Torah Posting: וישב
And so Ya’akov dwells in the land of his fathers’ sojourns, the land of Kena’an. Now the text begins to pepper in his new name, Yisra’el, more frequently than before, but still not every time. There’s much growing to do to grow into that name, both for the man, his children, and the land.
Here we get the story of one of the children of Yisra’el with the most growing up to do: Yosef, beloved son of Yisra’el’s old age. While we have explored the importance of Ya’akov’s role as the synthesis of his forefathers’ spiritual tendencies, that does not mean he has fully integrated the traumas those yearnings have inflicted on this lineage. In fact, here Ya’akov recapitulates the trauma inflicted by his father, Yitzhaq, of favoring one child, and Ya’akov’s repetition of this pattern causes great pain.
Yosef is 17 years old here, and the first thing we see him do is report to his father on the “evil” (רעה) doings of his brothers who are the sons of the concubines. This gives a sense of how Yosef’s brothers feel about him to begin with, and then Yisra’el bestows his favor on him visibly, making him a long-sleeved coat. His brothers see this sign and begin to hate him so much they can’t even speak to him.
And then the dreams start coming.
Some Biblical dreams and visions are inscrutable, but the teenage Yosef with the flashy coat has unsubtle dreams to match.
First he dreams he and his brothers are binding sheaves in the fields, and their sheaves gather around his and bow down to it. His brothers are like, “Oh, would you like to be king of us, little boy?” and they hate him all the more for it.
Then he dreams the Sun and Moon and eleven stars bowed down to him. (Guess how many brothers Yosef has.) This time, Yosef tells his father as well, and his father reacts much the same way as his brothers did the first time, given how the Sun and Moon seem to suggest Yosef’s parents should worship him as well.
Yosef is just a kid, though, and this situation with his brothers concerns Yisra’el, who is no stranger to brotherly strife.
One day, Yisra’el notices that Yosef has not gone with his brothers to tend the flock. He calls Yosef over, and Yosef responds “הנני” — “Here I am” — in the formal way we have seen the generations of this lineage respond to a divine summons. Yisra’el sends Yosef out to the fields with his brothers, so they won’t resent him further for avoiding work, and on his way Yosef encounters a mysterious “איש” (man) wandering in the field, and by now we know what that means, right? Angel time.
The man asks Yosef, “מה–תבקש” — “What do you seek?” Yosef responds, “את–אחי אנכי מבקש” — “I seek my brothers.” This exchange is conducted in the formal language of strangers encountering one another in the wilderness. Yosef asks the man if he knows where his brothers are, and the man tells him that they have departed from here and gone to a different place.
Yosef heads there, and his brothers see him coming and conspire to kill him. “בעל החלמות,” they call him to each other — “master of dreams.” They plan to kill him and throw him into a pit, then blame it on wild animals. “ונראה מה–יהיו חלמתיו,” they say — “and we’ll see what becomes of his dreams.”
But Re’uvein, the eldest, intervenes. “Shed no blood,” he says, “lay no hand upon him. Just throw him into the pit.” The text gives us an aside to reveal that Re’uvein intends to save him later and return him to their father.
When Yosef arrives, his brothers strip him of his coat and throw him into the pit. The text describes the pit as empty, without water, which stands out sharply against the brothers’ next move, which is to sit and eat.
They are stirred to look up by a passing caravan of ישמעאלים — Yishma’elim, descendants of Yishma’el, the first time this is used as a tribal designation. The caravan is heading for Mitzrayim — Egypt, or literally “the narrows.”
This gives Yehudah an idea. There’s no profit in killing their little brother and taking on that guilt. Why not sell him to the Yishma’elim? The brothers agree, but by the time they get back to the pit, Yosef is gone.
Unbeknownst to the brothers, passing merchants from Midyan had found him and had the same idea; they pulled Yosef out of the pit and sold him to the Yishma’elim, who were now bringing him with them to Mitzrayim. But Re’uvein doesn’t know that. He sees the pit is empty, and he tears his clothes in mourning. When he returns to his brothers, he speaks poetically, a verse that is so gorgeous in Hebrew that I reckon I will just read it aloud for you:
הילד איננו ואני אנה אני–בה
“The boy is no more with us, and I, where will I go?”
