Chapter 4

Genesis 42:17

Huddled in the darkness, the men from Canaan crowded into their own corner of the prison—the royal prison, though they were unaware of the distinction. They were separated from their freedom by a mud-brick wall, unbroken except for a single small window, cut out and barred with stiff wooden poles so that the guards could peer inside.

A handful of other prisoners, awaiting their own fates, shared the tight space, murmuring at the crowding arrival of this new band of men.

Judah found himself locking eyes, unintentionally, with a grizzled, thin-faced prisoner sitting in another corner and staring at the foreigners with dark, unblinking eyes.

“There was no reason to accuse us,” his oldest brother, Reuben, muttered, speaking in low tones to the brothers who sat around him with their knees pulled up to make room for the others.

“Everyone knows these people look down on—what do they call us?—desert dwellers.” The voice belonged to the second brother, Simeon, a tall, thin man with a slight beard, whose face favored their mother’s more than his broad-shouldered elder brother’s did.

“But we weren’t doing anything,” insisted Levi. “There was no reason—”

“How long will they hold us here?” asked Asher, who had been shivering despite the heat of the day. “Surely they won’t just keep us—”

“They’ll keep us,” said Judah. He had sought to calm his brothers when the guards came for them outside the granary, and now he sat slightly off to the side. “Until one of us brings Benjamin back.”

Reuben and Simeon looked toward him. Reuben shook his head. “Father won’t allow it.”

“What if they mean to trap us here?” Asher asked. “Even if someone brings Benjamin?”

“Benjamin won’t leave,” Reuben insisted.

“Then we all stay,” said Judah.

Some of the other brothers were beginning to mutter, watching the exchange. Simeon turned away and spoke in a low voice to Levi and Reuben. Judah was only half-listening, feeling only too keenly the growing protest in his aging body, left here to sit on the unyielding ground in a foreign land, impossibly far from help or home. He closed his eyes.

What are you no no stop you can’t no you can’t no—

That had been a summer day too, without hint of shade or hope of relief, only the open hole in the ground.

My brothers my brothers please my brothers—

We have no right, Judah thought, to think we deserve mercy.

“Brother,” he heard, and someone touched his arm. He turned toward the voice. Issachar, one of the youngest among them, though no longer young, was watching Judah in the dim light. “Are you all right?”

Judah nodded.

Issachar glanced toward Reuben, Simeon, and Levi, who sat together as if in council. They had been the first to be born into the family, and all had been born to Judah’s own mother, Leah, first wife of his father, Jacob, and mother of seven of Jacob’s children. Judah was the fourth of those children and Issachar the fifth, though four other sons separated them, sons born to serving women who had given birth to children on behalf of their mistresses.

It was somehow fitting, Judah thought, that of all the brothers held together in this prison, only the two sons of his father’s second wife—Rachel, his mother’s younger sister, the woman whom his father had loved above all others—were not among them.

Judah thought of those two half-brothers, boys who had been both favored and motherless most of their lives. Benjamin, the youngest of all the family, had never known his mother, and Rachel’s other son . . . Well, as Reuben had told the official, her other son was not.

Judah closed his eyes, hearing the voice again.

My brothers . . .

And he thought, We are no brothers.

“Judah.” He glanced toward Simeon, who was speaking to him. “Who do you think we should send back?”

Judah looked at Simeon, whose eyes stared through the darkness with their familiar sense of challenge.

“Whoever can be trusted,” Judah said at last, pausing just long enough to let the first half of the statement linger, “to convince Father.”

Simeon’s eyes narrowed slightly. “And who would that be?”

“Someone who would not betray his family.”

In the quiet, Judah could hear the scuffling of other prisoners, the low conversations in unknown tongues, and the hacking cough of a man who lay on the floor with his back to them.

Finally Reuben said softly, “That is old blood, brother.”

“Reuben could go,” suggested Gad, who until then had sat silently beside his only full brother, Asher, both sons of Leah’s serving woman, Zilpah, and inheritors of Zilpah’s waving hair and dimpled chin. “As the eldest.”

Reuben flicked a loose pebble away, watching it bounce across the dirt. “Father’s trust in me,” he said, “may not be sufficient.”

Judah looked away into the darkness.

At last Zebulon, Leah’s youngest son, raised his eyes. “There is no heir,” he said quietly, “so there is no clear choice about who should go, is there?”

There was no response to that, Judah thought in the quiet that followed, because there was nothing left to be said.