Assimilation Versus Separation

Joseph the Administrator and the Politics of Religion in Biblical Israel

Aaron Wildavsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351315388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

How to behave in the diaspora has been a central problem for Jews over the ages. They have debated whether to assimilate by adopting local customs or whether to remain a God-centered people loyal to their temporal rulers but maintaining the peculiar customs that separated them from their host nations. The question not only of survival, but of the basis for survival, is also a central problem in the Joseph stories of the Book of Genesis. The work shows its readers the grand alternatives of Judaism, instilled in two larger-than-life figures, so its readers can reassess for themselves the road Judaism did not take, and understand why Joseph though admirable in many respects, is left out of the rest of the Bible. The question is answered through the stories about how Joseph, the son of Jacob, saved his people/family from famine by becoming a high-ranking administrator to Pharaoh. By analyzing his behavior to the people over whom he exercises power, Joseph lords it over his brothers, grieves his father, takes lands from Egyptian farmers, and engages in forced deportation. Wildavsky explains why Joseph-the-assimilator is replaced in the Book of Exodus by Moses-the-lawgiver. The book ends by demonstrating that Joseph and Moses are, and are undoubtedly meant to be exact opposites. As in his earlier book on The Nursing Father: Moses as a Political Leader, Wildavsky combines analysis of political and administrative leadership with both traditional and modern study of texts: thematic linkages via plot, grammar, dreams, poetry, and religious doctrine. Thus the chapter on "Joseph the Administrator" is preceded by a chapter on Joseph as The Dream Lord" and followed by an analysis and explanation of why Jacob's obscure blessings to his sons are more like curses. Always the emphasis is on the reciprocal influence of religion and politics, on rival answers to questions about how Hebrews should relate to each other and to outsiders. New, in paperback, the book will be of interest to biblical scholars and readers as well as those concerned with the interaction of religion and political life.

1

No Foreigner Can Control Israel: The Wife-Sister Motif Prefigures the Joseph Stories

The Torah can be a teaching for anyone who chooses to seek counsel from it. Asking “Why should a Christian seek political guidance” from the Old Testament, Dale Patrick answers because it is “the ‘political’ Testament.” It tells the story of what happens in a dynamic political process as a people try and often fail to implement God’s laws.¹ The reasons for their failure often have to do with human weakness.

What is the temptation of a clever people? To be too clever. By confusing cleverness with morality, they bring misfortune upon themselves.

What is the temptation of a religious people? To take the name of the Lord in vain. By pretending to speak in the name of God, they confuse the history of their errors with His direction.

What is the temptation of high-level administrators? To confuse their patron with their God; to mistake serving their patron with helping their people. The Joseph stories make an excellent text from which to discuss the attributes of the good administrator.

Should Joseph have risen to as high a position as possible, even if that meant adopting foreign ways, so as to help his people to the utmost? Or should Joseph have acted as Daniel and Mordecai did, willing to serve a foreign government but not at the cost of violating God’s commandments? There are temptations that come from alignment with the sources of power. “Joseph may remember his roots . . .,” Walter Brueggemann observes, “But Egyptian power seduces, overwhelms, commandeers and besides all of that, one can do a lot of good with power. One can indeed feed the world.”² But, in a God-centered religion, is that enough?

Once analysis of the text disabuses us of the notion that Joseph is meant to be an exemplar, we are in a position to appreciate the dilemmas faced by a people who wish to be loyal to the earthly polity but socially separate in their relationship with foreigners. This dilemma between assimilation and separation is foreshadowed in the remarkable wife-sister stories whose abruptness (they seemingly come out of nowhere), strangeness (why deny the matrimonial tie by calling wives “sisters”?), and repetition (they occur three times) alert us to their immense importance.³ The wife-sister motif carries coincidence too far. That the episodes are duplicates of each other is indicated by the fact that Isaac and Abraham both deal with a king named Abimelech, who has a high-ranking assistant called Phicol (Gen. 21:22; 26:26).⁴ Much is shrouded in mystery; but of one thing there is no doubt: these wife-sister stories are meant to prefigure the Hebrew people’s entry into and exodus out of Egypt. Because these myths encapsulate the wisdom the Hebrew people are to learn about their Egyptian experience, they form the indispensable guide to the significance of the stories about Joseph, the son of Jacob, who became administrator to Pharaoh and whose life’s meaning is bound up with the experience of the Israelites in Egypt.

The Wife-Sister Stories

Each of the patriarchs, not only Jacob but Abraham and Isaac, go literally and symbolically either to Egypt or to a foreign country called Gerar where they are faced with conquest or assimilation. Their encounters are remarkably similar, one might say doubled to preview the special style of the Joseph stories, as if to insist that thrice-told tales come true.