To cover their tracks, the brothers decide to slaughter a young goat and dip Yosef’s coat in its blood. Then they return to their father and say, “We found this coat,” and they have the audacity to pretend they don’t know whether it’s Yosef’s or not. Ya’akov believes his beloved son has been killed by beasts, and he tears his clothes in mourning as well. He girds himself in sackcloth and mourns for days. His sons and daughters try to comfort him, but it is no use. Ya’akov says he will go down to his son in the underworld continuing to mourn.
Meanwhile, in Mitzrayim, Yosef has been sold to Potifar, captain of the Pharaoh’s guard. We’ll get to that whole situation in a little while.
First, we have another important incidence of the entire world going insane for millennia because of weird sexual hangups they import onto this ancient text even though it makes no sense.
Yehudah goes a’wandering, and he meets a Kena’ani woman, Shu’a, and they have three sons, ’Er, Onan, and Shelah. Just as you may have recognized the name of the city of Sedom from the sexually repressive English term “sodomy,” which as we have covered has literally nothing to do with what happens there in the Torah, you may recognize the name Onan from the equally insanely meaningless term “onanism,” which generally refers to male masturbation (in its capacity as evil sin, obviously). The thing is that the sin in the Torah story from which onanism draws its name has… nothing… to do with masturbation, and once again people have based entire regimes of religious oppression on absolutely nothing, much less on the Torah.
So please forget everything anyone has ever told you about Onan or onanism and read what actually happens:
Yehudah finds a wife for ’Er named Tamar. ’Er does something bad that is not specified, and God kills him. Yehudah, following the ethics of the time, instructs Onan to father children with Tamar, so that his dead brother’s line may be continued and not extinguished. Onan is happy to do the sex part of this duty, but he is selfish with respect to the lineage part, so he spills his seed on the ground rather than offer it to his brother. This displeases God, and God kills him, too.
Now, to read that story and interpret it as making masturbation a capital crime requires a rather audacious act of either illiteracy or intellectual dishonesty, which is to assume that the thing Onan does which displeases the LORD is ejaculating on the ground in and of itself, as opposed to what the text explicitly says in these verses more than once, namely refusing to take financial responsibility for his deceased brother’s family. You know, the sort of thing the entire Torah has been about so far.
Yehudah continues trying to manage this situation, instructing Tamar to remain a widow until his youngest, Shelah, is old enough to do this job. She goes along with it for a while, but this leaves her poor and powerless.
Yehudah’s wife, Shu’a, dies. After his mourning period, he goes off with his friend, Hirah, to shear the sheep. Shelah, meanwhile, has grown up, but he has still not married Tamar. Tamar decides to take her finances into her own hands.
She takes off the widow’s garments, dresses up, and covers her face with a veil. Then she goes to a place called ’Enayim — literally “Eyes” — and waits for Yehudah there. Because of the veil, the widower Yehudah thinks Tamar is a prostitute, and he solicits her. She inquires about her payment. He offers her one kid from the flock. She asks for a token to take right now, so she can return it to him when the kid arrives. He asks what pledge she wants, and she asks for his signet, cord, and staff, official signifiers of his holdings. He agrees, and they have sex and conceive a child.
Tamar changes back into her widow’s garments and returns home. Yehudah sends the kid as promised, but the friend who takes it to her can’t find her. Yehudah begins to worry.
Some three months later, rumor reaches Yehudah that his daughter-in-law, the widow, Tamar, has conceived a child by harlotry. Outraged, Yehudah summons her to be burned alive in public. When she comes out, she holds up Yehudah’s signifiers, and she says, “By the man who owns these items, I am with child. Can you tell me whose these are?”
Yehudah, to his credit, is chastened. “צדקה ממני,” he says — “She has been more righteous than I,” because he failed to give her to marry Shelah and secure her family’s future.
