A Note to the Reader

The perceptive reader, upon reading a story set in ancient Egypt, will no doubt wonder why there are no Egyptians.

And that is a very good question.

The short answer is that ancient Egypt was not called Egypt at all, and the term Egypt isn’t Egyptian but Greek, and the Greeks didn’t show up in Egypt until many centuries after the time of Senusret.

Set in a time before Egypt was Egypt, the story takes place during ancient Egypt’s Middle Kingdom—as opposed to the Old Kingdom (which saw the construction of the pyramids) or the New Kingdom (responsible for the Valley of the Kings and the temples at Luxor), or the Late Period (marking the arrival of the first Persian kings), the Ptolemaic Period (the Greeks, including Cleopatra), or the Roman Period, amongst others. To be more specific still, the novel’s central action is set principally during the reign of the Twelfth Dynasty king Senusret II, who reigned from approximately 1897 to 1878 b.c. and who did instigate a major irrigation and land reclamation project in the area known as the Faiyum or Faiyum Oasis, located near the assumed location for the Middle Kingdom capital of Itj-Twy and south of the Old Kingdom capital of Memphis, near modern-day Cairo.

Throughout the novel, effort has been made to avoid admittedly better-known terms, such as Egypt, Pharaoh, and Nile, that were not actually in use during the Middle Kingdom, referring instead to Kemet, the King, the River, and, as the citizens of Kemet thought of themselves, the People.

As far as possible, the descriptions, events, and concerns of the various characters, both Egyptian and Hebrew, are meant to be appropriate for their particular time and place. That being the case, a certain amount of additional context, history, and culture may benefit from some brief explanation.

Chronology: Joseph in the Middle Kingdom

The chronological setting of the novel is, of necessity, somewhat arbitrary, but it is not entirely so. While there is no general consensus as to when Joseph actually arrived in Egypt (indeed, there is plenty of debate about whether he existed at all), a few tidbits at least make the reign of Senusret II an interesting time.

Working with the Genesis account of the genealogy of the Patriarchs—meaning Abraham, his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob—we will assume, remarkable longevity aside, that Abraham, the founder of his people and a fellow sojourner in Egypt during a time of famine, was easily one hundred years older than his great-grandson Joseph. If we put Abraham’s arrival in Egypt sometime around 2000 b.c. (at the very beginning of the Middle Kingdom), Joseph could have arrived relatively close to 1900 b.c., which would mean that the same dynasty would have been in power and Abraham’s earlier visit and teachings could certainly still be remembered by the time of his great-grandson’s arrival.

For the sake of simplicity, to avoid skipping through too many kings and because the story must be set at some point in time, the chronology is therefore calculated upon Joseph’s arrival in Egypt in the year 1900 b.c., at age seventeen, during the long reign of Amenhemhat II, and becoming the vizier under Amenhemhat’s successor, Senusret II. A nice touch to this chronology is that Senusret would still have been alive when Jacob and his family arrived in Egypt.

The Middle Kingdom is an intriguing time in Egyptian history. Interspersed between the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms were so-called Intermediate Periods, when central governmental power was weakened or disintegrated. In fact, the political history of ancient Egypt is essentially an undulating wave of central authority—where strong centralized power under the king wanes, splintering away from the native monarchy and out into the hands of other (sometimes multiple) rulers, only to have the centralized government reinstated by a new native dynasty, which in turn subsequently crumbles and again dissipates power.

Egypt’s Middle Kingdom emerged amidst all of this undulating and is often referred to as a sort of golden age, both for its stable prosperity and its cultural outpouring (The Story of Sinuhe, a highly copied and frequently studied piece of literature, was composed during this time). Egypt did not really become a nation of warriors and empire builders until the New Kingdom and the overthrow of the foreign Hyksos rulers, who took power during the Second Intermediate Period. Their overthrow, it has been suggested, turned the Egyptian mind toward the necessity of conquest and warfare in maintaining their independence. In contrast, the preceding Middle Kingdom appears to have generally been a time of relative peace and prosperity.

