Book review: The apocryphal book Joseph and Asenath
Sunday, December 16th, 2007 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manThe New North London's sedra sheet a week ago (which unfortunately I did not keep to refer back to now), waxed lyrical about the Apocryphal book of Joseph and Aseneth [sic], filling in the blanks from the lack of account in Genesis of the courtship of Joseph with Asenath (Osnat) daughter of Poti-Phera priest of On. (As Wikipedia puts it, what was Joseph, a monotheist, doing marrying the daughter of a priest of the Egyptian pantheon?) So I tracked down an online translation and went off and went off and read it.
The general consensus seems to be that the book was a first-century Jewish work, and apparently it was known to the rabbis of the first millennium, but it doesn't come across as particularly Jewish on reading. Indeed, with its damsel locked in a tower by her father, and its extolling of virginity as a virtue to really rather offputting lengths, it reads in some ways more like a Christian tale from a thousand years later.
The early chapters tell of how Poti-Phera plans to marry Aseneth to Joseph, and Aseneth haughtily rejects him. Then, when she actually meets Joseph, she falls head over heels in love with him, only for him to reject her as a pagan. She then locks herself in her tower, destroys all her possessions, rubs ashes over herself, and fasts for seven days; and on the eighth day sees an angel of the Lord. I have to confess this amused me: if I fasted for eight days, I'd probably be seeing angels of the Lord by the end too.
There's then a strange mystical episode involving bees, then Joseph returns and he and Aseneth finally meet together in the right spirit, and they get together and get married, which you'd have thought would have been the end of the book. Instead, though, it goes on to relate how, when the seven years of plenty had finished, and the seven years of famine started, Joseph's family comes down to Egypt, and Pharaoh's son, who we had been told at the start fancied Aseneth, tries to tempt various of Joseph's brothers into killing him. In the middle of this, there's an amusing episode in which Simeon, who we know is hotheaded from the Dinah/Shechem incident, is all ready to draw his sword and run through Pharaoh's son on the spot, until Levi (who is described, with no Biblical justification, as a prophet) stops him by stamping on his foot.
Whilst the second half of the book succesfully manages to generate tension, I don't really like the mechanism the author used to do it. The Biblical account records that from when Joseph reveals himself to his brothers until after the death of Jacob, rather than continuing to hold the grudge against Joseph that had led them to try and do away with him in the first place, they're fearful that, in his new powerful position as vizier of Egypt, he will try and take revenge against him. Consequently, by inserting this episode into Joseph and Aseneth, in which not all of the brothers spring as readily to Joseph's defence as Simeon and Levi, Joseph and Aseneth is undoing the resolution and character development of the Biblical account.
Of course, this is not the only place where midrash messed with what actually happened in the Joseph story, but still.
One final little detail which annoyed me was in the final chapter, where Pharaoh leaves the crown of Egypt to Joseph, and Joseph was king of Egypt for forty-eight years before ceding the crown back to the Pharaonic line. Is it not enough that Joseph gets made vizier of Egypt? Why do they have to try and elevate him to an even greater pedestal than the one on which he already stood? For me, this was one step too far; I found my suspended disbelief coming down with a thump.
The general consensus seems to be that the book was a first-century Jewish work, and apparently it was known to the rabbis of the first millennium, but it doesn't come across as particularly Jewish on reading. Indeed, with its damsel locked in a tower by her father, and its extolling of virginity as a virtue to really rather offputting lengths, it reads in some ways more like a Christian tale from a thousand years later.
The early chapters tell of how Poti-Phera plans to marry Aseneth to Joseph, and Aseneth haughtily rejects him. Then, when she actually meets Joseph, she falls head over heels in love with him, only for him to reject her as a pagan. She then locks herself in her tower, destroys all her possessions, rubs ashes over herself, and fasts for seven days; and on the eighth day sees an angel of the Lord. I have to confess this amused me: if I fasted for eight days, I'd probably be seeing angels of the Lord by the end too.
There's then a strange mystical episode involving bees, then Joseph returns and he and Aseneth finally meet together in the right spirit, and they get together and get married, which you'd have thought would have been the end of the book. Instead, though, it goes on to relate how, when the seven years of plenty had finished, and the seven years of famine started, Joseph's family comes down to Egypt, and Pharaoh's son, who we had been told at the start fancied Aseneth, tries to tempt various of Joseph's brothers into killing him. In the middle of this, there's an amusing episode in which Simeon, who we know is hotheaded from the Dinah/Shechem incident, is all ready to draw his sword and run through Pharaoh's son on the spot, until Levi (who is described, with no Biblical justification, as a prophet) stops him by stamping on his foot.
Whilst the second half of the book succesfully manages to generate tension, I don't really like the mechanism the author used to do it. The Biblical account records that from when Joseph reveals himself to his brothers until after the death of Jacob, rather than continuing to hold the grudge against Joseph that had led them to try and do away with him in the first place, they're fearful that, in his new powerful position as vizier of Egypt, he will try and take revenge against him. Consequently, by inserting this episode into Joseph and Aseneth, in which not all of the brothers spring as readily to Joseph's defence as Simeon and Levi, Joseph and Aseneth is undoing the resolution and character development of the Biblical account.
Of course, this is not the only place where midrash messed with what actually happened in the Joseph story, but still.
One final little detail which annoyed me was in the final chapter, where Pharaoh leaves the crown of Egypt to Joseph, and Joseph was king of Egypt for forty-eight years before ceding the crown back to the Pharaonic line. Is it not enough that Joseph gets made vizier of Egypt? Why do they have to try and elevate him to an even greater pedestal than the one on which he already stood? For me, this was one step too far; I found my suspended disbelief coming down with a thump.
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-17 01:34 pm (UTC)"ere Tony, what does "apocryphal" mean?"
"means it ain't kosher."
For some reason, this entry reminded me :)
no subject
Date: 2007-12-17 02:01 pm (UTC)