THREE MONTHS LATER, PHARAOH got angry at two of his ministers, the chief butler and the chief baker, and he put them under detention in Potiphar’s prison. The chief butler, because of his access to Pharaoh, was a rich and powerful official; his position was a highly sensitive one, and his trustworthiness had to be impeccable, since there was an ever-present danger of bribery or mischief. The chief baker also ranked high on the list of palace officials, responsible as he was for some of the food that went directly into his sovereign’s mouth.
Potiphar assigned Joseph to them as their attendant. His job was to visit them every morning and see that their needs were being met. He was also free to chat with them if he wished.
One morning he noticed that they were upset. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you look out of sorts, both of you. What happened?”
“We had important dreams last night,” the butler said, “but there is no expert here to interpret them.”
Both men had had considerable experience with dream interpreters. Interpreting dreams was a popular occupation in Egypt, and at every level of society people consulted professionals. These ranged from the high priest of Amun—who, during court ceremonies, stood before Pharaoh in his elaborate regalia, alongside the most prominent court officials—down to the tawdriest psychics hawking their talents in the marketplace in front of wooden signs scrawled in simplified hieroglyphics with slogans that promised wealth and happiness to every client wise enough to linger. There were hundreds of dream books as well. Each one proposed a system that was, according to its creator, infallible. All you had to do in order to discover the correct meaning of any particular dream was to take every object in it, substitute the signified for the signifier on one of the long lists of equivalences, simplify the common elements among them as if you were factoring a quadratic equation, then fiddle with the spatial and temporal succession in one of the prescribed ways—and voilà, the meaning would appear before you, as obvious as a cracked egg. The most highly esteemed of these books claimed its descent from a prophet who, a thousand years before, had received his methodology from the god Ra himself, in his red-bodied, falcon-headed form, during a forty-day meditation retreat in the Theban desert. Copies of the book were rare and kept under lock and key. It took many years to master its dream grammar, but once you did and were certified by the proper authorities, you were assured of a position either at Pharaoh’s court or at the court of one of the many princelings on the periphery of the empire, who were as dependent on Egyptian superstitions as on the strength of the Egyptian army.
“True interpretations come from God,” Joseph said to the butler. “Why don’t you tell me your dream? I can interpret it.”
He was supremely confident. He didn’t consider himself a prophet, a man through whose mouth God spoke. (The very concept would have seemed ludicrous to him.) What he meant by “True interpretations come from God” was that once you let go of systems and methods of interpretation, and even of the desire to interpret, the dream would interpret itself.
He had mused about this a great deal during his eleven years in Egypt. Dreams, he had concluded, were simply uninhibited thinking. They presented you with what you knew already but hadn’t had the presence to be aware of. At their best, when they weren’t entirely the random or mischievous play of the mind, they subtracted the habitual and left you with essence: what your life would look like if you stepped beyond personal interest and saw all things as forms of God, in an ever-mutating, never-circumscribed flow. Dreams were, or could be, prophetic of the future only because they illuminated the present. It did not, after all, require prophetic powers to see that a seed would become a stalk or a lamb a sheep.
He had often thought of those boyhood dreams that had been the spark to the powder keg of his brothers’ hatred. There was an arrogance to them, as he was well aware. But in another sense they weren’t about him at all, the person Joseph. What his brothers, and his father as well, and his sweet dead mother had been bowing down to was a quality that shone through him like a flame through glass—an intelligence, a discernment, which could be called “the clear heart” as accurately as “the clear mind” and which he himself bowed down to in all humility. It wasn’t him; it wasn’t ever his. But if anything in the world could be called holy, that quality could.