Speaking of the rise and fall of dynasties, the astute reader may also be wondering where all the pyramids are. Alas, the great age of pyramid building had already passed away with the decline of the Old Kingdom, which ended around 2200 b.c. With the end of the Old Kingdom, there was movement away from the old capital at Memphis (near modern-day Cairo) to the new capital at Itj-Twy (about two hours south of Cairo), near the marshy Faiyum region. Had he lived during the Middle Kingdom, Joseph, whose life centered near the king and the government, would not have been especially close to any of the Old Kingdom pyramid sites. If he did see them, they might have been a notable lesson in resource allocation to the foreign vizier: the end of the Old Kingdom was likely precipitated by the collapse of the government, rather than by external conflict or the dissipation of natural resources, and the government may well have bankrupted itself with building projects.

This collapse of central authority shifted the balance of power away from the king and out toward a handful of powerful regional rulers called nomarchs who appear to have governed largely without a strong central government. Known as the First Intermediate Period and lasting around two hundred years, this time appears to have lingered in cultural memory as a chaotic and unstable period, beset with danger and darkness.

It’s hard to say whether things were actually as desperate as later records indicate—a change in regime often necessitates unflattering comparisons with the period just preceding it—but not long after 2000 b.c., the First Intermediate Period ended as a new generation of native kings came to power, and the prosperous Middle Kingdom began. Amenhemhat I (along with his son, Senusret I) moved the ruling capital to Itj-Twy (not, interestingly, to his native Thebes, which became the capital during the New Kingdom) and unified the country once more under the Twelfth Dynasty. The Twelfth Dynasty (that is, the twelfth family of rulers, including one ruling queen) is synonymous with the time frame of the Middle Kingdom and lasted about as long as the preceding chaotic period (approximately 1990–1780 b.c.).

King Senusret II therefore came to power about one hundred years after the rise of the Twelfth Dynasty, when the cultural memory of the First Intermediate Period and its accompanying woes were, if not exactly fresh, inevitably still present. Thus, a certain comparative pride in the stability, prosperity, and accomplishments of the Middle Kingdom—though likely not without concern about reverting to the country’s previous instability—would likely have been the dominant sentiment of the day.

Beyond the Middle Kingdom

One other chronological candidate, not represented in the novel, deserves mention, because placing Joseph in the Middle Kingdom is admittedly less common an approach to biblical chronology. While Joseph himself may not attract too much attention in regard to his chronological setting, the much later exodus of Jacob’s descendants out of Egypt, which is inevitably tied to Joseph’s own arrival in Egypt, has often been set, whether in academic or cinematic conjecture, in the aggressive New Kingdom, often under the Ramesside kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty.

Even taking the Genesis account at its own word, calculating the time between Joseph’s arrival and the later Israelite exodus is a little tricky. For example, Abraham prophesied that his descendants would sojourn for four hundred years, and it’s unclear whether the four hundred years should be calculated from the time of Abraham or the time of Joseph, and so on. Nevertheless, it does seem that the later Israelite exodus fits nicely into one of the New Kingdom dynasties, after the expulsion of the (possibly Semitic) Hyksos kings, whose rise to power ended the Middle Kingdom and whose overthrow ushered in the New Kingdom thereafter. Assuming a New Kingdom exodus, the question for Joseph is which preceding period makes the most sense: the Middle Kingdom or the Second Intermediate Period, which fell between the Middle and the New Kingdoms? In the novel, he comes to Egypt during the Middle Kingdom; however, it has also been suggested that placing Joseph’s arrival during the Second Intermediate Period, during the reign of the foreign Hyksos kings, might better account for his rapid political ascendency.

