Chapter 38

Genesis 44:14–34; 45:1–14

Zaphenath-Paaneah, vizier of all Kemet, stood with his arms crossed, decorated in his fine linens and jewels and watching with cold, elegantly painted eyes as the men filed into the courtyard of his home. Amon was ordering all of the Canaanites to stand against the wall except for the accused prisoner, who was brought forward to kneel between his brothers and the offended vizier.

The young man kept his head down. His hands were bound behind his back.

Zaphenath watched the others looking on with hollow eyes and broken faces, disoriented, weary, and frightened. Apart from the shuffling of feet and the admonitions of the guards, the courtyard was quiet—none of the brothers spoke as they moved to their appointed places. They simply stood, fidgeting, or staring at Benjamin’s bent back.

Surveying the foreigners and satisfied that they were properly in place, Amon turned and approached his master. He bowed, holding out the stolen silver cup. Zaphenath took the cup from his steward’s hand and held up the offending item, perhaps weighing its worth against that of the offender. Then he nodded, and Amon bowed again, and stepped back.

Holding the silver cup, Zaphenath moved closer, walking with slow, measured steps. He looked first down the line of brothers, from one to the next to the next. Only one or two dared raise their eyes in return. But none of them spoke, and none of them moved.

Finally, Zaphenath looked down to where Benjamin knelt on the floor, head bowed, his body crouched, perfectly still.

“This is how you repay my hospitality.” Zaphenath’s voice came low and cold, and the brothers shook their heads in vigorous unison at the translation, but Zaphenath raised his hand against the beginning swell of protests, and the wave broke and settled once more. “I am told you offered me the life of the guilty one.” He looked down at Benjamin, at his brother’s dark curling hair and the eyes that so perfectly matched his own, and thought for a brief moment, How is it they cannot see?

But of course, he was no longer the boy who had been their brother, no longer even the young man who was sold in the slave markets of Kemet. When he was summoned out of the prison to interpret the desperate king’s troubling nightmares of devouring, skeletal cattle and insidious stalks of corn, and the Voice had whispered the visions of coming famine in a way that transcended words and flooded his mind with clear understanding, he had been given the name Zaphenath-Paaneah and raised to stand beside (or nearly beside) the Son-of-Ra, God-on-Earth, King Senusret II. Zaphenath had embraced the name as his new identity and his elevation as his resurrection, and it was as Zaphenath that he had been known ever since—even to Potiphar, the departing vizier who, just as the king’s dreams began, had expressed his wish to devote himself to the priesthood and to his young, motherless son. His whispers in the king’s ear had not been inconsequential in his former steward’s elevation.

And when Zaphenath had met the boy Amon, he assured his former master that he would look forward to the time when Amon would assist him with his many important duties. And Potiphar—who had seen to it that Joseph was watched over in the prison and continued to receive reports from the guards as to his former steward’s well-being, and when the keeper of the prison at last created the opportunity by suggesting it (for Potiphar himself could not appear to abuse his authority), quickly had his former steward elevated as the overseer of the prison, where he could prove his abilities while continuing to have food and shelter and protection—yes, Potiphar was well pleased.

Zaphenath believed that he had come to understand the words that swirled around him in the darkness, the mysteries of the texts that he and his father and Potiphar had all studied so diligently—new life came through the passages, the process of an elevation of the spirit from one understanding to another by experiences endured. Ma’at was restored in the sacrifice. Abraham had to first be on the altar before he could see the stars. Joseph had died first in the desert, once more in the prison, and then had risen as Zaphenath-Paaneah, vizier and counselor to the king, inheritor of the priesthood secrets of Ra and Abraham and transformed, as the sun is transformed in the womb of the stars, to rise again.

When he was married to Asenath—daughter of Potiphera, high priest of the Temple of Ra, and sister of Potiphar, the departing vizier, who was charged with arranging a marriage for his newly appointed successor—and as she prepared to bear him a child, Zaphenath had been nearly out of his mind with fear that he would lose her, as his mother and others he had known had been lost.

But Asenath was breathless only with radiance, and the baby boy was strong and shrill, and Joseph, who by then was Zaphenath, wept as he held the child in his arms and called him Manasseh, for in the moment he held him he could not remember the pain of his father’s house or the taste of betrayal or the years of his imprisonment. There was only his son and Asenath, the woman who brought their child into the world and who smiled at him now, who carried life within her and only life, who had caused him at last to forget.

