People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy
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“What are you laughing at?” Reuben says as he marches past, and it’s all Joseph can do not to really laugh, for it almost doesn’t matter, scary as it is. He knows something about them that they don’t even know themselves. And doesn’t that make him their lord?
Mostly Joseph divines from dreams, but sometimes the cup shows him what he needs to know. His mother gave him the cup when he was five. She’d ordered it made two years before, when their travels took them past the old woman who kept the kiln outside Luz. Rachel had had her own dream of how it should look, with rainbow swirls in the glaze, and four knobs of different colors. It took a long time but she made Jacob wait, despite the older boys’ complaints, until the potter finished it. And then Rachel put it aside until the ceremony by the fire, when Joseph’s first haircut would turn him from a wild animal (one who secretly still sucked at his mother) into a human. Rachel couldn’t attend—yet another boys’ only event—but they came and told her what happened—how he whooped it up, jumping and waving his arms like a cross between a monkey and a bat, how his hair made the fire flare so that Jacob had to yank the child back to keep him from getting scorched. And then how Joseph quieted when his father gave him the cup, how he purred over it like a girl, how his father poured the wine. But instead of drinking Joseph just stared at it, stared and made a noise like a nightmare, and might have flung it away if Jacob hadn’t grabbed hold of him (a salvation Jacob later regretted) and forced him to drink the wine so they could end the ceremony.
It took Rachel a long time to get Joseph to tell her what he’d seen. Darkness, he said finally. Darkness over all the world, thicker than smoke. And a hand in the dark sky, a finger outstretched, reaching, reaching, stroking invisible foreheads. He heard cries, he said, shrieks and wails in the blackness. Then light came—and everywhere, in every home, from palace to shack, women held their dead children against their bodies. “I’m not going to die, am I?” Joseph asked her.
“No, no, darling, it’s not for you, it’s for someone else. The bad people. Don’t worry, sweetie, it’s not for you.” Joseph cried and cried while his mother held him and kissed the torn remnants of his hair.
As much as they make fun of him, as much as they complain to Jacob about his airs and his lack of work, the brothers will sometimes sneak into his tent, after they think everyone has fallen asleep. “Can you find my staff?” they’ll say, or “Who’s this Ugarit girl Pop’s got lined up for me? Is she good looking? Can she keep her mouth shut?” The wives come even more often, scurrying along the path as if anyone who saw them would mistake them for rabbits. “Tell me it’s going to be a boy,” they say, “Please, he’ll kill me if it’s another girl,” as if the diviner can control something like that, as if events are at the mercy of the diviner, and not the other way around.
At first, Joseph soaks in their secret devotions. When Zebulon ridicules him, Joseph looks him in the eye, as if to say, “Put on a good show, big brother, because you know and I know what you think about after dark, under your sheepskin.” Or maybe he’ll just finger the colored stone Zeb gave him as a bribe not to say anything. But after awhile he wishes they’d leave him alone. He even pretends to sleep, but they just grab him by the shoulder. Worst of all are the ones who offer themselves to him, not just the wives, but sometimes the brothers too, pretending it’s something Joseph is longing for. Do they do it just to reward him, or because they really desire him, or because they think of it as some kind of magic that will change a bad prediction? Joseph tries to find the answer in his cup, or a dream, but the wine and the night remain as blank as his brothers’ faces. He can see the fate of entire tribes but not the motives of his own brothers. Maybe there are no motives. Maybe people do things for no reason at all.
And Joseph himself? Why does he do it? Just to know things other people don’t? To make himself better than his brothers? Because he can? Because he can’t stop himself? As a child he loves the excitement, that lick of fire that sometimes becomes a whip. Later, especially the last days in Egypt, he wishes it would end. His body can’t take the shock, his mind can’t take the knowledge. He prays, he sacrifices goats stolen from the palace herd and smuggled into the desert. No use. The visions keep coming, wanted or not.
