6
Joseph
According to a venerable Spanish proverb, God writes straight with crooked lines (Dios escribe derecho con renglones torcidos), but how crooked does God allow the lines to become before he begins straightening them? This is the question that will shape our consideration of Yahweh Elohim and of Allah in the story of Joseph.
A famous few lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet make the same point as the Spanish proverb and invite the same question:
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will. (Act V, sc. ii, lines 8–11)
To use Shakespeare’s language, how rough may we hew before divinity shapes? At this point in the play, the murderous and usurping King Claudius of Denmark has sent his nephew, Prince Hamlet, the son of Claudius’s slain predecessor on the throne, to England. Hamlet’s shipboard traveling companions, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are carrying a letter from Claudius to the King of England. Indiscreetly and secretly, Hamlet opens the letter and discovers that Claudius has asked the English king to have Hamlet executed. In appropriately flowery diplomatic language, Hamlet then writes a substitute letter instructing the English king to execute the letter’s bearers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves. Hamlet seals this substitute letter into the very envelope that Claudius’s unsuspecting agents are carrying, and in due course the King of England does as requested.
The death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is not the end of the tragedy, however. Hamlet’s letter was just one of the crooked lines, and in the play’s final scene he himself will die. But is even his death the play’s true conclusion? What awaits him in the afterlife, “from whose bourn / No traveller returns,” in which he so firmly believes? Where does the “divinity that shapes our ends” end its shaping? Hamlet’s dying words are: “The rest is silence.”
In the biblical saga, after the departure of Hagar and Ishmael, little is said about him and nothing about her. The narration continues through Isaac, who fathers two sons, one of whom, Jacob, acquires the sobriquet Israel. Jacob/Israel then fathers twelve sons by two wives and their respective maidservants, whom he takes as concubines: these twelve are to be the eponymous patriarchs of the future twelve tribes of Israel. Among the twelve, leaving aside the toddler Benjamin, Jacob favors the seventeen-year-old Joseph—born to his favorite wife, Rachel—over the other ten, born to the concubines and to his less favored wife, Leah.
Jacob loved Joseph more than all his other sons, for he was the son of his old age, and he had a decorated tunic made for him. But his brothers, seeing how much more his father loved him than all his other sons, came to hate him so much that they could not say a civil word to him. (Genesis 37:3–4)
Bitter rivalry between the wives, now transferred to their respective sons, is the context for a “rough-hewed” indiscretion by the teenaged Joseph that puts the plot in motion.
Now Joseph had a dream, and he repeated it to his brothers, who then hated him more than ever. “Listen,” he said, “to the dream I had. We were binding sheaves in the field, when my sheaf suddenly rose and stood upright, and then your sheaves gathered round and bowed to my sheaf.” “So you want to be king over us,” his brothers retorted, “you want to lord it over us?” And they hated him even more, on account of his dreams and of what he said. He had another dream which he recounted to his brothers. “Look, I have had another dream,” he said. “There were the sun, the moon and eleven stars, bowing down to me.” He told his father and brothers, and his father scolded him. “A fine dream to have!” he said to him. “Are all of us then, myself, your mother and your brothers, to come and bow to the ground before you?” His brothers held it against him, but his father pondered the matter. (37:5−1)
In both the Bible and the Qur’an, God sometimes speaks through dreams, but it is clear not just from the brothers’ reaction but also from Jacob’s that they take this dream to come from nowhere loftier than a cocky teenager’s imagination. A grave sin? Hardly. Rather, a boyish indiscretion that merely sets old Jacob to thinking.
This indiscretion, however, is a last-straw affront to the brothers. Out in the pastureland with their father’s flocks and far from his tent, the brothers see Joseph approaching and are suddenly seized with a murderous impulse:
“Here comes that dreamer,” they said to one another. “Come on, let us kill him now and throw him down one of the storage-wells; we can say that some wild animal has devoured him. Then we shall see what becomes of his dreams.” (37:19−20)
Reuben, the eldest brother, persuades them to throw Joseph into a dry well but not to kill him immediately. Having disposed of Joseph for the moment, the brothers then settle down to eat. But a caravan of Ishmaelite (Arab) traders happens along, and Judah says to his brothers:
“What do we gain by killing our brother and covering up his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, then we shall not have laid hands on him ourselves. After all, he is our brother, and our own flesh.” His brothers agreed. (37:26–27)
In Egypt, the traders sell Joseph to Potiphar, “one of Pharaoh’s officials and commander of the guard” (37:36). Back home, the brothers plunge Jacob into long days of mourning by dipping Joseph’s decorated tunic in goat’s blood, leading the old man to believe that his favorite son is dead, dragged off and devoured by a wild beast.
To this point in the biblical account, the anonymous narrator has not offered the story of Joseph as in any way an exemplary story, and he has assigned Yahweh Elohim neither a speaking role in it nor any other kind of intervention. Human action, indiscreet or impulsive as it may be, excusable or inexcusable, seems to be all that is driving the action forward.
The same story assumes a strikingly different character as Allah tells it in the Qur’an:
Remember when Joseph said to his father: “O father, I dreamt of eleven stars, and of the sun and moon. I dreamt they were bowing down before me.”