Along with shaping the New Kingdom’s cultural and political consciousness regarding the necessity of aggression and empire building (an attitude that certainly seems to fit with the oppressive conditions that open the record in the book of Exodus), the overthrow of the Hyksos rulers ushered in the new Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties of native Egyptian rulers. A change in political power and a new family of rulers would certainly explain the enigmatic opening line of the book of Exodus: “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8). Putting Joseph in the Middle Kingdom would probably put the Exodus in the Eighteenth Dynasty; dropping Joseph in among the Hyksos rulers would likely push the Exodus into the Nineteenth Dynasty.

As you may be sensing, at the end of the day no one really knows—though this is no reason to deny anyone the delicious pleasure of hearty speculation. Ramses II (whose name means Born-of-Ra), of the Nineteenth Dynasty Ramesside kings (that is, kings named Ramses), is not infrequently suggested as the ruler who might have instigated the Exodus. Tuthmoses, meanwhile, which shows up as the name of several Eighteenth Dynasty kings, means Born-of-Thoth. And if you think you recognize the mss root in both of these New Kingdom dynasty names—a root that means “born of” and, by itself, might simply mean “born of an unknown or unnamed god”—as the name of a Hebrew baby adopted by an unnamed but probably New Kingdom Egyptian dynasty, you do.

Geography: The Black Land and the Red Land

Throughout Egyptian writing and religion, there is a strong preoccupation with the way the forces of harmony and justice (ma’at) are in constant conflict with the destructive powers of chaos and instability. This metaphysical construct of harmony constantly battling destruction was also reflected starkly and literally in the demarcation of the land itself. The area where the Nile flooded was called Kemet, or the Black Land, named after the residual, nutrient-rich mud spread over the landscape by the annual flooding. The four-month flooding season actually forced the People to travel by boat outside their homes, thanks to the rise in the water level.

Egyptian civilization clung closely to the part of the land nourished (exclusively) by the Nile floods. The region along the River allowed for agricultural cultivation and provided a constant bounty of water, fish, and plant life. In contrast, the area beyond the sustaining reach of the Nile—the Deshret, or Red Land—was considered hostile, sterile, and without a source of natural nourishment or the steadying hand of civilizing governance. A hapless traveler was simply and solely at the mercy of the unbridled forces of nature and the whims of the desert tribes.

Egypt’s geography also created a certain regional dichotomy, which may well have contributed to the country’s undulating political stability. The country divided quite naturally into an Upper and Lower Kingdom—which distinction corresponded, confusingly, to southern (Upper) Egypt and northern (Lower) Egypt. Instead of indicating relative latitude, the distinction was instead oriented to the directional flow of the Nile, which runs north from southern Egypt (the Upper Kingdom) toward the Nile Delta in northern Egypt (the Lower Kingdom). Not surprisingly, the two regions of this sizable country, parts of which were invariably separated from their king by quite some distance, routinely struggled to maintain their identity as one unified kingdom. The king’s double crown of red and white was itself a hopeful symbol of the two regions’ unity.

Time and All Eternity: Life and Afterlife in the Middle Kingdom

Along with political shifts and a sustaining, dualistic worldview, the Middle Kingdom saw important changes in the practice of religion. In the Egyptian (or Kemetian, if you like) worldview, kings were divine and directly connected with the gods. The king oversaw the law and order of the state and helped to maintain the delicate balance of ma’at so that interactions remained peaceful and relationships beneficial. He (or, in the occasional case of a ruling queen, she) also had the added benefit of divinity: the king was considered the son of the sun god Ra (“Son-of-Ra” was one of his titles) and was particularly associated with and protected by the hawk-headed god Horus, son of Isis and Osiris (themselves also children of Ra). Moreover, the king was believed to become fully divine after mortal life and was therefore buried with the necessary spells, rituals, and supplies to ensure a comfortable and successful transition into eternal life. The royal tombs were representative of the wealth and influence the king enjoyed during his lifetime and would continue to enjoy as a god.