Only near the very end of his life does he get an answer. The half burnt goat sends up a shimmer of light that Joseph stares at, hypnotized, so that he doesn’t hear the desert roar, or see the swirl of sand that marks a storm until it literally slaps him in the face. He cowers down and covers himself as best he can, and wonders if he will die here so that no one will ever find his body. Maybe his family will think Yah just sucked him up into heaven, too impatient to wait for Joseph to die. In the midst of it all, he hears it. The Voice. An actual voice! High pitched, somewhere between a man and a woman, it shouts at him out of the whirlwind. “Do you think I do this for you? I opened secrets for you because I needed you. I will close them when I close them!”
The fact is, Joseph is no fool. By his final years, he’s known for a long time that Yah has used him. He doesn’t like that this bothers him, but it does. A messenger, he tells himself. A filler. A bridge between his father and the other one, the Burning Beard. He knows exactly what people will think over the millennia. Jacob will get ranked as the last patriarch (the only real patriarch, Joseph thinks, the only one to pump out enough boys to found a nation), the other one the Great Leader. And Joseph? A clever bureaucrat. A nice guy who lured his family to Egypt and left them there to get into trouble.
He considers writing his own story. “The Life of Joseph ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of Egypt.” But what good would it do? A fire would incinerate the papyrus, or a desert lion would claw it to shreds, or maybe a freak flood would wash away the hieroglyphs. By whatever means, Yah would make sure no one would ever see it. The Beard is the writer, after all. God’s scribe.
Some things Joseph knows from the ripples and colors of the wine. Others require a dream. He first sees the man he calls “the Beard” in a dream. Joseph is eight, a spindly brat with a squeaky voice. He’s had a bad evening, swatted by Simeon for a trick he’d played on Levi. In despair that no one loves him, he drinks down a whole cup of wine from the flask his mother has given him. The cup falls with a thud on the dirt floor of his tent as he instantly falls down asleep.
At first, he sees only the flame. It fills his dream like floodwaters hitting a dry riverbed. Finally, Joseph and the fire separate so that he can see it as a blaze on a man’s face. No, not the face, the beard. The man has thick eyebrows and thin hair, and sad eyes, and a beard bushier than Reuben’s, except the beard is on fire! The flames roar all about the face and neck, yet somehow never seem to hurt him. They don’t even seem to consume anything, his beard always stays the same. Later in life, in countless dreams, Joseph will study this man and the inferno on his face. He will wonder if maybe the fire is an illusion—the man’s a master magician, after all—or a trick of the desert light (except it looks the same inside Pharaoh’s palace). And he will wonder why no one ever seems to notice it, not the Pharaoh, not the Beard’s self-serving brother, not the whiny mob that follows him through the desert. In that first time, however, the fiery beard scares him so much he can only hide in the corner of his dream, hardly even aware that the man stands on a dark mountain scorched by lightning, and talks to the clouds.
Joseph doesn’t like this man. He doesn’t like his haughty pretension of modesty, the I’m-just-a-poor-shepherd routine. He detests the man’s willingness to slaughter hordes of his own people just for the sake of discipline. He dislikes his speeches that go on for hours and hours, in that thick slurry voice, always with the same message, obey, obey, obey. Joseph distrusts the man’s total lack of humor, his equal lack of respect for women. Can’t he see that his sister controls the waters, so that without her to make the rocks sweat they would all die of thirst? As far as Joseph can tell, the mob would have done a lot better if they had followed the sister and not the Beard. Joseph thinks of her as his proper heir as leader o
f the Hebrews. But then, he has to admit, he always did like women better.
Most of all, Joseph detests the Beard’s penchant for self-punishment. The way he lies down in the dirt, cutting his face on the pebbles, the way he’ll swear off sex but won’t give his wife permission to take anyone else. And what about his hunger strikes that go on for days and days, as if Yah can’t stand the smell of food on a man’s breath? It might not bother Joseph so much if the man wasn’t such a role model for his people. Joseph’s people. Doesn’t the man know that Joseph saved his family—the mob’s ancestors, after all—and all of Egypt from starvation just a few generations before? It was Joseph who explained Pharaoh’s dream of the seven fat cows and the seven lean ones, Joseph who took over Egypt’s food storage systems during the seven good years, building up the stocks for the seven years of famine. It was Joseph who took in his family and fed them so the tribes could survive. Doesn’t the Beard know all this? He claims to know everything, doesn’t he? The man who talks to Yah. How dare he denounce food? How dare he?