He said: “My son, do not relate your dream to your brothers, else they will contrive and plot against you. Satan to man is a manifest enemy. Thus will your Lord choose you and teach you the interpretation of reports, and perfect His grace upon you and upon the family of Jacob, as He perfected it upon your ancestors before you, Abraham and Isaac. Your Lord is Omniscient, All-Wise.”
In the story of Joseph and his brothers there were clear signs to those who seek answers.
Remember when they said: “Joseph and his brother are more dear to our father than we are, though we are a band. Our father is in manifest error. So kill Joseph or drive him away to some land, and the face of your father shall be wholly yours, and after him you shall be a virtuous community.”
One of them said: “Do not kill Joseph but throw him into the darkness of the well, where some travellers will pick him up—that is, if you carry through that deed.”
They said: “O father, why is it that you do not trust us with Joseph, though we care for him? Send him with us tomorrow to roam and play, and we will surely guard him well.”
He said: “It grieves me that you take him away, and I fear the wolf might eat him when you are not minding him.”
They said: “Were a wolf to eat him, we being a band, we would most surely be good for nothing!”
When they set out with him, and all agreed they would hurl him into the darkness of the well, We revealed to him: “You shall acquaint them with this act of theirs at a time when they shall recall it not.” (12:4−15)
In the biblical account, there is the divine actor, on the one hand, and there are the human actors, on the other. In the qur’anic account, there are the divine actor and the human actors, and then there is the demonic actor: a two-character play becomes a three-character play in which Satan has the godlike power to enter and influence human minds and manipulate the course of events. As the biblical narrator tells the story, the brothers’ envy is self-explanatory. As Allah tells it, Satan did what he could to lead the brothers into sin.
The biblical narrator would have us believe that Jacob sent Joseph to join his brothers in the field never guessing that he was sending his favorite son into danger. Allah, who honors Jacob as a prophet, tells us a different story. Allah portrays Jacob as fully aware of the brothers’ malice, warning Joseph in advance to beware the ten and not tell them the dream that Joseph has just told his father. As for that dream itself, Allah again corrects the Bible: Jacob is not offended by it, merely concerned that Satan and the brothers—the two mentioned in the same breath—will use it against Joseph.
Jacob goes on to predict that Joseph too will become a prophet: “Thus will your Lord choose you and teach you the interpretations of reports.” And Allah further indicates that His final goal in managing the events of the Joseph episode as He does is to offer “clear signs to those who seek answers” (12:7). What happens to Joseph and his brothers is happening, in other words, so that their story can eventually be part of the Qur’an.
The biblical story of Joseph is a tour de force of Hebrew narrative art, one of the subtlest and most elegant narrative set pieces in the entire Bible. Betrayal and deceit in which the anonymous, omniscient narrator and we the readers know the truth while one or another of the human actors in the story—Jacob or Joseph or, later, Judah—does not is intrinsic to its power. As we wait, repeatedly, for one actor or another to learn what we already know, suspense mounts, declines, mounts again, declines again, and so forth.
But where is Yahweh Elohim through all this suspense? Joseph—betrayed by his brothers, trapped at the bottom of a pit, awaiting in anguish what lies ahead—is a man whose plight would seem to cry out for the sort of prayer that we hear so often in the Psalms, where “the pit” is sometimes a powerful symbol for human despair and divine delay.
Such a psalm is Psalm 69, where we read:
It is for you I bear insults,
my face is covered with shame,
I am estranged from my brothers,
alienated from my own mother’s sons;
for I am eaten up with zeal for your house,
and insults directed against you fall on me.
Rescue me from the mire before I sink in;
so I shall be saved from those who hate me,
from the watery depths.
Let not the waves wash over me,
nor the deep swallow me up,
nor the pit close its mouth on me. (Psalm 69:7−9, 14−15)
Powerful lines, but in the Book of Genesis, Joseph may be consumed with dread but is not “consumed with zeal” for Yahweh’s house. He has shown, as yet, no sense at all of divine election or vocation. The reader is left wondering not only whether Joseph will beseech Yahweh Elohim to come to his rescue but also whether Yahweh Elohim will respond. As these background questions remain unanswered, a hum of theographical suspense grows behind the more obvious elements of narrative suspense.
But suspense is simply not a game that Allah plays in the Qur’an. Joseph, for whom Jacob has already provided some considerable, tension-relieving sense of what lies ahead, is visited by Allah Himself while he is still in the pit and before he has ever been sold into slavery in Egypt. Allah tells him, reassuringly, “You shall acquaint them with this act of theirs at a time when they shall recall it not” (12:15). Allah tells Joseph, in effect: To their great surprise, you will have the last word.