During the Old Kingdom, only the king or nobles of great status seem to have had hopes of this glorious afterlife. At the very least, they were the only sort of people routinely buried with the necessary treasures and funeral texts—called the Pyramid Texts because of their exclusive appearance in aristocratic tombs—which contained a collection of the necessary rites, spells, and rituals for passage into the afterlife. However, after the collapse of the Old Kingdom and the proliferation of power into the hands of men besides the king, spiritual power seems to have experienced a similar democratic surge. The possibilities of immortality apparently began to extend to men and women besides the king and his relatives, and by the time of the Middle Kingdom, the chance at eternal life appears to have encompassed all men and women who could undertake the proper preparations and obtain the necessary spells and rituals.

This spread in religious ritual is evidenced by the spread of funeral texts and inscriptions once found almost exclusively within the royal pyramids. Copies of these religious rituals begin to appear in the tombs and among the personal possessions of nonaristocratic citizens and, to differentiate these records from the earlier Pyramid Texts, the Middle Kingdom funeral texts have consequently become known as Coffin Texts. By the New Kingdom, these collections of rituals and instructions proliferated into the myriad versions of what is now known as the Book of the Dead. Often kept as private documents that were then buried with their owners (though particular sections and spells also show up on tomb walls), the Book of the Dead and the preceding Coffin and Pyramid Texts all contain various assortments of instructions, spells, and rituals to aid the dead through the trials and impediments encountered between death and the entry into immortality and eternal life.

In the spirit of full anachronistic disclosure, the specific Breathings text quoted throughout the novel does not date to the Middle Kingdom. This particular document, which would have been used as a private ritual text by the original owner and buried with him at the time of death, comes from a later, likely New Kingdom, date. However, while the religious ritual of the Egyptians evolved to some degree over time, the essential ritual steps, whenever they were written down, appear to have remained relatively constant and uniformly old. Several spells from the Book of the Dead appear to date back to the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, meaning that the rituals were transmitted over hundreds or even thousands of years. Quoting this particular text is more like quoting from a twentieth-century publication of a collection of Shakespeare—the actual document is newer than its content and would be equally recognizable (or unrecognizable) to a reader in 1714 as in 2014.

However, even with the necessary rituals and preparations, immortality depended in large part on conforming one’s life to the principles of ma’at. Such conformity meant that a person lived properly, justly, and in harmony with one’s neighbors and the forces that govern the world. Amongst the spells in the Book of the Dead, which exist in various abbreviated or elongated forms, depending on the specific copy, there is a specific rite for successfully undergoing divine judgment, and the famous judgment scene gives us an explicit look into what such judgment entailed.

A soul’s heart was placed on a balance against an ostrich feather (a symbol of ma’at) in the presence of watchful gods, including the goddesses Isis and Nephtys, who helped prepare the soul for judgment. Sometimes, Osiris himself—the god of the underworld and a potent symbol of resurrection—was present as an onlooker. In fact, suppliants were explicitly identified by the name Osiris throughout the recitation of the funeral texts (as in “Osiris-[name]”), taking on the god’s identity in imitation of Osiris’s own successful passage through the underworld. If the heart of the suppliant balanced against the ma’at feather, the person would be revealed as one who had lived according to the precepts of ma’at and would be received into eternal life. If not, the unworthy heart would be devoured by a crouched, crocodile-headed beast named Ammit, and eternal life would be forfeit.

All things, in the Egyptian view, thus had spiritual undercurrents. While there was clearly an acknowledgment of both good and evil, such awareness does not appear to have carried over into creating alliances with one force over the other. The presence of all divinity saturated the everyday world, and the Egyptians conducted their daily lives in constant acknowledgment of ever-present spiritual forces (even Seth, the murderous brother of Osiris, had his own cultic following). The Egyptians therefore worshipped a great variety of gods and goddesses, who appear to have represented the various forces and aspects of the spiritual realities underlying everyday life. Many homes appear to have had small rooms where members of the household could engage in private worship, burning incense and keeping small statues of the gods they particularly wished to supplicate, such as those who oversaw fertility, childbirth, or domestic prosperity. Annual public festivals of worship and celebration similarly kept the Egyptians aware of both the community and the divinity that bound up their world.