They do not have sex again. She has conceived twins by their first union. Their birth is described strangely. One’s hand emerges first, and the midwife ties a red string around it to identify the one who came out first. But the baby draws his hand back in, and the other is first to be born. Not much is made of this directly, but it is evocative of Ya’akov and ’Esav’s birth, with Ya’akov drawing his name from grasping ’Esav’s heel as they emerged and whatnot. Red threads on the wrist also become something of a Jewish talisman (of possibly dubious origins) much later in history, too, so it’s interesting to see how far back that symbol goes.
Anyway, the sin of Onan is not masturbation, or non-procreative sex, or anything yucky to people who hate bodies, but rather it is the sin of not manning up and taking care of your family. Okay?
Back to Yosef in the house of Potifar. Believe it or not, the spiciest stuff in this parashah has not happened yet.
Yosef finds success down in the narrows, a.k.a. Egypt, which I call Mitzrayim for Biblical purposes. His master, Pharaoh’s guard captain, sees that God favors Yosef and makes his ventures profitable, and Potifar favors Yosef also and makes him overseer of his house. For this, God blesses Potifar with great wealth, so much that he doesn’t even know everything he has; Yosef takes care of that for him.
The text points out that Yosef is quite a sexy man. Potifar’s wife, in fact, demands that he lie with her. But Yosef says no. Even though Potifar has given him control over everything he owns, this is one step too far. Yosef says it would be a sin against God. He begins to keep his distance from her.
One day, Yosef is working around the house, and none of the other servants are around. Potifar’s wife catches him by the shirt and demands he lie with her, and he wriggles out of the shirt and runs away.
Yosef is caught by the garment once again; Potifar’s wife takes her revenge. She calls the servants to her and says Yosef tried to force himself on her, and she cried out, and he ran away. In doing so, she — being the first Egyptian we hear refer to someone of Yosef’s lineage — calls him an “עברי” — a Hebrew. Presumably this is a linguistic designation, but we don’t really know the origin or meaning of the term “Hebrew,” anyway. The accepted etymology is that it means “one who comes across,” i.e. an immigrant, a wanderer. Not from around here. That’s who the Hebrews are, certainly to the mighty Egyptians.
When Potifar hears of this heinous crime alleged by his wife, he throws Yosef in the royal prison. But God is with Yosef in prison, too. The officer in charge favors him just like Potifar did, and he makes Yosef sort of the captain of the prisoners.
While Yosef is in there, Pharaoh’s butler and baker offend their king and are imprisoned there, too. Now in contact with the “master of dreams,” both men have prophetic dreams on the same night. In the morning, Yosef sees they are sad and asks them what happened. They say, “We have dreamed a dream, and there’s no one to interpret it.”
Yosef responds in an interesting way; he says, “הלוא לאלהים פתרנים” — “Doesn’t God interpret dreams?” I think the plain meaning of this is supposed to be something like, “We don’t need anyone special to interpret dreams; God enables anyone to do that,” which Yosef says in order to encourage them to tell him his dream. But it also strikes me as a noteworthy humbling of Yosef’s ego; his early dreams that got him in trouble were all about him, but now Yosef dedicates his interpretive abilities to God.
The butler goes first. In his dream, there was a vine with three tendrils, and it blossomed and brought forth fine grapes, and Pharaoh’s cup was in his hand, and he pressed the grapes into the cup and gave it to Pharaoh.
Yosef interprets this dream to mean Pharaoh will restore the butler to his royal place in three days. While he’s on the subject, Yosef asks the butler to think of him when he’s back in the palace and let Pharaoh know about his talents, and to mention that Yosef is innocent of any crime.
This positive interpretation inspires the baker to share his dream as well. He dreamt he had three baskets of baked delicacies for Pharaoh on his head. Birds landed on the uppermost basket and ate up all the goodies.
Yosef’s interpretation of this one is not so sunny: in three days, Pharaoh will behead the baker and hang his body from a tree, and the birds will pick at his flesh.
Three days later, it’s Pharaoh’s birthday. He makes a feast for all his servants, and Yosef’s interpretations of both dreams come to pass. But as the butler returns to his duties, he does not remember Yosef as he promised.
👘