As the biblical story continues, the anonymous narrator does begin to mention Yahweh, even rather insistently:
Now Joseph had been taken down into Egypt. Potiphar the Egyptian, one of Pharaoh’s officials and commander of the guard, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had taken him down there. Yahweh was with Joseph, and everything he undertook was successful. He lodged in the house of his Egyptian master, and when his master saw how Yahweh was with him and how Yahweh made everything he undertook successful, he was pleased with Joseph and made him his personal attendant; and his master put him in charge of his household, entrusting him with all his possessions. And from the time he put him in charge of his household and all his possessions, Yahweh blessed the Egyptian’s household out of consideration for Joseph; Yahweh’s blessing extended to all his possessions, both household and estate. So he left Joseph to handle all his possessions, and with him there, concerned himself with nothing beyond the food he ate. (39:1–6)
Yahweh, Yahweh, Yahweh—five mentions within just six short verses. But at this point does Joseph know all that the omniscient biblical narrator knows? And what does the narrator intend by the words “[Joseph’s] master saw how Yahweh was with him and how Yahweh made everything he undertook successful”? Even in the terms of a narrative within which miracles do occur and God regularly does speak, we may well ask what it was that Potiphar actually saw? Did he see the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in action? Is that what the narrator intends? Or did he simply see a charismatic Joseph exceeding all human expectations?
The word charisma—from the Greek for “grace” or “divine favor”—connotes an ability or a power beyond the human. When we say, even in English, that someone is “gifted,” we imply that the gift had a giver whether or not we ever stop to ask who the giver might have been. Here, Yahweh Elohim is the giver, but does Potiphar see anything more than Joseph’s gifts? In the Qur’an, Allah comments:
Thus did We establish Joseph firmly on earth, in order that We might teach him the interpretation of reports. God’s decree will prevail, but most people do not know.
When he grew to full manhood, We granted him sound judgment and knowledge—thus do We reward those who act righteously. (12:21–22, emphasis added)
“Most people,” presumably including Potiphar (known in the Qur’an only as “the man from Egypt”), saw the effects of divine favor but not divinity itself. They lack the eyes to see the wonder unfolding before them.
As the story proceeds, we learn that administrative ability is not Joseph’s only gift:
Now Joseph was well built and handsome, and it happened some time later that his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, “Sleep with me.” (Genesis 39:7)
Joseph refuses out of loyalty to Potiphar, who has treated him so well and trusted him so completely, but also because of Elohim: “How could I do anything so wicked, and sin against God?” (39:9)
Potiphar’s wife’s attempt to seduce Joseph continues day after day. One day,
she caught hold of him by his tunic and said, “Sleep with me.” But he left the tunic in her hand, took to his heels and got out. (39:12)
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. When Potiphar returns home, his wife (unnamed in the biblical account) turns bitterly on Joseph and, holding up Joseph’s dropped tunic as evidence, accuses him of assaulting her. The outraged Potiphar then has Joseph clapped forthwith in the dungeon that, as commander of the guard, he maintains beneath his own residence.
Allah gives this episode a sharply different ending. Joseph’s master finds Joseph innocent and his own wife guilty in a seduction story that includes a slightly bawdy chase scene. The action begins as “The woman in whose house he dwelt sought to seduce him and shut firm the doors upon them: she in whose house he was staying sought to lure him from himself”:
She said: “Come to me!” He said: “God forbid! He is my lord and has treated me hospitably. Sinners do not prevail.” For she was about to possess him, and he to possess her, were it not that he saw the proof of his Lord.
Thus did it turn out, so that We might avert from him sin and debauchery. He was one of Our faithful worshippers.
They raced to the door, and she tore his shirt from behind. They found her master by the door.
She said: “What is the punishment for one who intended evil against your wife except to be imprisoned or suffer painful torment?”
He said: “It was she who attempted to seduce me.”
A witness from her family witnessed as follows: “If his shirt is torn from the front, then she is telling the truth and he is lying. But if his shirt is torn from behind, then she is lying and he is telling the truth.”
When he saw that his shirt was torn from behind, he said: “This is woman’s cunning; indeed, your cunning is great. O Joseph, mention this matter to no one; and you, woman, ask forgiveness for your offence, for you have truly been sinful.” (12:23–29)
Allah’s account ends with the too familiar “she said/he said,” but as the evidence favors the man, the master’s anger is directed mainly at the woman. By contrast, the biblical narrator’s account ends abruptly with “she said”: Joseph is permitted no reply, and Potiphar’s fury is directed at him alone.
Among other differences in these two accounts (differences of detail, such as the biblical lost tunic as opposed to the qur’anic torn shirt), one of some significance is that Allah allows candidly that Joseph was attracted to the woman, ready in human terms to “possess” her, even though he repelled her advances. About this, the biblical narrator has nothing to say. Essentially, however, the two accounts agree that Joseph resisted the woman’s advances both out of loyalty to his Egyptian master and out of adherence to God’s law. Satan, interestingly, is not an actor in this scene, but Allah is actively and declaratively engaged in it, bolstering Joseph’s virtue and, in asides, making His interpretive points for the benefit of Muhammad. Yahweh Elohim, for all we know at this point, is involved, if at all, only invisibly and behind the scenes.
