The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  Where does wisdom come from? And what is the source of understanding?

  It is hidden from the eyes of the living, concealed from the birds of the heavens.

  The Underworld and Death say, “We have only heard tell of it.”

  But God understands the way to it; He knows its source. (Job 28:20–23)

  Here it seems that wisdom is not only altogether remote and inaccessible—God alone knows where she comes from—but she is apparently quite distinct from Him. He knows how to find His way to her dwelling place, but she, the great set of eternal principles, is apparently an autonomous being. (By the way, she’s a she, both in Hebrew and in Greek.)

  This, in short, is a somewhat different notion of God’s way with the world from that seen earlier. He still rules over all and is the owner of everything, but He has a very different management style, one that, in turn, bespeaks an altogether different notion of God’s very nature. He is not the God of Old, lurking just beyond the curtain of ordinary reality, ready at any moment to cross over and intervene in human affairs. Nor, on the other hand, is He what post-biblical religion would make of Him: omnipresent, omniscient, all-powerful. Rather, He is a bit like the God depicted in the latter third of the book of Isaiah, a huge and remote deity whose control of the world can hardly be fathomed by human minds:

  Who has measured the oceans in the hollow of his hand [as God has], or marked off the skies with a yardstick?

  Or put the earth’s soil in his bushel, weighed the mountains on a hand-scale and the hills in a balance? . . .

  The nations themselves are a drop from the bucket [to Him], they weigh as much as the dust on a scale.

  He can flick off islands like a mote; all the Lebanon will not provide His kindling, its animals do not equal one lone offering.

  The nations all together are nothing for Him, insignificance itself and less than zero. So to whom will you compare God? (Isa 40:12, 15–18)

  Some biblical scholars connect the emergence of this great, world-bestriding, universal deity in Isaiah to political events in the history of Israel—in particular, the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE and their sack of God’s holiest site, the Jerusalem temple. Once the shock had passed, the nature of God’s dominion over His world had to be conceived anew. The fact that half a century later, the Babylonians would in turn be supplanted—not by tiny Israel, but by the mighty Persian Empire—itself suggested a huge deity, moving whole nations around like pieces on a chessboard. In fact, at one point God refers to Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king and Israel’s archenemy, as “My servant” (Jer 25:9); he’s just another pawn in a much bigger game. But this is not necessarily a view imposed by later history; it is what we have seen in the story of Joseph.

  Three Verses

  The three interesting verses from the Joseph story listed earlier seem designed to tell us how not to conceive of God. The first, “What is this that the LORD has done to us?” comes as the brothers are heading home after their first visit to Egypt. Freed from prison, they depart with their grain sacks loaded with provisions. Unbeknownst to them, however, Joseph had ordered that the silver they paid for the grain be returned to them in full, each man’s in his own sack. Stopping on the way, one of the brothers opens his sack to feed his donkey and is shocked to see that the silver he paid is now sitting in the mouth of the sack. “My payment’s been returned!” he shouts. “Here it is in my grain sack.” The brothers, far from rejoicing at this development, are immediately afraid of what it might mean. “Their hearts sank, and with trembling they said one to another: ‘What is this that the LORD has done to us?’” Of course, we know that it isn’t the LORD who has done this to them, but their own brother Joseph.

  The second verse cited comes under related circumstances. The brothers soon discover that all of them have had their payments returned, and their father Jacob is as disturbed by this news as they are. What could it mean? Jacob steadfastly refuses to let his sons return to Egypt, despite the family’s dwindling grain supplies, because he is afraid of what might happen to the youngest brother, Benjamin, whom Joseph has demanded to see. Perhaps the “missing” money will be used as a pretext for harming them. As time goes on, however, their food situation only grows worse, until Jacob is forced to relent and entrust Benjamin to his older siblings for another trip down to Egypt. To make sure that the returned silver is not used against them, however, Jacob insists that they give it back to the Egyptians when they get there: “Perhaps it was all a mistake,” he says. But when the brothers arrive in Egypt and with trepidation seek to hand over the money to Joseph’s steward, the steward replies: “Everything’s fine—don’t worry! Your God, and the God of your fathers, must have put a hidden treasure in your grain-sacks. I already received your payment.” Once again, we know the truth. It was not “your God, and the God of your fathers” who stuck the money in their grain sacks, but the steward himself.