He could not speak, and she understood.

When a little brother was born, also before the onset of the years of famine, Zaphenath named the boy Ephraim as an expression of God’s abundance, an acknowledgment of what had been and a reminder for the times that would shortly come. He had received his own name from his father as an acknowledgment of God’s increase, and he hoped that this son would carry that blessing of abundance with him as well, an inheritance from his father and his father’s fathers. And still Asenath was strong and well, and for the first time since the day his father’s coat had been torn from his shoulders, Zaphenath no longer feared that his happiness would be taken from him.

So it was no surprise that his brothers did not know him as he stood hidden behind his new name and ornate dress and extraordinary mantle of power, facing the men whose beards were gray and bodies weakened by the passage of the years that had separated them. And Benjamin knelt before them all, helpless and exposed, offered up like a lamb.

“Did you think I would not know?” Zaphenath asked, his voice soft. Not one of the brothers dared raise his eyes to meet the accusation. “I know a man’s guilt.” His assertion hung unchallenged in the silence. “I know.” He looked down toward Benjamin. “His life is mine now.” He paused. “But I am a merciful man. This one will remain behind only as my slave.” He held out a hand, the most powerful hand in all the land beside the king’s, with the golden ring of power glinting on his finger. “The price of your dishonor is paid. The rest of you are free to go.”

But suddenly and without speaking, the foreign men lowered themselves to the ground, kneeling behind their brother, faces toward the earth. Zaphenath stared at them, at the way their outstretched hands seemed to reach toward their captive brother, calling out to his accuser.

“Get up,” he said and felt his voice waver—Behold, I dreamed a dream, and the sun and moon and eleven stars bowed down to me—and he swallowed. “You are free to go.”

Benjamin was raising his head, slightly, as if sensing a change in the current of the air.

“Please.” One of the men raised his head, gazing directly up at the man who held the life and death of his family in his outstretched hand.

Zaphenath looked at the one who had dared to speak, seeing, in a moment, the man’s faded beard and lined expression, his weary eyes and his face so open, so hopeless, so determined.

The other brothers also raised their heads, turning uncertainly toward the sound of Judah’s voice.

Still kneeling, still with his hands upon the ground, Judah kept his eyes focused on the vizier’s face, strongly suspecting he was violating some sort of protocol yet feeling compelled that he could not do otherwise.

“My lord.” Judah’s voice was quiet in the expanse of the courtyard, surrounded by the walls of wealth and authority, unable even to speak directly with the man who seemed intent on destroying them. The open sky itself seemed to be staring pitilessly down at his bowed back. “What shall we say to you?” His words dropped like rippling stones into the quiet, reverberating out into the still. “How can we clear our names before you?” He took a slow breath. “If your servants are guilty, my lord, it is not before you but before God—” and he could feel the echoed intake of breath from the brothers surrounding him as he said it, but he pushed on—“and we will all stay behind as your servants.”

Benjamin had raised his head further, glancing halfway over his shoulder, as if so distracted by what he was hearing that he had nearly forgotten where he was—as if he too was simply unable to resist turning toward his brother.

Zaphenath kept his eyes on the one who dared to speak. “Only the man found in possession of my cup will stay behind,” he said, speaking to the man whose name, he knew, was Judah. “As for you”—he fought to keep the hoarse edge from his voice—“get you up in peace to your father.”

He clapped his hands and turned, walking from them, feeling his throat tighten.

“Oh—”

Zaphenath stopped and closed his eyes, because the voice was his brother’s, and all the years and the bitterness of his betrayal could not erase his recognition of the voice that called out to him.

“—my lord,” Judah said, making himself fully prostrate on the ground as the vizier turned back toward him. “Let your servant, I pray, speak a word, and do not be angry.”

Zaphenath hardly heard the unnecessary translation. He simply stood, unmoving. When no reply came, Judah hesitantly raised his eyes.

“You asked us,” Judah said, speaking faster now, as if sensing that he was being granted a brief dispensation to plead, “when you first believed we were spies, if we had a father or a brother.” Judah nodded, as if to reaffirm the truth of the story. “We told you that our father is an old man and that our brother”—he gestured to Benjamin, who still knelt, bound—“is the youngest, the child of his old age.” Judah raised his eyes to Zaphenath’s face. “And you asked us to bring him to you, so you could see him and know that we were truthful.” He shook his head. “And we told you, my lord, that this brother could not leave our father, because the boy is his very life. But you ordered us to bring him if we ever wished to see our other brother”—he gestured then toward Simeon—“or you, my gracious lord, ever again.”