The next chapter in either account is the tale of Joseph in prison. In the Bible, Joseph is behind bars simply because Potiphar has put him there. In the Qur’an, the story is noticeably more complicated. After Joseph’s master has largely exonerated him, Allah reports that his erstwhile seductress, even as she admits her sin, paraded Joseph before a gathering of the “women in the city,” who swooned over his unearthly beauty: “He is no human being! He is nothing but a noble angel” (12:31)! So smitten were they, Allah says, that instead of cutting the food that she has served them, they end up cutting their own hands. Implied is that, like so many raving maenads, they were about to yield to their longing en masse, and she is fully prepared to be their ringleader:
She said: “Here he is, the one you reproached me with! I attempted to seduce him but he resisted my seduction. And yet, if he does not do what I order him, he will assuredly be imprisoned and suffer humiliation.” (12:32)
Faced with the choice between imprisonment and consent to an orgy, Joseph replies:
“My Lord, prison is dearer to me than what they invite me to do. If You do not ward off their guile from me, I shall long for them, and so become a man of base desires.”
His Lord answered his call and averted their guile from him—He is All-Hearing, Omniscient. (12:33–34)
Once the signs of Joseph’s God-given resolve become unmistakable, the women turn on him and do manage to have him imprisoned. But this, it would seem, is clearly a part of Allah’s plan.
In the Bible, the story of Joseph seems to tell itself as one event leads to, or provokes, the next. Joseph’s imprisonment is caused by Potiphar’s believing his wife’s false accusation, which was caused by her fatal attraction to Joseph, which was caused by Joseph’s beauty, which was a gift from Elohim. Once in prison, events are set in motion again by Joseph’s skill in interpreting dreams, a skill he might not have been called on to exercise had events not led to his imprisonment in the first place.
In the Qur’an, Allah, the divine narrator, has shared His understanding of Joseph’s future with Jacob, His prophet, who, as we saw, has shared much of it with Joseph. Someday, Jacob has confided to Joseph, Joseph’s “interpretation of reports” will be Allah’s great gift to him, and someday, too, Joseph’s resolute decency will be a lesson to all inquirers—inquirers, we may assume, about Muhammad’s message. Allah thus not only tells the story but also controls the story as it unfolds, revealing as much of it in advance to His successive messengers as He chooses.
It is while he is in prison that Joseph begins to grow into his vocation as a prophet of Allah to the polytheist Egyptians:
Entering the prison with him were two young men.
One of them said: “I dreamt I was pressing grapes.”
The other said: “I dreamt I was carrying on my head bread from which the birds were eating. Tell us its interpretation, for we see you are a virtuous man.” (12:36)
Joseph confirms that, yes, he has the Allah-given power to interpret events but then proclaims his allegiance to “the religion of my forefathers, Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob.” As for what they believe:
“My fellow prisoners, are many and diverse gods better, or is the One Omnipotent God? What you worship instead of Him are merely names that you and your ancestors coined, and for which no authority has come from God. Sovereignty belongs solely to God. He commands that you worship none but Him. This is the upright religion, but most mankind have no understanding.” (12:39–40)
Sermons delivered in prison—and Joseph’s speech to his fellow prisoners is the longest he will give in the Qur’an’s Joseph story—can be as welcome and as life-giving as water in the desert or as desolating as the sight of land receding from view to a ship lost at sea. Decades ago, as a student in Rome, I attended a sermon in the lofty day room of a crumbling juvenile prison. Looming above the preacher hung a huge oil painting of the crucifixion and above it “God is love.” The canvas of the painting was so old that it hung in folds upon which dust had accumulated over the years. Daylight streamed down on the dust from barred windows up near the barrel-vaulted ceiling, far beyond the reach of the boys gathered miserably below. One of the boys, effeminate and mocked for it by the others, had the cruel nickname Biancaneve—Italian for “Snow White.” The scene could not have been more depressing. And yet many years later, I visited an American friend serving time for a drug offense in a low-security Northern California prison. How cheered and buoyed he was by my surprise visit to that semi-normal and yet joyless place! I had brought him nothing and could do nothing at all to help him. I left humbled, troubled, and yet glad I had gone.
Prison can be a place of either brutal or tender truth. I think of King Lear’s words to his daughter Cordelia—both doomed—as they are led off in hostile custody:
Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies. (Act V, sc. iii, lines 8–17)
Joseph in the Egyptian prison is like God’s spy telling the mystery of things to his two fellow prisoners:
“My fellow prisoners, as for one of you, he shall serve his master wine to drink; as for the other, he shall be crucified and the birds shall eat from his head. The issue is settled upon which you seek my opinion.”
To the man he imagined was about to be released from the two of them, he said: “Mention me to your master.” But Satan caused him to forget the mention of this to his master, and he languished in jail for several years. (12:41–42)
In the Bible, the narrator tells of a closely parallel pair of dreams, adding the detail that it was the king of Egypt’s cupbearer who had the wine dream and the king’s baker who had the bread dream. And the two biblical dreamers do not turn to Joseph because of his charismatic virtue as the qur’anic pair does. The interpretation is set in motion by Joseph himself, who has been assigned as a kind of Hebrew valet to the two royal Egyptian functionaries:
When Joseph came to them in the morning, he saw that they looked gloomy, and he asked the two officials who were in custody with him in his master’s house, “Why these sad looks today?” They replied, “We have each had a dream, but there is no one to interpret it.” “Are not interpretations God’s business?” Joseph asked them. “Tell me about them.” (40:6–8)
The long speech that Allah recounts, Joseph exalting the religion of his forefathers and belittling the religion of Egypt, here shrinks to just one sentence, and that sentence no more than a leading question: “Are not interpretations God’s business?”