  It seems to me that both of these sentences are highly significant, precisely because neither of them was at all necessary. Why should the brothers, upon discovering along the way that one of them has had his payment returned, attribute this apparently inexplicable development to God? They could simply have asked, “What could this mean?” or even say what Jacob later says, “Perhaps it is all a mistake.” Why bring God into it—or, to put the question more precisely, why should the narrative have gone to the trouble of inserting this mention of God when it serves no purpose? It has no role in the subsequent events; it is not what writers call “plot-related.” The only thing it seems to accomplish is to make the brothers out to be superstitious fools; in fact, having them suppose that it was God almost seems, under the circumstances, to be making fun of the whole phenomenon of religious belief.

  The same is true of the sentence spoken by Joseph’s steward, which, if anything, seems more blasphemous: he uses the phrase “your God and the God of your fathers,” so characteristic of pious biblical rhetoric (Deut 1:21, 6:3, 12:1, 26:7, 27:3, etc.; cf. Exod 3:13; 3:15, 16), in such a way as to put it to shame. And this is nearly my point. However, it is not religious belief as such that is being mocked, but rather the simple-minded sort of religious belief that the Joseph narrative is out to correct. The true God, this narrative seems to be saying, is not the one who suddenly appears to people or crosses over the curtain into our world in order to destroy or instruct or promise—He is not the God of Old. The true God doesn’t do such things, the narrative asserts, and He certainly didn’t stick something into people’s grain sacks! Rather, the true God is the long-range planner, the manipulator of great swaths of territory and human history. This is exactly the lesson Joseph seeks to impart to his brothers at the end: “You planned evil against me, but God had planned it for the good.” You are only part of a much bigger plan. So the old way of apprehending the divine, that is, the God of Old, is quite consciously mocked here.

  The third verse comes just before the end of the story. Joseph’s expensive goblet has been “discovered” in Benjamin’s grain sack (where the steward had put it!). The steward looks at them harshly: “Did you really expect to get away with stealing my master’s goblet?” he asks. Judah, as leader of the brothers, replies: “What can we say to my lord—what can we plead, how can we claim to be innocent? God has uncovered the crime of your servants.” Now this is a particularly significant sentence. Judah seems to be saying that indeed, they have committed a crime, stealing Joseph’s goblet. Of course he knows that this is not true; as far as he can figure out, the goblet must have found its way into Benjamin’s sack in the same way that the silver found its way into all their sacks after the previous visit. But Judah confesses to the crime anyway; it would seem that he is less worried about what will happen in Egypt than what will happen in Canaan when he shows up at his father’s door without Benjamin, whom he swore to look after. But once again, from the narrative’s point of view, Judah’s mention of God seems completely unnecessary—after all, why bring God into it?—and, in the sense that we h
ave seen, to do so is once again to evoke—and to mock—a certain kind of religious belief, the old kind.

  At the same time, what Judah says is actually quite true. God has indeed “uncovered” the brothers’ crime—not the phony one that Judah is confessing to, but their real crime, selling their brother as a slave to be brought down to Egypt.4 This is altogether parallel to Joseph’s assertion to his brothers that they really didn’t understand what they were doing, but that unwittingly, they were carrying out God’s plan. Here, Judah really doesn’t understand what he is saying, but in spite of what he thinks is a false confession, he is unwittingly telling the truth.5

  Counting the Jubilees

  After the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and exiled its inhabitants to Babylon, God apparently did nothing to save the remnant of His people; off to Babylon they went, apparently starting with the Judean leadership in 597 BCE, and then more massively after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple a decade later. No doubt many at the time despaired: the musicians who were taken captive hung their harps in the trees and wept: “How can we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land?” (Ps 137:4). But meanwhile, the great divine plan was slowly unfolding. According to the book of Jeremiah, God had told His prophet:

  “This whole land [of Judea] will be a desolate ruin. And these people will serve the Babylonian king for seventy years. But at the end of seventy years, I will punish the king of Babylon, and that nation of his, and the whole land of the Chaldeans for their sins, and I will turn them into an eternal ruin.” (Jer 25:11–12)

  Help was thus on the way, but it would take 70 years—and 70 years it turned out to be (or perhaps 60, depending on where one starts the counting or stops it). The Persian emperor Cyrus, having defeated the Babylonians in 539 BCE, issued an edict the next year allowing the Judeans to return to Jerusalem—and many of them did return, starting with a trickle in 520 or so. The prediction seemed to have been fulfilled.

  Interestingly, however, that is not how the book of Daniel (written some four centuries later than Jeremiah) sees things. Its hero, Daniel, is said to be living during the Babylonian exile and thereafter, and at a certain point he finds himself studying Jeremiah’s prediction of the 70 years:

  While I was praying, the man [= angel] Gabriel, whom I had seen before in a vision, came flying toward me at the time of the evening offering. He gave me understanding when he spoke to me and said: “Daniel! Now I have come to give you knowledge and understanding . . . Seventy units of seven years were decreed for your people and your holy city—to put an end to transgression, and finish with sin, and atone for wrongdoing, and bring eternal justice, to carry out the prophet’s vision and to reanoint the Holy of Holies . . .” (Dan 9:21–24)

  The book of Jeremiah had spoken of 70 years, but now it turns out that the divine plan was actually much longer, 70 “units of seven” years, or 490 years in total.6 This truly was a God of long-range planning; Joseph’s prediction of 7 years of coming famine seems paltry by comparison. Note also that here God does not even speak directly with Daniel: He sends a messenger (the angel Gabriel) as any mighty king would do. And the message he delivers is one of “knowledge and understanding,” two key words in the wisdom tradition.

  Indeed, earlier in the book, Daniel had uttered a prayer that presents a similar big-picture vision of God’s workings:

  Blessed be the name of God from age to age, for wisdom and power are His. He changes times and seasons, deposes kings and sets up kings; He gives wisdom to the wise, and knowledge to those who have understanding. He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with Him. (Dan 2:20–22)

  Nearly every word here is significant for our subject. God is praised “from age to age” because that is His true time frame, eons and eons. Consequently, true wisdom—that set of unshakable rules and long-range plans that ultimately always prove to be true—belongs only to Him, as does the “power,” which likewise will reveal itself only ultimately, when everything works out. Earthly rulers, the kings who seem to govern our lives, are merely His pawns; He moves them around and replaces them in the same way that He changes the seasons, replacing winter with spring. Then: “He gives wisdom to the wise”—is that really fair? Oughtn’t He to give wisdom to the stupid? But “the wise” here are the sages who alone can seek to attain divine knowledge, those “deep and hidden things” that most people miss. They miss it because it is “in the darkness,” but light does indeed exist, and it is with Him.

  The 490 years spoken of in the book of Daniel may seem like an oddly shaped chunk of time, but actually it makes great sense. Biblical law stipulates that the jubilee year is to come around once every 49 years (Lev 25:8);* 490 is just that unit of time multiplied by 10 (which comes out to be the same as Daniel’s 70 “units of seven”). So it was that 490 years appears here and there as a mega-unit of time in the Dead Sea Scrolls (some of them contemporaneous with the book of Daniel).7

  But even that unit of time pales before the vision of an anonymous Jewish text written around 200 BCE, the Book of Jubilees. It recounts in its own words much of the book of Genesis and the first half of Exodus, mentioning in many cases the precise year in which this or that event took place. The years are calculated from the time of the creation, but the author does not just say, “1,870 years after the creation such-and-such happened.” Instead, each date is calculated in multiples of 49 years (that is, the length of a single jubilee). So, to arrive at the year “1,870 years after the creation,” he first counted the total number of complete jubilees preceding the event in question, in this case, 38 jubilees; if each jubilee lasts 49 years, then 38 jubilees brings us to a total of 1,862 years. This left him just 8 years short of the desired total. He could have just said “38 jubilees plus 8 years,” but conventionally, each jubilee subdivides into 7 “weeks” of 7 years apiece. So “38 jubilees plus one ‘week’” would bring him almost home; to this he only had to add a single year borrowed from the second week of that jubilee. In his book, he thus dated the event to the first year of the second week of the 39th jubilee, since (38 x 49) + (1 x 7) + 1 = 1,870.