Some dreams come so quickly they seem to pounce on him the moment he closes his eyes. Others lie in wait all night until they seize him just before he plans to wake up. The dream of the coat comes that way. Joseph has fidgeted in his sleep for hours, flinging out his arm as if trying to push something away. And then at dawn, just as Reuben and Judah and Issachar and Zebulon are gulping down stony bread on their way to the sheep, their little brother dreams once more of the Burning Beard. He sees the Beard stride into the biggest room Joseph has ever seen. Stone columns thicker than Jacob’s ancient ram hold up a roof higher than the Moon. The Beard comes with his brother, who has slicked down his hair and oiled his beard, and wears a silver plate around his neck, obviously more aware than the Beard of how you dress when you appear before a king. Or maybe the Beard has deliberately crafted his appearance, his torn muddy robe, his matted hair, as either contempt for the Pharaoh or a declaration of his own humility. “Look at me, I’m just a country bumpkin, a simple shepherd on an errand for God.” Later, in other dreams, Joseph will learn just how staged this act is from the man who grew up as Pharaoh’s adopted son. Now, however, the dreaming boy knows only the gleam of the throne room and the scowl of the invader.
The brothers speak together. Though Joseph cannot follow any of it (he will not learn Egyptian for another twenty years) he understands that the Beard has something wrong with his speech so that silver-plate needs to interpret for him. Whatever they say, it certainly bothers the king, who shouts at them and holds up some gold bauble like a protection against the evil eye. The Beard says something to his brother, who strangely throws his shepherd’s staff on the floor. Have they surrendered? But no, it’s a trick, and a pretty good one, because the stick surrenders its rigidity and becomes a snake!
Asleep, Joseph still shivers under his sheepskin. The king, however, shouts something at one of his toadies who then rushes away, to return a moment later with a whole squad of magicians in the most amazing coats Joseph has ever seen. For Joseph the rest of the dream slides by in a blur—the king’s magicians turn their sticks into snakes too only to have silver-plate’s snake gobble them up like a basket of honeycakes—because he cannot take his dream eyes off those coats. Panels of linen overlaid with braids of wool, every piece a different color, and hung with charms and talismans of stone and metal. I want that, the dream Joseph thinks to himself, and “I’ve got to have that” he says out loud the moment he wakes up.
He begins his campaign that very day, whining and posturing and even refusing to eat (later, he will blame the Beard for this fasting, as if his dreams infected him) until he wins over first his mother and then at last his father. With Jacob on his side, Joseph can ignore the complaints of his brothers, who claim it makes Joseph look like “a hittite whore.”
Joseph doesn’t try for the talismans. Jacob probably could afford it, but Joseph knows his limits. Besides, it’s the coat he cares about, all the colors, even more swirls than his cup of dreams. The day he gets it he struts all about the camp, the sides of it held open like the fan of a peacock—or maybe like a foolish baboon who does not know enough to protect his chest from his enemies.
That same night, Joseph dreams of the coat soaked in blood.
Joseph’s dream power comes from his mother. “All power comes from mothers,” Rachel tells him, and thereby sets aside the story Jacob likes, that Yah taught dream interpretation to Adam, who taught it to Seth, who taught it to Noah, whose animals dreamed every night on the boat, only to lose the knack when they walked down the ramp back onto the sodden earth. “Listen to me,” Rachel whispers, “you think great men like Adam spent their time with dreams? It was Eve. And she didn’t learn it from God, she learned it from the serpent. She bit into the apple and snipped off the head of a worm. And that’s when people started to dream.”
Joseph’s worst moment comes in prison. He sits on his tailbone with his legs drawn up and his arms around his knees, trying to let as little of his body as possible touch the mud and slime of the floor. He’s tried so hard, it’s so unfair. No matter what terrible tricks Yah played on him—his brothers’ hatred, his coat taken from him and streaked with blood—he’s done his best, he’s accepted it, really he has. And now this! And all because he tried to do something right. When your master’s wife wants to screw you you’re supposed to say no, right? Isn’t that what Yah teaches (not that it’s ever stopped Jacob, but that’s not the point). And instead of a reward he has to sit in garbage and eat worse.