After delivering the first, welcome interpretation to the cupbearer, the biblical Joseph adds:
“But be sure to remember me when things go well with you, and keep faith with me by kindly reminding Pharaoh about me, to get me out of this house. I was kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews in the first place, and even here I have done nothing to warrant being put in the dungeon.” (40:14–15)
Joseph’s interpretations quickly are confirmed by events, but “the chief cup-bearer did not remember Joseph; he had forgotten him” (40:23). Call the cupbearer’s neglect ingratitude, call it indifference, call it excusable human fallibility—Satan has nothing to do with it as the biblical narrator tells the story. Another detail of expository difference: Joseph in the biblical account gives at this point his first defense of his innocence in Egypt and makes his first reference to his brothers’ heartless betrayal of him in Canaan: “I was kidnapped in the land of the Hebrews.”
Joseph is freed from prison in both the Bible and the Qur’an when Pharaoh has a troubling double dream that his courtiers (in the Bible, his “magicians and wise men”) are unable to interpret. Pharaoh’s cupbearer remembers Joseph, seeks him out in prison, and has him interpret Pharaoh’s dream: seven fat cows devoured by seven lean ones, then seven plump ears of grain devoured by seven shriveled ones. Joseph explains, both in the Bible and in the Qur’an, that the dreams portend seven years of plenty followed by seven of famine. In both accounts, Joseph is eventually granted Pharaoh’s own authority to manage the storage of grain during the years of plenty against the great need that will come, and does, in the years of famine.
In the Qur’an, however, Allah tells Muhammad that Joseph refused to go before Pharaoh until Pharaoh had first called to account the women who had accused Joseph, including his old master’s wife. Only after they confess their guilt and confirm Joseph’s innocence is he prepared to assume his task as Egypt’s quartermaster, yet even then Joseph does not claim that his chastity is his own meritorious achievement: “I do not declare my soul innocent: the soul ever urges to evil, except when my Lord shows mercy. My Lord is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each” (12:53).
After Joseph’s elevation to high office, Allah offers a comment on the story to this point:
This is how We established Joseph firmly in that land, to live therein wherever he wished. We cast Our mercy upon whomsoever We wish, and We do not neglect the reward of the righteous. But the reward of the hereafter is better for those who believe and are pious. (12:56–57)
As in the story of Adam and Eve, the afterlife, “the Hereafter,” appears at a pivotal moment in the Qur’an’s Joseph story; it never appears in the Bible’s.
The final half of the Joseph story in the Qur’an, its final two-thirds in the Bible, is the story of Joseph, his brothers (now including Benjamin), and their father, all of them eventually in Egypt. Both accounts, each in its own way, come to a moving, emotional climax, each climax especially revealing of the two scriptures’ different characterizations of, respectively, Yahweh Elohim and Allah.
In the biblical account, famine in the biblical “land of the Hebrews” drives the ten elder brothers to Egypt in hopes of procuring food. They leave behind only the aged Jacob and his youngest son, Benjamin, now a teenager about as old as Joseph was when his brothers sold him to the Arab traders. Arrived in Egypt, the ten encounter but do not recognize Joseph, now speaking Egyptian and dressed as Pharaoh’s all-powerful viceroy. The Bible’s omniscient narrator and we, his readers, know that Joseph, unbeknownst to his brothers, understands every word that they are saying among themselves in Hebrew.
Feigning hostility, Joseph accuses them of being spies and imprisons them for three days. On the third day, however, he offers them a deal: he will provision them but hold Simeon as a hostage. If and when the other nine return to him bringing their youngest brother—Benjamin, Joseph’s only full brother—with them, he will take this as proof that they are honest traders and not spies. At that point, he says, he will both release Simeon and grant them a second caravan of provisions. They accept the deal, saying among themselves but within his hearing:
“Clearly, we are being punished for what we did to our brother. We saw his deep misery when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen, and now this misery has come to us.” (42:21)
This is the first mention in the Bible that Joseph, in misery, actually pleaded with his brothers not to kill him or sell him into slavery. He knew they hated him, but until that moment, he had never guessed how much. Now, as he overhears them recalling their crime, he “turned away from them and wept” (42:24). He returns to them only after regaining his composure.
Joseph then orders their donkeys loaded with provisions and secretly has the money they have paid him returned to them in the saddlebags. They are disconcerted when they discover this: will it later be held against them? But they complete their homeward journey, and wrenching exchanges then ensue between them and their father, Jacob, about Joseph’s demand for Benjamin. “You are robbing me of my children,” Jacob moans; “Joseph is no more; Simeon is no more; and now you want to take Benjamin. I bear the brunt of all this” (42:36)!