  This was certainly a clumsy way of keeping track of time! But the author did it for one reason. In the Bible itself, the 49-year jubilee was the longest unit of time, but for the Book of Jubilees, it was practically the shortest. God, this book seemed to say, sees history in multiples of jubilees and plans accordingly. The thunderous proof that the author offered for this assertion comes at the very end of the book, when the Israelites enter the Promised Land of Canaan exactly 50 jubilees after the time when Adam, the first human being, was created. Fifty jubilees exactly? Such a round number could not be the result of chance—obviously, it was God who had arranged things so as to fit this perfect number, which also meant that He had arranged the date of every single event between the creation and the entrance into Canaan so as to arrive at a total of 50 jubilees exactly. Now, 50 jubilees equals 2,450 years. If God is calculating things to fit such huge patterns, the book seemed to say, no wonder that we mere humans lose track of divine time and fail to see God’s great hand behind all the events of our everyday world. Just like the poor fellow who is about to drown on the Greek ferry, we have no grasp of the great, divine plan underlying all of earthly life and human history.

  Joseph Versus Abraham

  We have not quite finished with Joseph, however. It is important to consider what sort of contact he has with God in this story. The answer is surprising: none. He is kicked around a lot—by his brothers, by his master’s wife, by his cellmates, by life itself—yet not once does he lift his voice in prayer to the Almighty. Nor, for that matter, does he offer thanks to God when he is saved (from his brothers, who first planned to kill him, Gen 37:18–20; from execution, which probably ought to have been his punishment for attempted rape;8 from prison after his reputation as a dream interpreter reaches Pharaoh). He does say, when Pharaoh first tells him that he has heard of Joseph’s abilities as a dream interpreter, “It is no
t I, but God who will give Pharaoh the proper answer.” A nice sentiment,9 but actually, there is no indication in the text that God ever supplies Joseph with the interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams: Joseph does it all on his own, without even praying for God’s help (contrast Dan 2:19). After that, when Pharaoh decides to put Joseph in charge of food rationing in preparation for the coming famine, he asks rhetorically: “Can we find anyone like this man, who has the spirit of God in him?” (Gen 41:38). Here is a revealing turn of phrase. God’s spirit dwells in Joseph, apparently on a permanent basis;10 but given the utter lack of interaction between God and Joseph, what could that phrase really mean? It sounds more like a trait of Joseph’s character than an assertion that God actually intervenes on Joseph’s behalf or even enters Joseph’s mind; His spirit is just permanently there.

  Joseph is the only figure in the book of Genesis described as “wise” (twice, in fact: Gen 41:33 and 39). Enosh, Enoch, Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob—none of these distinguished ancestors is ever so described. Now, we have seen that “wise” is a kind of code word: wisdom is the great set of divine rules and plans, and someone who is wise necessarily understands this and acts accordingly. Joseph’s wisdom is thus expressed not only in his ability to interpret dreams (a wise function in the ancient Near East), but in his character: patient, optimistic, modest, and of good disposition (he never takes revenge on his brothers). But to say this much is to say something important about Joseph. He does have these traits; he has a “self” very much like our own, with his own thoughts and emotions. He is forgiving and generous (42:25); at one point he turns aside and weeps (42:24); in the end he “cannot restrain himself” (45:1) and falls into his brother Benjamin’s embrace and weeps again (45:14). His own ideas and assessments are never interrupted by God’s; he could hardly be said to have what the previous chapter called the “revelatory state of mind.”