Because of Sarah and Rachel

The first biblical account follows:

There was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land. As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. If the Egyptians see you, and think, ‘She is his wife,’ they will kill me and let you live. Please say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may remain alive thanks to you.” When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw how very beautiful the woman was. Pharaoh’s courtiers saw her and praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s place. And because of her it went well with Abram, he acquired sheep, oxen, asses, male and female slaves, she-asses, and camels. But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his household with mighty plagues on account of Sarai, the wife of Abram. (Gen. 12:10-17)

Is “sister” just a convenient subterfuge—an important family member but not a wife—or is there more to the use of this term? Why is there all this emphasis on Sarai as the causal factor—“because of you,” “because of her”? And why does Abram prosper materially for turning his wife over to the Egyptians on false pretenses?

The story is repeated in regard to another king, Abimelech of Gerar (the main characters now renamed Abraham and Sarah by the Lord):

While he was sojourning in Gerar, Abraham said of Sarah his wife, “She is my sister.” So Abimelech king of Gerar had Sarah brought to him. But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him, “You are to die because of the woman that you have taken, for she is a married woman.” Now Abimelech had not approached her. He said, “O Lord, will You slay people even though innocent? He himself said to me, ‘She is my sister!’ And she also said, ‘He is my brother.’ When I did this, my heart was blameless and my hands were clean.” And God said to him in the dream, “I knew that you did this with a blameless heart, and so I kept you from sinning against Me. That was why I did not let you touch her. Therefore, restore the man’s wife—since he is a prophet, he will intercede for you—to save your life.” (Gen. 20:1-7)

Why must Abimelech be the one to take Sarah back to her husband? Why, like Pharaoh before him, being blameless, must he send Abraham away much richer? Why is harm threatened because of Sarah and Rachel?

After receiving material recompense, as if there was no fault in his behavior, Abraham prays to God in the king’s behalf: “and God healed Abimelech and his wife and his slave girls, so that they bore children; for the Lord had closed fast every womb of the household of Abimelech because of Sarah, the wife of Abraham” (Gen. 20:17-18). Why is not only Abimelech but his extended family harmed and then saved if he did Sarah no harm?

A similarly strange story is told about Abraham’s son Isaac when he stayed in a place called Gerar because the Lord warned him against going to Egypt:

When the men of the place asked him about his wife, he said, “She is my sister,” for he was afraid to say “my wife,” thinking, “The men of the place might kill me on account of Rebekah, for she is beautiful.” When some time had passed, Abimelech king of the Philistines, looking out of the window, saw Isaac fondling his wife Rebekah. Abimelech sent for Isaac and said, “So she is your wife! Why then did you say: She is my sister?” Isaac said to him, “Because I thought I might lose my life on account of her.” (Gen 26:7-9)

Wives, especially wives engaged in fondling their husbands, are not usually causes of their husband’s death. Why would the patriarch of his people fear being killed “on account of” his wife, Rebekah?

These stories are the same in that the moral is identical: Israel is the beautiful woman who is taken by a foreign king until he discovers that she belongs to another and more powerful potentate, the God of the Hebrews. No foreign deity is to take God’s place as father of His people.⁵ Sarah is the eternal mother of the Hebrew people and no one but God’s duly appointed husband can have her. Heaven will harm those who seek to seduce or force the people who are promised to God. “Because of Sarah,” there is the message: foreigners who attempt to impregnate Israel, mixing their seed in its womb, even inadvertently, will find themselves unable to procreate. But why, if Abraham places his wife in danger, does he prosper?

The Exodus Foretold

That the three wife-sister stories prefigure the Exodus there can be no doubt. Thinking the Jewish people were like any other, Pharaoh sought to bring them into his domain, intermixing them with the Egyptian people by taking their mother, Sarai, into his harem. Plagues come because the Hebrews are the people of a jealous God who will not allow them to merge into another people. Had Pharaoh known that Hebrews were betrothed to God, he would not have had (or attempted to have, the text does not make this clear) intercourse with her. Now he has learned that a force higher than himself will not allow him to impregnate Israel with Egyptian seed.

The parallel is exact: a later Pharaoh tries to destroy the Hebrew people by killing off all their male children; then only Egyptian men will be able to impregnate Hebrew women. So, too, if Pharaoh impregnates the wife of father Abraham, Pharaoh will be the father of the people and they will be Egyptian, not Hebrew. “Sister” signifies Sarah and Rachel as part of the family of Israel. Not only no wife but no woman of Israel, nay, Israel itself, may be touched by a foreign force.