First, Reuben tries to break the impasse and fails:
“You may put my two sons to death if I do not bring him back to you. Put him in my care and I will bring him back to you.” But {Jacob} replied, “My son is not going down with you, for now his brother is dead he is the only one left. If any harm came to him on the journey you are undertaking, you would send my white head down to Sheol with grief!” (42:37−38)
Sheol is the Semitic underworld—not a hell of punishment, much less a heaven of reward, but a realm only of ghostly powerlessness, a nonexistence barely short of nothingness. In simpler language, Jacob is saying simply, “If harm comes to Benjamin, it will kill me.”
Meanwhile, however, the famine in the land is grievous and only getting worse. At length, Judah tries one last time:
“Send the boy with me, and let us be off and go, if we are to survive and not die, we, you, and our dependents. I will go surety for him, and you can hold me responsible for him. If I do not bring him back to you and produce him before you, let me bear the blame all my life.” (43:8–9)
At this, Jacob wearily succumbs: “May El Shaddai {another name for Yahweh} move the man to be kind to you, and allow you to bring back your other brother {Simeon} and Benjamin. As for me, if I must be bereaved, bereaved I must be” (43:14).
So, the eleven go down again to Egypt; Joseph receives them more hospitably than the first time; and, when Benjamin is identified for him, he is again overcome with emotion and says, “God be good to you, my son” (43:29). Joseph is twice Benjamin’s age, just old enough to be his father. As on the previous visit, he orders his brothers’ donkeys to be laden with provisions, the brothers’ money again to be clandestinely returned to them atop the provisions, and in addition his own ceremonial drinking cup to be concealed in Benjamin’s saddlebag. As the brothers head homeward, Joseph’s agents accost them and, after a search, demand that Benjamin, the apparent thief, be returned to Egyptian custody.
At this point, Judah throws himself on Joseph’s mercy, deferential to a rhetorical extreme but most effective when he says—inadvertently, because, of course, he does not realize that he is speaking to Joseph—something that pushes Joseph over the emotional brink:
“So your servant our father said to us, ‘You know that my wife bore me two children. When one of them left me, I supposed that he must have been torn to pieces, and I have never seen him since. If you take this one from me too and any harm comes to him, you will send my white head down to Sheol with grief.’ If I go to your servant my father now, and we do not have the boy with us, he will die as soon as he sees that the boy is not with us, for his heart is bound up with him, and your servants will have sent your servant our father’s white head down to Sheol with grief….Let your servant stay, then, as my lord’s slave in place of the boy, I implore you, and let the boy go back with his brothers. How indeed could I go back to my father and not have the boy with me? I could not bear to see the misery that would overwhelm my father.” (Genesis 44:27–31, 33–34)
In the criticism of classical Greek literature, anagnorisis is the term used for the climactic recognition of previously unrecognized relationships or their previously unguessed meaning. The moment in Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex when Oedipus recognizes that Jocasta, his wife, is also his mother and that he has murdered her husband, his own father, is perhaps the paradigmatic instance of anagnorisis. In a flash, everything changes for everybody.
Here, Joseph is moved by emotions that he can no longer conceal as he hears for the first time of what Jacob was told about his abduction so many years ago and of how very deeply Jacob loves Joseph’s little brother, Benjamin, born late to their mother, Rachel, who died in childbirth, on a dark day that Joseph must surely recall.
Then Joseph could not control his feelings in front of all his retainers, and he exclaimed, “Let everyone leave me.” No one therefore was present with him while Joseph made himself known to his brothers, but he wept so loudly that all of the Egyptians heard, and the news reached Pharaoh’s palace. (45:1–2)
Then comes the true anagnorisis:
Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me….I am your brother Joseph whom you sold into Egypt. But now, do not grieve, do not reproach yourselves for having sold me here, since God sent me before you to preserve your lives. For this is the second year there has been a famine in the country, and there are still five years to come without ploughing or harvest. God sent me before you to assure the survival of your {people} on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So it was not you who sent me here but God, and he has set me up as a father to Pharaoh, as lord of all his household and governor of the whole of Egypt.” (45:4–8)
Dios escribe derecho con renglones torcidos. In the end Joseph’s interpretation of what has happened coincides exactly with Allah’s. Elohim has been in charge all along: “It was not you who sent me here but God.” But the biblical narrator is not quite done telling his story, and Joseph must underscore his interpretation of it one more time.
As the eleven brothers, their father with them, draw near to Egypt, Jacob sends Judah ahead to bring word to Joseph, and at this point in the narration the narrator begins pointedly calling Jacob “Israel,” using the sobriquet given him by a mysterious night visitor whom he wrestled to a draw years earlier:
Israel sent Judah ahead to Joseph, so that Judah might present himself to Joseph in Goshen [on the eastern outskirts of Egypt]….Joseph had his chariot made ready and went up to Goshen to meet his father Israel. As soon as he appeared he threw his arms round his neck and for a long time wept on his shoulder. Israel said to Joseph, “Now I can die, now that I have seen you in person and seen you still alive.” (46:28–30)
There in Goshen, Israel the patriarch settles with his people, adopting Joseph’s two sons as his own, and just before his death delivering a long, poetic, son-by-son blessing that functions analogously as a kind of musical reprise. But once Jacob/Israel is dead, will Joseph turn on his brothers after all?
