household was soon struggling to survive. They had prospered through the good times, and saved money, but hadn’t known to lay in the reserves of grain they would need to see them through so harsh and protracted a dearth as they now faced.
Jacob, accordingly, told his sons (42, 2): ‘Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt: get you down thither and buy for us from thence; that we may live and not die.’ But Benjamin, his youngest son (and Rachel’s second – all the dearer to his parents since Joseph’s ‘death’) was to remain with him in Canaan, for Jacob could not bear to lose him.
Joseph, down in the marketplace when his brothers arrived, immediately recognized the Canaanites. Even so, he ‘made himself strange unto them, and spake roughly unto them’ (42, 7). He accused them of being there as spies, come to see ‘the
nakedness of the land’ (42, 9). They insisted that they were an innocent family from Canaan; that they had left behind them an anxious father and their youngest brother. Joseph, unmoved, had the young men arrested: they were lying, he insisted, and would not be freed until they produced this supposed brother.
On the third day, he seemingly relented, allowing them to leave, on condition that they swore to prove their honesty by returning with Benjamin. Not only did Joseph let them take the grain they’d bought: he secreted the money they had paid for it in bags deep in their sacks – as they discovered, to their amazement, on arriving home.
His own soothsayers baffled, the Pharaoh has been reduced to hearing the prisoner brought up from his own dungeons. He listens amazed as Joseph deciphers his dream. From that time on, Joseph will be his most trusted adviser.
Jacob was furious when he learned of the deal they had struck with the Egyptian official, but simple honesty demanded that they keep to it. Moreover, the appearance of their money at the bottom of their sacks seemed more menacing than reassuring. So the brothers set off again for Egypt, this time with young Benjamin. They were well received, and allowed to buy more grain.
Amidst the opulence of the Egyptian court, a kneeling Judah begs the unyielding official to spare his youngest brother Benjamin, taking him as prisoner in his place. Not for a moment does he realize that he’s pleading with another brother, Joseph.
Before they left, however, Joseph hid a precious silver chalice in Benjamin’s sack. The brothers set off homeward, entirely unaware. When they were called on to halt by pursuing Egyptian soldiers, they were obviously anxious – the more so when their sacks were searched; but when the chalice was ‘found’ in Benjamin’s, they were stunned.
Frogmarched back to the city, the Canaanites were harangued by the official who, apparently enraged, said that Benjamin would have to hand himself over to serve him as a slave. Judah – the brother behind Joseph’s own enslavement – begged that he should stay in Benjamin’s place, because their father would not be able to bear the loss of a second favoured son. Joseph, moved despite himself, forgave his brother there and then. He told his brothers who he was, and asked them to bring their father and family to live with him down in Egypt.
‘I am Joseph; doth my father yet live?’ (45, 3). The Pharaoh’s official finally reveals his true identity to his brothers and a touching reunion takes place. All past treasons and resentments are forgotten in an outbreak of relief and joy.
And so it was agreed: Jacob and his whole family made the journey. The house of Israel was once more reunited.
Moses (above) led the Israelites to freedom. Opposite: He hit the floor with his rod and it immediately became a twisting serpent of bronze. He shows it to his followers in this painting by Giuseppi Maria Crespi (lo Spagnuolo), 1690.
III
THE BIBLE
LAWS AND WARS
It was now that God laid down his laws and gave the Jews his Commandments to live by. There’s little evidence that they actually did.
——♦——
‘Thou hast guided them in thy strength.’ EXODUS 15, 13.
Joseph’s family thrived in Egypt. They ‘increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty’ (Exodus 1, 7). So ‘mighty’ did they wax (or grow) that ‘the land was filled with them’. A new Pharaoh succeeded Joseph’s friend, and the prospect he saw was alarming: ‘Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we’ (1, 9). The Egyptians, accordingly, set about subjecting the immigrants, enslaving them for the construction of ‘treasure cities’ (1, 11). But the Israelites continued to multiply, and so it went on through generation after generation – no matter how much ‘rigour’ the Egyptians applied; no matter how ‘bitter’ they made their lives with their ‘hard bondage’ (1, 13–14). Finally, one Pharaoh decided that enough was enough and that altogether tougher tactics would have to be used.
