Genesis 37 ff: The eleventh - and second youngest - son of Ya'akov (Jacob), linked with Bin-Yamin (Benjamin), through sharing Rachel as their mother.
Bin-Yamin is really Ben-Oni (Genesis 35:18), which provides a second significant connection with Yoseph, who will serve (Genesis 39) as a house steward to Poti-Phera, the high priest of On - which the Greeks called Heliopolis, and we now know as Cairo, though it is really only a tiny fragment of a small suburb of Cairo, known as Ayn Shams ("the eye of the sun"): one of its ancient obelisks now stands on the banks of the Thames in London, and is known (erroneously) as Cleopatra's Needle; a second, bearing the same name, and equal erroneously, can be found in New York's Central Park.
Yoseph's wife in the Genesis tale (Genesis 41:45) is named Asnat, daughter of Poti-Phera, the high priest of On. In the earlier scandal (Genesis 39), when Poti-Phera's wife attempts to seduce him and then accuses him of attempting to rape her, no name is given in the Tanach, but Jewish tradition, endorsed in the Midrashim, claim that her name was Zuleika, or refer to her as "the woman of Moph". In the Qu'ran (12:30) she is simply called "The wife of Al-'Aziz", Aziz being a title for a high noble rather than a name.
The manner in which the Tanach presents the tale tries to make Potiphar and Poti-Phera into two different people; see my commentaries in Genesis to understand why this is not correct.
The myth of Osher (Osiris) is visible throughout the Yoseph story: not obviously in the description of his youthful beauty, but clearly in the two periods he spends in the Underworld: the pit before he is sold into slavery, the prison afterwards; and especially his role as provider of bread to a starving world etc. cf Jesus in the same regard.
The butler and the baker represent wine and bread - religious symbolism clearly. Also it is a form of the kiddush becher, the cup used in the Jewish Kiddush and the Christian Eucharist - that Yoseph has concealed in Bin-Yamin's luggage, though in those days the silver cup was simply a devining instrument, as used in the cult of Anubis, the Egyptian Hermes, and coincidentally (!) the name of one of the two brothers in the aforementioned tale, as well as being a title of Osher (Osiris). A portrait of the god would have been engraved on the inside of the cup, which was filled with water rather than wine, and then a small object dropped in to disturb the surface; the way the ripples affected the god's countenance informed the augury.
Yoseph as Vizier to the Pharaoh represented the corn-god - Vizier in the Egyptian context is to be understood more as High Priest with secular functions than a Prime Minister. This is particularly revealed in the interpretation of Pharaoh's dream (Genesis 41), which reflects the liturgy of Osher; also when Yoseph becomes the distributor of the corn during the years of famine (verses 47-49). In those verses we are told that he collected the harvested corn during the years of plenty, and stored them in silos; we know from considerable archaeological evidence that this was managed by the priests, and that the silos were all erected at shrines and temples, and not in secular locations; not surprisingly, as Egypt was a theocratic society.
Yoseph was given the "name" Tsaphnat Paneyach by Pharaoh (Genesis 41:45). In Egyptian it means "Saviour Of The Age" and is thus a title of the sacred king, or in this case the vizier who stands in for the sacred king.
Genesis gives two meanings for Yoseph; one "to take away", the other "to add". Both are correct.
Ezra 8:10 has Yosiph-Yah (יוֹסִפְיָה), understood to mean "whom the god will increase" though that should be "whom the goddess will increase"; the term means "to raise up to importance", and is therefore a title rather than a name.
If the prefictual Yud (י) is really Yah (יה), then do we have here Yah Suph (יה סוף)? It would be very interesting if we did. A Suph is a rush or reed, and particularly (Exodus 2:3, Isaiah 19:6) those that grow in the River Nile, and which are the vegetation most associated with Osher (Osiris), the Egyptian god whose story echoes Yoseph's in almost every aspect, and to whom Yoseph was high priest. Traditionally the waters of the Arabian Gulf, including the Red Sea itself and the many inland wadis of the Arabian Peninsula, are known collectively as Yam Suph (ים-סוף), but this is incorrect. The Reed Sea, which is what Yam Suph means, was the delta of the River Nile, where it breaks into the Mediterranean in the north of Egypt, precisely in the land of Goshen where Ya'akov settled, and from where Mosheh led the Beney Yisra-El into the Wilderness. Osher also represented the tempest or the whirlwind, as did his Babylonian equivalent Tammuz, and Suphah (סופה), the feminine form of Suph, is used for this throughout the Book of Job (21:18, 27:20, 37:9) as well as in Proverbs 10:25, Isaiah 17:13; Hosea 8:7 has a variation, Suphatah (סוּפָ֣תָה), with the same meaning. In later Yehudit this destructive power of the flooding Nile and the whirlwind gave rise to the verb Suph (סוף) = "to end" or, in the Hiphil form, "to destroy".