Further underscoring the intermingling of religious and everyday life, the priesthood was not a full-time occupation until the New Kingdom. Men held professions outside their sacred work and would serve in the temples for only a certain amount of time (say, three months out of the year), rather than devoting themselves full-time to religious duties. They were required to shave their bodies and maintain a state of purity while serving in the temples, but they would return to their outside lives upon the completion of their service. Priestesses, too, were known to exist, though they appear to have served in different capacities and sometimes appear as sacred singers and dancers. The office of the high priests of the various religious orders (such as the high priest of Ra) were often political as well as religious positions. It would not have been unusual for men in significant political positions—like Potiphar and Joseph—to hold priesthood offices as well.

Culture: The People of Kemet and Deshret

Kemet

A multitude of other peoples lived beyond the boundaries of Egypt, including the Asiatic desert tribes and their Nubian neighbors. The Egyptian kings sent out expeditions both for diplomacy and for trade, and there were even mining operations stretching out into the Sinai for copper and turquoise. The average Egyptian, however, would likely have had little or no interaction with any of these foreign peoples. Foreigners would have come into Egypt primarily to trade (tourism was not yet in Egypt what it is now) or been brought in as slaves. Although there was apparently a great influx of captured Canaanite slaves during the Middle Kingdom (and the Canaanites primarily appear to have served as domestic servants), it would be a stretch to imagine the Middle Kingdom as particularly cosmopolitan.

However, the Middle Kingdom Egyptians would likely have been suspicious rather than hostile toward foreigners simply from lack of exposure. After all, it was not until the New Kingdom that Egypt began to take a deliberately militaristic attitude toward neighboring peoples. And throughout her remarkably long history—exceeding three thousand years of unbroken civilization—Egypt never became a mighty military empire in the model of the Assyrians, Babylonians, or Romans. Instead, the country and culture were, and essentially always remained, fundamentally peaceful, agricultural, and self-sustaining. In fact, this mighty agrarian empire far outlasted any of the other ancient powers in that region of the world by several thousand years. Not until the incursion of Alexander the Great (in the fourth century b.c.>) did Egypt fall permanently under foreign rule, and it was only following the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra (the queen who was the last of the Ptolemaic, or Greek, rulers) in 30 b.c. that Egypt was finally subsumed into the Roman Empire.

Along with being a remarkably stable civilization, ancient Egypt was also notably humane. The concept of ma’at—that difficult to define sense of social justice and harmony, if not righteousness—was the foundational philosophy of all interaction and law. Those with power were expected to advocate on behalf of the weak and the powerless, and rulers were expected to be law abiding and just. Even slaves, rather than being considered merely as chattels of their masters, were endowed with certain rights—including the ability to own and bequeath property, the option for male slaves to marry free-born women, and even the possibility of eventual freedom and citizenship.

Although they did not appear to hold many positions outside domestic life and they married early, usually as teenagers, Egyptian women possessed equal rights with Egyptian men. Women could own property, pursue legal action, instigate divorces, serve in the temples, and inherit the throne (although female rulers were far more rare than their male counterparts). Literacy was not widespread among men or women, but there is evidence that well-born women may have had the opportunity to be educated alongside their brothers. Marriages were rarely arranged, and couples were expected to be monogamous. Children were considered a great blessing, and infertility might result in taking another wife or slave-women to bear children in the wife’s place. Fidelity and marital happiness were considered natural and desirable, and adultery would have been considered a serious breach of ma’at and the social law of the land.