Calling the Hebrew midwives to him, he told them that they should kill all boy babies born to their charges; the girls would be allowed to live, to wed Egyptian men. But the women proved recalcitrant: so ‘lively’ were the Jewish women, they claimed, that they were ‘delivered ere the midwives come in unto them’ (1, 19). The Pharaoh therefore told his people that they would have to take action themselves, ‘saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive’ (1, 22).
‘Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river,’ ordered Egypt’s Pharaoh. Moses’ mother saved her son by literally fulfilling his command. Here she places the infant in a floating cradle in the bulrushes.
Infant Afloat
One woman, a descendant of Joseph’s brother Levi, couldn’t bear to give her son up for the slaughter. She kept him hidden, managing to do so for three months. As he grew, however, it only became more difficult. So it was that (2, 3):
when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein.
Then, we’re told, she laid it in the ‘flags’ (or rushes) by the river’s brink. The boy’s elder sister stood waiting on the bank nearby to see what would transpire. In the event, no less a figure than the Pharaoh’s daughter came down to wash herself in the Nile and found the basket. ‘When she had opened it, she saw the child; and, behold, the babe wept,’ (2, 5). Her heart was moved. She guessed that this was ‘one of the Hebrews’ children’, but despite this asked her handmaiden to find her a nurse from among the Jews to mind the child. The boy’s sister still being close at hand, the choice naturally fell on her. She brought her brother up but, as he grew older, she brought him more and more to the Pharaoh’s daughter and he ‘became her son’ (2, 10): ‘And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.’
The Pharaoh’s own daughter found the floating baby and ‘had compassion on him’: ‘This is one of the Hebrews’ children,’ she said. She had a Jewish woman (Moses’ own mother) raise him on her behalf.
Moses the Murderer
Moses grew up in the royal household but never lost sight of his ‘brethren’ and their ‘burdens’ (2, 11). He was appalled one day when he saw an Egyptian hit a Hebrew. ‘And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand’ (2, 12). This won him a reputation. Next day, when he saw a fellow Jew hit another in a fight, and remonstrated with him, the man replied (2, 14):
Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? Intendest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian?
Not unreasonable questions, in all their insolence – and, as Moses himself wasn’t slow to realize, clear evidence that his crime of the day before was now public knowledge.
Moses’ place among the Egyptian elite became impossible when, seeing an overseer strike a slave, he attacked the man and killed him, and ‘hid him in the sand’ (Exodus 2, 12). He was forced to flee into the desert and lie low.
It was indeed, and it wasn’t long before it was known to the Egyptians too, and Moses was forced to flee, a wanted man. He lay low in Midian, a desert region believed by scholars to have been in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula. There he met Reuel (also known as Jethro), a priest of that country, who took him into his house and gave him his daughter Zipporah in marriage (2, 21). She bore him a son, whom they named Gershom, or ‘Sojourner’, because, said Moses, that was what he himself had been – in his own memorable words (2, 22), ‘a stranger in a strange land’.
The Burning Bush
The sojourn looked set to continue, though, and with every appearance of happiness, until – suddenly – Moses received his call from God. The tribulations of his Jewish brethren in their Egyptian servitude had grown unbearable, ‘and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage’ (2, 25):
‘Behold, the bush burned with fire, and lo, the bush was not consumed’ (3, 3). God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, although Moses ‘hid his face’,
appointing him the leader and the liberator of the Jews.
And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God had respect unto them.
One day, then, when he was out in the desert looking after his father-in-law’s flock, Moses saw a strange sight (3, 2):
The angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
“... and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed”
EXODUS 3, 2
God, the narrative goes on to say, spoke to him ‘out of the midst of the bush’ (3, 4). (There does seem to be some confusion in these early sections of the Book of Exodus over whether it is Yahweh or his ‘angel’ who is intervening at any given time.) He told Moses that he had chosen him as his messenger to Pharaoh, ‘that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt’ (3, 10).
Dark History of the Bible Page 6