Seeing that their father was dead, Joseph’s brothers said, “What if Joseph intends to treat us as enemies and pay us back for all the wrong we did him?” So they sent this message to Joseph: “Before your father died, he gave us this order, ‘You are to say to Joseph: Now please forgive the crime and faults of your brothers and all the wrong they did you.’ So now please forgive the crime of the servants of your father’s God.” Joseph wept at the message they sent to him.
Then his brothers went to him themselves and, throwing themselves at his feet said, “Take us as your slaves!” But Joseph replied, “Do not be afraid: is it for me to put myself in God’s place? The evil you planned to do me has by God’s design been turned to good, to bring about the present result: the survival of a numerous people. So there is no need to be afraid; I shall provide for you and your dependents.” In this way he reassured them by speaking affectionately to them. (50:15–21)
The biblical narrator is not the only writer of art fiction ever to bring a powerfully emotional story to what seems its resolution only to bring the tension rushing back, and then back again, before truly concluding. I think here of the extended, sometimes explosive codas that conclude certain of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. Yet in Allah’s account, the anagnorisis comes much more quietly and simply than in the Bible. Allah lingers over no sequence of copiously tearful scenes among Joseph, his father, and his brothers. The center of gravity in the Egyptian story as He tells it is not the brothers’ protracted failure to recognize Joseph. Joseph’s ability to overhear and understand the brothers when they speak Hebrew plays no part in it at all.
In the Qur’an, moreover, Jacob is blind, as he is not in the Bible. Joseph, knowing this, instructs his brothers to take a shirt of his with them when they return home for the first time, confident that his father will recognize Joseph’s scent on the shirt. Jacob does so, his sight is restored on the spot, and it is at that point of high emotion that the brothers break down and confess, indeed much earlier and more readily than they do in the Bible, where initially only Benjamin meets Joseph’s tears with his own. The brothers plead:
They said, “Father, ask forgiveness for our sins, for we were sinners.”
He said, “I shall ask forgiveness for you from my Lord. He it is Who is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.” (12:97–98)
In a poem inspired by a qur’anic correction of the Bible, the great Persian poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, makes the miracle of the sight-restoring fragrance of Joseph in the nostrils of Jacob a metaphor for the mystical allure of the divine in the human soul:
If someone asks you about houris [heavenly lovers], show your face and say, “Like this.”
If someone speaks of the moon, rise up beyond the roof and say, “Like this.”
When someone looks for a fairy princess, show your face to him.
When someone talks of musk, let loose your tresses and say, “Like this.”
If someone says to you, “How do clouds part from the moon?”
Undo your robe, button by button, and say, “Like this.”
If he asks about the Messiah, “How could he bring the dead to life?”
Kiss my lips before him and say, “Like this.”
When someone says, “Tell me, what does it mean to be killed by love?”
Show my soul to him and say, “Like this.”
If someone out of concern asks you about my state,
Show him your eyebrow, bent over double, and say, “Like this.”
The spirit breaks away from the body, then again it enters within.
Come, show the deniers, enter the house and say, “Like this.”
In whatever direction you hear a lover complaining,
That is my story, all of it, by God like this.
I am the house of every angel, my breast has turned blue like the sky—
Lift up your eyes and look with joy at heaven, like this.
I told the secret of union with the Friend to the east wind alone.
Then, through the purity of its own mystery, the east wind whispered, “Like this.”
Those are blind who say, “How can the servant reach God?”
Place the candle of purity in each one’s hand and say, “Like this.”
I said, “How can the fragrance of Joseph go from town to town?”
The fragrance of God wafted down from His Essence and said, “Like this.”
I said, “How can the fragrance of Joseph give sight back to the blind?”
Your breeze came and gave light to my eyes—“Like this.”1
When the brothers return to Egypt for a second time, Jacob and his wife, Joseph’s mother (who is not deceased in the Qur’an, as she is in the Bible), come with them. The old couple prostrate themselves before Joseph (a fulfillment, omitted in the Bible, of Joseph’s sun-and-stars dream), and all ends roughly as it does in the Bible. There is one noteworthy difference, however, in Joseph’s theological peroration, strongly analogous though it is to the one already quoted from the Bible:
He said: “Father, this is the interpretation of my former dream; now my Lord has brought it to pass. He was gracious to me when He delivered me from prison and brought you from the wilderness, after Satan had sowed conflict between me and my brothers. My Lord turns with kindness to whomsoever He wills. He is Omniscient, All-Wise.” (12:100)
Historically, Muhammad—born in Mecca but driven to flee with his first followers to Medina in the historical hijra—returned to Mecca in triumph in 630, striking fear into the hearts of his erstwhile persecutors. But on that occasion, Muhammad gathered the city leaders and elders together and recited to them from Sura 12, the Joseph Sura, reassuring them most especially with the first words of 12:92, the verse with which Joseph sent his brothers home to their father bearing Joseph’s shirt with them:
“No blame shall fall upon you; today, God forgives you, for He is the most merciful of those who show mercy. Take this shirt of mine and throw it over my father’s face, and he will see again, and bring me your family, one and all.” (12:92–93, emphasis added)
In the final moments of the qur’anic account, Joseph addresses himself to Allah in a prayer of gratitude that has no equivalent in the biblical account:
“My Lord, You have granted me power and taught me the interpretation of reports. Creator of the heavens and earth!