Add to their relatively humane worldview the details regarding dress and hygiene for both men and women—shaved bodies, frequent bathing, wigs and elaborate hair-styles, makeup, perfume, linen, and abundant jewelry—and you begin to get the sense that Kemet would have been an abrupt contrast with the world Joseph left behind.

Deshret

Indeed, in many ways, Judah’s world could not stand at greater contrast to his brother’s. Deshret, or the Red Land, was home to isolated and often warring tribes and scattered townships. Rather than being home to relatively peaceful and unified citizens of a highly bureaucratic and organized state, the Red Land presented a much starker picture of survival—tribal, often nomadic, and, within the scope of the Genesis narrative, saturated with both secular and sacred violence. Yet despite violence, violation, death, famine, and betrayal, Jacob and his family survived with tenacity, courage, and extraordinary spirit.

The absence of bureaucracy, of course, did not mean the native Canaanites were a people without order. There were towns and cities full of Canaanite inhabitants who led a much more settled life than the nomadic desert tribes and who have left to history their own collection of cultural relics. Indeed, many of the descendants of these people were still living in Canaan—Abraham’s promised land—when Jacob’s descendants (hereafter Israelites, as opposed to Canaanites) returned from their nearly five-century sojourn in Egypt. Much of the early history found in the book of Judges records the Israelites’ conflicts with these other native Canaanites, whom they were forbidden to marry or join and with whom they waged an incessant series of territorial and cultural battles.

Like the other Asiatic tribes and ancient powers, including the later Babylonians and Assyrians, the Canaanites worshipped multiple gods and goddesses. Several of these deities—such as the god Ba’al, who apparently liked human sacrifices, and his consort, the fertility goddess Astoreth—continue to show up quite late into Israelite history, even making an appearance in the clash between the much-later queen Jezebel and the Israelite prophet Elijah. As long as the two peoples lived alongside each other, the Canaanites’ enticing religious rites evidently remained a constant and alluring temptation for the chaste, monotheistic Israelites.

Religious, tribal, and family identities were all closely intertwined in the Israelite tradition; indeed, the violation of any one part of this composite identity could compromise the identity in its entirety. Like their Canaanite neighbors, the Israelites tended to be heavily patriarchal, with sons inheriting from their fathers and men standing at the head of the family. However, sons could also lose their spiritual and secular inheritance through violation of the tenets of the covenant. Marriages were to be undertaken exclusively with other inheritors of the Abrahamic covenant, though the early record indicates that such inheritance could come through birth or conversion (Dinah’s new husband, Shechem, was murdered after undergoing the ritual requirement of circumcision). To marry outside the covenant was one sure way to forfeit tribal and spiritual privileges, as well as one’s core identity, and to threaten all of one’s descendants with the forfeiture of their birthright as Abraham’s heirs.

The frequent incursion of non-Israelite women into Israelite history—including the wives of Joseph and Judah and several ancestors of the illustrious king David—remains, therefore, one of the most intriguing aspects of the record.

The Brothers

As the astute reader has also no doubt noticed, the rituals mentioned in the Breathings text (including the transference of breath, washing, ritual interaction with two distinct women, and Osiris’s eventual reunion with his father, Ra) align with notable harmony alongside the experiences of Joseph and Judah. Their experiences also align quite remarkably and in ways all recorded in Genesis. Indeed, the two brothers’ lives are inextricably intertwined. After all, it is Judah whose suggestion spares Joseph’s life and (albeit in the novel, inadvertently) sends him on to Egypt, and it is Judah whose plea on behalf of the falsely accused Benjamin eventually reunites his long-lost brother with their family more than twenty years later. At the same time, the very different worlds that Joseph and Judah inhabit influence (at least within the novel) each brother’s engagement with the fundamental conflicts inherent in the larger world—good and evil, harmony and chaos, justice and corruption.