Something touches Joseph’s sleeve. He screams and jerks back, certain it’s a rat. But when he opens his eyes he sees two men not much older than himself. They wear linen and their hair is curled, signs they’ve fallen from a high place. “Please,” one says, “You’re the Hebrew who interprets dreams, aren’t you? Will you help us? Please?”
“No,” Joseph says. “Go away, leave me alone.” And yet, he feels a certain tug of pleasure that his reputation as Potiphar’s dream speaker has followed him into hell. He tries to ignore them, but they just stand there, looking so desperate, that finally he says “Oh all right. Tell me your dreams.”
The one who goes first announces that he was Pharaoh’s chief wine steward before the court gossips slid him into jail. He tells Joseph “In my dream I saw— I was in a garden. It was nighttime, I think. I looked up high and saw three branches. They began to bud. Blossoms shot forth. There were three ripe grapes. Suddenly, Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand. Or maybe it was there before, I’m not sure. I squeezed the grapes in my hand. I poured the juice into the cup. I gave it to Pharaoh. He was just there and I gave it to him and he drank it.”
Joseph rolls his eyes. This is not exactly a great mystery, he thinks. He says “All right, here’s the meaning. In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head. He will examine your case and restore you to your office. You’ll be safe from this filth and back in the palace. Congratulations.”
The man claps his hands. “Blessed Mother Isis!” he cries. “Thank you!” He bends down to kiss Joseph’s knees but Joseph pulls his legs even closer to his chest.
“Just promise me something,” Joseph says. “When you’re back pouring wine for Pharaoh, remember me? Tell him I don’t deserve this.”
“Oh yes,” the man says, and claps his hands again.
“Now me,” the other one says. He kneels down before Joseph and says “In my dream I’m walking in the street behind the palace. There are three baskets on top of my head. Two of them are filled with white bread, but the one on top holds all the lovely things I bake for Pharaoh. Cakes shaped like Horus, a spelt bun like the belly of Hathor. Just as I’m thinking about how much the king will like them, birds come and pluck them away.” He laughs, as if he’s told a joke. “Right out of the basket. Now,” he says, “Tell me the meaning.”
Joseph stares at him. He stares and stares at the man’s eager face. Why has Yah done this to me, he thinks, but even that last shred of self-pity drains out of him, washed away in ho
rror at such pathetic innocence.
“Go on, go on,” the man insists.
Can he fake it? Joseph wonders. He tries to think of some story but his mind jams. He can’t escape. Yah has set the truth on him like a pack of dogs. In a cracked whisper he says “In three days Pharaoh shall lift your head from your shoulders. He will hang you from a tree and the birds will eat your body.”
The baker doesn’t scream, only makes a noise deep in his chest. “Oh Gods,” he says, “help me. Help me, please.”
Joseph is stunned. No anger, no hate. No demands to change it or make it go away or even to think again. Just that trust. Without thought, Joseph wraps his arms around the man like a mother. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m so sorry.”
Joseph will stay two years in the prison before Pharaoh will dream a dream not found anywhere in the catalogues, and his wine steward, hearing of lean cows and fat cows, will remember the man he had promised not to forget. In all those months, Joseph will think of that empty promise only three or four times. But he will see the face of the baker every morning, before he opens his eyes.
People at court sometimes joke about the Viceroy’s clay cup. Childish, they call it. Primitive. Hebrew. Visitors from Kush or Mesopotamia look shocked when they see him raise it in honor of Pharaoh’s health. Their advance men, whose job it is to know all the gossip, whisper to them that Lord Joseph uses this cup to divine the future. Perhaps he sees visions in the wine, they say. Or perhaps—these are the views of the more scientifically minded—some impurity in the clay flakes off into the liquid and induces heightened states of awareness. The visitors shake their heads. That’s all well and good, they say. He saved Egypt from famine, after all. But why does he drink from it in public?