“You are my Protector in this world and in the hereafter.
“Let me die a Muslim and make me join the company of the virtuous!” (12:101)
As in the Bible, so here: the providential power of God is ultimately supreme. Joseph prays for Allah to accept him as a Muslim, in this world and the world to come. In the Bible, Joseph never mentions the world to come.
The emotional peak of Sura 12 of the Qur’an, however, comes not in any scene or series of scenes, however moving, among the human actors but rather in the heartfelt speech with which Allah concludes the sura, conveying to Muhammad the full and final meaning of this story, the only story that occupies an entire sura of the Qur’an. I am not a Muslim, but something that I can only call the sincerity of Allah comes through in this speech—something that makes it seem close to the essence of the Qur’an, the essence of the message that Muhammad, Allah’s messenger, is to deliver. Early in the sura, Allah has commented: “In the story of Joseph and his brothers there were clear signs to those who seek answers” (12:7). Now, at the sura’s end, He spells out for Muhammad what the inquirers might learn from the story of Joseph, if they but would, and what Muhammad himself must take away from it.
A key part of Allah’s message to Muhammad consists precisely of corrected versions of biblical stories, such as the story of Joseph, stories that Muhammad already knows in a general way but has not previously heard from Allah himself and could not have known in this form without Allah’s revelation. In the climactic speech below, Allah begins and ends with precisely this point:
This account of something that was beyond the reach of thy perception We [now] reveal unto thee, [O Prophet:] for thou wert not with Joseph’s brothers when they resolved upon what they were going to do and wove their schemes [against him]. Yet—however strongly thou mayest desire it—most people will not believe [in this revelation], although thou doest not ask of them any reward for it: it is but [God’s] reminder unto all mankind. But [then]—how many a sign is there in the heavens and on earth which they pass by [unthinkingly] and upon which they turn their backs!
And most of them do not even believe in God without [also] ascribing divine powers to other beings beside Him. Do they, then, feel free from the fear that there might fall upon them the overwhelming terror of God’s chastisement, of that the Last Hour might come upon them of a sudden, without their being aware [of its approach]?
Say [O Prophet]: “This is my way: Resting upon conscious insight accessible to reason, I am calling [you all] unto God—I and they who follow me.”
And [say:] “Limitless is God in his glory; and I am not one of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside Him!”
And [even] before thy time, We never sent [as Our apostles] any but [mortal] men, whom We inspired, [and whom We always chose] from among the people of the [very] communities [to whom the message was to be brought].
Have, then, they [who reject this divine writ] never journeyed about the earth and beheld what happened in the end to those [deniers of the truth] who lived before them?—and [do they not know that] to those who are conscious of God the life in the hereafter is indeed better [than this world]? Will they not then use their reason?
[All the earlier apostles had to suffer persecution for a long time;] but at last—when those apostles had lost all hope and saw themselves branded as liars—Our succour attained to them: whereupon everyone whom we willed [to be saved] was saved [and the deniers of truth were destroyed], for, never can Our punishment be averted from people who are lost in sin.
Indeed, in the stories of these men there is a lesson for those who are endowed with insight.
[As for this revelation,] it could not possibly be a discourse invented [by man]: nay indeed, it is [a divine writ] confirming the truth of whatever remains [of earlier revelations], clearly spelling out everything, and [offering] guidance and grace unto people who will believe. (12:102–111; all bracketed words original)
I quote here the earnest translation of Muhammad Asad, born Leopold Weiss in what is now Ukraine, a Jewish convert to Islam whose account of the moment of his conversion in his memoir The Road to Mecca concludes with his sudden conviction: “Out of the Koran spoke a voice greater than the voice of Muhammad.”2 In Asad’s translation, I hear him straining at every point—especially in his many bracketed, explanatory insertions—to make his English readers hear what he hears as he listens not so much to as through the Arabic of the Qur’an. One of his translation’s remarkable features is that neither Arabic nor English was his native language, but for him, clearly, the substantial linguistic challenges of the translation were just the beginning. He is straining to translate a voice beyond the Arabic and beyond even Muhammad, a voice that he finds fearsome and yet entirely reasonable and entirely merciful as well, a voice offering “guidance and grace unto people who will believe.”
Joseph and His Brothers is the title of a magnificent, unsurpassed four-volume novel that Thomas Mann, the giant of modern German literature, considered his masterpiece. As I conclude this two-track walk through these two scriptural tellings of Joseph’s story, what comes to mind is an imagined subtitle for Mann’s masterpiece: Joseph and His Brothers: A Tale of Guidance and Grace.