Egyptians and Israelites

The Israelite worldview was one in which mortal man was engaged in a constant struggle between personified forces of good and evil, symbolized in the story of the Garden of Eden. The world and all of its inhabitants were irretrievably broken, fallen from the presence of God without hope of return, save for the power of a single, personal, redeeming God who had power over the inevitable conditions of physical and spiritual death. And it was this God that the patriarch Abraham sought out and who, he taught, had opened his mind to visions and entered into a redemptive covenant with him and all of his descendants after him.

As part of this relationship, Abraham and his descendants practiced sacrifice—both literally, with the symbolic offering of animals, and figuratively, in obediently conforming lives and habits with divine will—as they sought atonement. This at-one-ment was literally a reunion with the divine, brought about by conforming one’s life to God’s teachings and thereby activating divine mercy and salvation. The definition of a life properly lived centered on cultivating this personal relationship, through obedience, between an individual and God. And despite the constant search for a promised land, there was not, in the lifetime of any of the Patriarchs, any true and lasting refuge in the world, aside from God—Abraham’s heirs were simply “strangers and sojourners” (Genesis 23:4) to the end.

The all-important purpose of life, from an Egyptian perspective, was not explicitly focused on seeking a personal relationship with a personal deity (and using the deity’s commands as a basis for human interaction) but rather in cultivating and conducting proper, harmonious, and just relationships with one another based on the more amorphous concept of ma’at. The practice of ma’at—frequently personified as a winged, protective goddess—along with religious practice (which focused on worshipping and acknowledging a multitude of divine forces) and the strong rule of a divine king (considered the ultimate link with the gods) helped keep Kemet in a state of proper balance and order. Kemet herself was seen as a bastion of civilization, order, and justice, albeit under constant threat from the upending forces of disunity and chaos found beyond her borders. Like the Israelites, a life in conformance with a higher divine will, personified in the practice of ma’at, was the ultimate requirement for peace in this life and passing into the exalted afterlife. But in contrast to the wandering Israelites, to the Egyptian mind the Red Land that lay beyond the peaceful, orderly borders of Kemet—Deshret, from which we get the English word desert—was nothing to be desired. It was a place of disorder, death, and chaos. The Egyptians even buried their dead on the west side of the Nile—facing toward the uncharted Deshret.

Reunion

Along with spending their adult lives in very different worlds, Joseph and Judah are also the only two of Jacob’s sons of whom we have any record showing significant time spent away from their father and family. In the story, therefore, they grapple with the fundamental questions of identity and survival in a different way from their more insular brothers. They are equally pursued by recurring questions regarding their true identities: Joseph as a displaced and inadvertent citizen of Kemet, an heir who becomes a slave who becomes a prisoner who becomes the vizier who eventually saves the brothers who betrayed him, and Judah as a refugee (and, he fears, a murderer), a man of some stature among the Canaanites, and, eventually, the brother who plays the other pivotal role in unifying and saving his family. Each undergoes a process of transformation and recollection in his sojourn, being alternatively humbled and enlivened by his experiences. Each ultimately comes to remember (or re-member) himself as Jacob’s son and Abraham’s heir.

The larger issue of remembrance—re-membrance, re-membering, a literal piecing back together—is a significant one, and so it should be, coming from a biblical text so wonderfully full of resurrection and reunion imagery. Potiphar’s sacred writings, which come from the Egyptian Book of Breathings, are no less saturated with restoration imagery. Indeed, the central theme of the Breathings text is essentially one of resurrection by reunion: a reunion of body and spirit, of mortality and divinity, of man and the gods.

In the Israelite story of the Garden of Eden, the man Adam is tricked by the serpent, Satan, and doomed to suffer physical death and permanent isolation from God as a result of his changed nature. His hope turns to the eventual promise of a redeemer, who will have power over death and possess the ability to restore his divine nature. In Egyptian mythology, the god Osiris, with whom the initiate identifies himself, is killed and dismembered by his jealous brother; he is then literally “re-membered”—pieced back together and regenerated—by his wife, Isis. Even the word breathings—snsn—apparently has strong implications of union, or reunion, as well as life-breath. It is life restored through the restoration of body, soul, and divine association. The giving and receiving of breath is thus a sort of divine embrace, a sacred, life-reviving kiss.