The wives in these stories, Sarah and Rebekah, are self-sacrificing. They evidently agree to call themselves sisters to protect their husbands, taking what comes, so far as we know, without protest. Yet it must be said that it is the men, the Hebrew patriarchs and the foreign kings, who initiate and carry on the action, while it is their women, including servant girls, who bear the brunt of the danger, whether that is being taken into a foreign king’s harem with Lord only knows what consequences or being unable to conceive.

Does this signify that the women in the stories about Joseph are bound to be passive? Not at all. Potiphar’s wife and Tamar, the wife of Er, the women we meet in the first two chapters (Gen. 37 and 38) are demanding, action-forcing individuals who violate law and custom, the former to dishonor and the latter to honor their husbands. Tamar is spared her sacrifice by persuading her father-in-law, Judah, that he himself is the guilty party. Later, her example stands as precedent when Judah offers to stand as surety for Benjamin. So do the Egyptian midwives refuse their Pharaoh’s command to kill the Hebrew male children.

Good for them. But apparently not so good for Abraham, who left his wife as a sister prey to foreign invasion.

Is Abraham at Fault?

Abraham is in bad odor. He pretends, half-truthfully but essentially falsely (he had married his father’s brother’s daughter), that she was his sister. He has subjected his wife to gross indignity, perhaps worse, in Pharaoh’s harem. The Zohar suspects that Sarai’s picture hung in Pharaoh’s bedroom.⁶ To add insult to injury, Abraham (and later Isaac) gets rich off his wife’s presence (to use a neutral term) in another man’s harem. There is no need to sidestep the obvious question: Is Abraham pimping? Worse, Abraham, who has just received God’s promise to found a people on his family, procures the services of his wife for a foreign king who can negate God’s promise by mixing his seed with the patriarch’s in the womb of the mother of the Hebrew people. And, if it is possible to make things still worse, Abraham repeats his sacrifice of Sarah’s virtue and dignity, as if he benefited from the exchange the first time, with King Abimelech. The question of the prosperity of the patriarchs is certainly open to this mercenary, wife-selling interpretation.

A Dead Sea Scroll found in the first Qumran cave seeks to rationalize Abram’s behavior. In this account, Abram dreamt that

he saw two trees, a cedar and a palm, and a group of people coming to cut down the cedar and planning to leave the palm untouched. The palm bursts out crying and warns the men that they will be cursed if they cut down the cedar. Thus the cedar is saved for the sake of the palm.

Abram wakes, tells Sarai about the dream that frightened him and interprets its meaning to her; when they reach Egypt, there will be an attempt to kill him, but Sarai will be able to save him.⁷

The palm tree in Hebrew is Tamar who, by playing prostitute to Judah (Gen. 38), acts to maintain the continuity of her husband’s name. The threat in this dream is the same as in the wife-sister stories themselves: the destruction of a community via the elimination of its male members.

One commentary, the Babba Kamina, praises Abraham for going to Egypt to save his people.⁸ The opposite view is taken by the Zohar— Abraham erred by going to Egypt instead of Israel; for that reason, the Zohar inferred Israel was punished by hard labor in Egypt.⁹

Abraham’s sin, according to Nahmanides, was that he lacked trust in God. Otherwise, in possession of God’s promise, Abraham should have acknowledged Sarah as his wife.¹⁰ Not to acknowledge the wife of the progenitor of the Hebrew people is not to acknowledge all future generations.

Lack of trust in God is also Umberto Cassuto’s theme:

In order to escape the danger, Abram had relied on his shrewdness, and did not put his trust in the paternal providence of the Lord. Now the very ruse that he had relied upon became a source of evil to him. The only peril that he had envisaged was that which might emanate from the commoners of Egypt (v. 12: “And it shall come to pass when the Egyptians see you”), and he thought it would be easy for him, as Sarai’s brother, to put them off with words. It never dawned on him that po...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Political Consequences of a God-Centered Religion
• 1. No Foreigner Can Control Israel: The Wife-Sister Motif Prefigures the Joseph Stories
• 2. Survival Must Not Be Gained through Sin: The Moral of the Joseph Stories Prefigured through Judah and Tamar, Ruth and Naomi, Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar
• 3. The Dreamer Is the Dream
• 4. Fathers, Sons, and Brothers: Joseph and His Family
• 5. The Egyptianization of Joseph Compared to the Hebraicization of Daniel and Esther
• 6. Joseph the Administrator
• 7. If These Are Jacob’s Blessings, What Would His Curses Be Like?
• 8. Why Joseph-the-Assimilator Is Superseded by Moses-the-Lawgiver
• 9. The Path Not Taken
• Index