Zaphenath’s chest rose and fell, and his brothers were staring at him, and Judah plunged on.

“And so,” Judah said, “we told our father what you said, my lord.” It was as if Judah were holding out his hands, imploring, pleading, with his very voice. “And our father sent us back with the child of his old age, his most beloved son.” Judah’s voice was trembling now, and Zaphenath bit down on his lower lip to forestall the burning that threatened behind his own eyes. “Now”—Judah’s voice came stronger—“seeing that our father’s life is bound up in the boy’s life, when we return and the boy is not with us, our father will die.” He bowed his head. “It was on my word of protection that he came with us, my lord.” He raised his eyes one last time. “Let this boy go up with his brethren, and our family will live. I will stay here in his place.”

Judah’s voice fell into silence. Not even the translator spoke. For a breathless and brief and terrible moment, Judah feared that perhaps his plea would not even be heard and he had spoken in vain.

But when he raised his eyes, he saw the vizier gazing back at him, and the man’s eyes were shimmering, even as his own.

“Go,” the vizier ordered suddenly, clapping his hands, and the guards in the room looked at each other. “Go,” Zaphenath repeated, and Amon cleared his throat, reaffirming the order. After another hesitation, the guards withdrew, and Amon glanced only briefly at his master before following them out.

Zaphenath stood alone.

Benjamin raised his head and looked at the vizier. The powerful man’s own head was bowed, and he covered his eyes, the golden ring glinting on his finger. Then he wiped his hand across his face, and the tears glistened on his skin like the River beneath the newly risen sun. He looked at Benjamin, who knelt, gazing up at him in terrified wonder, and then turned toward Judah, who looked up at him with the even gaze of a man who knows he has no hope and must hope anyway.

“I am Joseph,” the vizier said, and he pressed a hand over his heart. “Is my father alive?”

Judah blinked, staring uncomprehendingly at what must surely be an apparition, the strangest and cruelest vengeance the desert had yet taken upon him. He could not understand how their accuser could suddenly speak to them as if he were Joseph himself—as if he were the very brother they had murdered in the desert—it was some piece of sorcery, some horrible vision—

But the vision stood before them and wept.

And then he came closer, moving toward Benjamin, the accused thief staring at him with trembling eyes, and the vizier bent down and untied the bonds that held Benjamin’s wrists.

The frayed rope fell to the ground.

Benjamin gingerly moved his arms from behind his back, and the vizier rose up to his feet and slid the elegant wig from his head, and—

And it was Joseph.

It was Joseph—Joseph, who let the wig fall to the floor, his dark, curling hair matching Benjamin’s exactly. His face was Joseph’s, and the painted eyes were Joseph’s—Joseph, who had haunted them since that day beneath the terrible sun at Dothan—

“Please,” he said, his voice breaking as he held out his hand, “come.”

Judah rose up from the ground.

For a moment, neither of them could bear to speak or dared to breathe, and then Joseph clasped Judah by the arm, and Judah felt the solidness of his touch and knew in one terrible, joyful, sweeping moment that this was no apparition.

It was rushing upon Joseph now, the words of his fathers I show these things to you before you go into Kemet and the words of the sacred texts to make his soul live, to make his body live, to restore him anew—

“Our family will live,” Joseph said, and Judah nodded, chin trembling. “Hurry back to our father, and tell him I’m alive, and bring him down to me.” He looked out over the faces of his brothers. “All of you will come, and stay here, and be near to me,” he blinked, spilling more tears over his face, “and you will be protected here. Please.” He looked back at Judah. “Will you go to him?”

“We will,” said a voice.

Joseph turned, and his touch fell away from Judah’s arm as he stared at the man who had been his brother—a child who had been only a small boy and to whom he had been nothing but a whisper, a dream, a far-off memory tenaciously clung to during all the years they had been apart.

And though they had wept much in the years that had separated them, Rachel’s sons wept together now once more.

Asenath—who could not understand what was being said as she stood outside the courtyard, listening because she and all the household had heard her husband weeping so openly—understood.

And she smiled.