Joseph’s story is perhaps the perfect blend of Israelite and Egyptian restoration imagery, particularly in regard to the episode in which his coat (the symbol of the covenant and the birthright) is dismembered and he himself is thrown into the earth as a dead man and separated from his home and birthright. Happily, when he is eventually reunited with his father and family, he has the power to restore life to his family—ironically, but in keeping with both the Egyptian and the Israelite redemption narratives, as a direct result of an earlier treachery.

Such a deft touch in the Genesis narrative can hardly be coincidental.

Caveat Emptor

The characterizations and structure within the novel have sought to be reasonably supported by the original narrative, though they may not necessarily follow its most familiar interpretations. At times, language and cadence are directly borrowed.

The characters of Amon, Asar, and Joseph and the others of Potiphar’s household staff are entirely fictional. There is also no explicit evidence that Joseph’s wife, Asenath, has any particular relation to the elusive character Potiphar, who is only ever identified as the captain of the guard, not the vizier. However, we do know that Asenath’s father is “Potipherah, priest of On.” On is Heliopolis, or the Temple of Ra, and Potipherah and Potiphar are the same name. Incidentally, this is also the same name that appears in Abraham’s account of his near-sacrifice at “Potiphar’s Hill” (Abraham 1:20), though the full implications of this detail remain to be explored another day.

The name Potiphar indeed means “Given-of-Ra” and derives from the divine name of the sun god, the dominant royal deity of the Old Kingdom. Although Osiris appears to have become the dominant deity figure by the Middle Kingdom (and is the god with whom initiates identify themselves in the funeral texts), Ra, the father of Osiris, remained a powerful and important figure. The Temple of Ra at Heliopolis (Greek, “City of the Sun”)—called by its native name “Iunu” in the novel and “On” in the Genesis account—served as a religious site of enormous importance. Indeed, it may well have been founded to commemorate the first moment and first geographic spot of the original creation—where a sacred mound rose up out of the primordial waters and was struck by a ray of light.

Finally, the events presented in the novel have been juxtaposed for the sake of elucidating the parallels, foils, and repetitions nestled within the original narrative, all of which can be studied, poked, prodded, and researched but never improved upon.

Works Cited

The Book of Breathings text quoted throughout the novel is taken from Hugh Nibley’s translation of the ancient Egyptian text of the same name, published in his book The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment (Deseret Book and Maxwell Institute, 2005). Any alteration of Dr. Nibley’s translation is the author’s own.

The writings of Abraham are taken from the Pearl of Great Price, as translated by Joseph Smith and published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981. Again, any alteration is the work of the author.

Works Consulted

Additional sources consulted in researching and writing the novel include The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, translated by Raymond O. Faulkner, London: British Museum Press, revised edition, 2010; The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, Oxford University Press, 1993; The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, edited by Ian Shaw, Oxford University Press, 2000; Jan Assman, The Mind of Ancient Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs, translated by Andrew Jenkins, Metropolitan Books, 2002; Mark Collier and Bill Manley, How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs, revised edition, University of California Press, 1998; Rosalie David, Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt, revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1998; Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, University of Chicago Press, 2003; Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Press, 1967; Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 2nd edition, Deseret Book and Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), 2000; Hugh Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment, 2nd edition, Deseret Book and FARMS, 2005; R. B. Parkinson, Voices from Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Middle Kingdom Writings, British Museum Press, 1991; Donald P. Ryan, Ancient Egypt on 5 Deben a Day, Thames & Hudson, 2010; Joyce Tyldesley, Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt, Penguin Books, 2010; Gordon Wenham, World Biblical Commentary: Genesis 16–50, Thomas Nelson, 1994; Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, Jewish Publication Society, 1995.