Certain letters in Yehudit, particularly Samech (ס) and Tet (ט), denote a foreign word imported into the language - both being sounds that already have their native Yehudit phoneme, Seen (ש) and Tav (ת). That Yoseph with his Egyptian links should have a foreign letter in his name ought to alert us… especially as the Genesis story gives him an Egyptian name as well, and more importantly an Egyptian family. Given his status in the Old Testament, as Ya'akov's favourite, as the bearer of the coat of many colours, as the interpreter of dreams (for which compare the role of the Ollave, the Master-Poet, in ancient Ireland, who sat at the king's right hand and shared with the king the privilege of wearing six colours in his clothing), as the father of Ephrayim, which took the central geographical location in Yisra-El, and became the sobriquet by which the northern kingdom for many centuries would be known, and of Menasheh, which acquired the largest portion of land; given all this, it is extremely curious that Yoseph is himself denied a tribal territory. And why would this be, unless he had never been a Beney Yisra-El with a geographical claim in the first place? Can we read the stories of his "going down" into Egypt as an attempt to explain his lack of Beney Yisra-Eli connections? And how convenient, that they also provide a Yisra-Elisation of his Egyptian character, by absorbing the Osher elements at the same time.Was Yisra-El originally just Yoseph (Ephrayim/Menasheh) and Bin-Yamin, the Rachelite tribes, with the others added later on to establish the confederacy?
Does this explain the dreams, the animosity? Re'u-Ven and Yehudah are reluctant to shed his blood, but the views of the other brothers are not made clear. Re'u-Ven and Yehudah border Bin-Yamin to the south, on either side of the Dead Sea, precisely the area where the Sha'ul and David stories are set. Gad and Dan border it to the east and west respectively, with Shim'on further to the south. The other tribes are well to the north, on the far side of Ephrayim and Menasheh, so a Yehudah version of the tale could well ignore them.When Ya'akov sent Yoseph to take food for his brothers, he advised him to seek them around Shechem (Genesis 37:12), which was a very long way from Be'er Sheva for the brothers to "feed their father's flock"; like Sha'ul pursuing his father's donkeys, this feels like something must be concealed in the text. Were they at Shechem for a festival, a rite? Dotan (דֹתָֽן), where he actually found them (2 Kings 6:13), was even further, a full thirteen miles north of Shechem, on the Damasek-Gil'ad-Mitsrayim caravan route. Built on a mound, it was the main northern pass to the hill country of Ephrayim.
Two documents, or two oral traditions, appear to be interwoven in the tales of Yoseph. The Ephrayimite (pre 721 BCE when the northern kingdom was destroyed) has Yoseph sold to Beney Midyan; the Yehudah document on the other hand has him sold, or perhaps sold on, to Beney Yishma-El - an ancient form of human trafficking either way. In the Ephrayimite version, Yoseph is protected by Re'u-Ven, in the Yehudan by Yehudah. Similarly it appears to be the Yehudah tradition that Yoseph served Poti-Phera as his house-steward, the Ephrayimite that he served him as a senior guard in prison.
Yoseph's burial at Sihor (Zior), a river also called the Torrent of Egypt (now Wadi el-Arish) is his third descent into the Pit, this time of She'ol. Cf Jeremiah 2:18, 1 Chronicles 13:5, Isaiah 23:3, Joshua 13:3.
Ancestor worship: unless buried among ancestors a soul is banished for vagrancy to the depths of She'ol. Thus both Ya'akov (Genesis 50:5) and Yoseph (Genesis 50:25) ask to be buried among their ancestors in Kena'an. Thus Korach, Datan and Avi-Ram (Numbers 16:31) are punished by being swallowed up by the earth without proper funeral rites. Psalm 88:5 and Isaiah 38:18 place She'ol beyond YHVH's jurisdiction (after the 5th century BCE he regains it: Job 26:6, Psalm 139:8 and Proverbs 15:11), but use the language of "the pit" which is so central to the Yoseph tale.
The idea of the resurrection of the soul belongs to not earlier than the 6th century BCE (Isaiah 26:19). This transformed She'ol into the waiting room of Purgatory before the Messianic resurrection and Last Judgement, and marked a radical and fundamental change in the theology of the ancient world - I say world, and not just the narrow geography of Yehudah, because this was the Era of Abstract Thought, the moment of Pythagoras, Confucius, Lao Tsu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Mahavira, and the Buddha - Gore Vidal offers a fascination study of this moment of human evolution in his novel "Creation" (but make sure you read the author's cut from 2002 and not the original version, and be aware that Vidal's starting date is about 100 years wrong).
Copyright © 2019 David Prashker
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