by Bruce Feiler
Potiphor promptly throws Joseph into prison, but God stays with Joseph, the text says, and assures that the chief jailer is kind to him. While in prison, Joseph hears that two of his fellow prisoners, a cupbearer and a baker, have had dreams that they cannot interpret. “Surely God can interpret!” Joseph says. “Pray tell me your dreams.” The cupbearer’s dream involves three branches that bud into grapes, which then get pressed into the pharaoh’s cup. Joseph says the dream means that in three days the cupbearer will be pardoned. The baker’s dream involves three open baskets of food, which birds pick clean. Joseph says the dream means that in three days pharaoh will behead the baker and birds will pick his body clean. In three days, the pharaoh’s birthday, both dreams come true.
Two years later, the pharaoh has a dream that out of the Nile emerge seven cows, handsome and sturdy, that graze on the land. They are followed by seven more cows, ugly and gaunt, that eat the earlier set of cows. He has another dream in which seven ears of grain, solid and healthy, grow on a single stalk. They are followed by seven ears, thin and scorched, which swallow up the seven solid ears. None of the pharaoh’s messengers can interpret his dreams, so the cupbearer recommends Joseph, who’s still in prison. The pharaoh sends for Joseph and asks him to interpret the dreams. “Not I!” Joseph says. “God will see to Pharaoh’s welfare.” The dreams are one and the same, Joseph declares. “Immediately ahead are seven years of great abundance in all the land of Egypt. After them will come seven years of famine, and all the abundance in the land of Egypt will be forgotten.” As for why the pharaoh has the dream twice, “It means that the matter has been determined by God.”
Joseph further recommends that the pharaoh take steps to preserve food from the seven fat years to use during the seven lean years. The plan pleases the pharaoh, and he asks Joseph to organize the effort. “You shall be in charge of my court,” the pharaoh says. “Only with respect to the throne will I be superior to you.” Removing the signet from his hand, the pharaoh puts it on Joseph’s hand, and dresses him in linen robes, yet another important coat in Joseph’s life.
According to scholars, foreigners did, on occasion, become prime minister of Egypt. Also, the swearing-in ceremony, during which Joseph receives the ring and robes, is well known from art during the New Kingdom. As for interpreting dreams, it was a highly coveted skill, usually performed by priests. As Basem explained, “They might have been magicians; we don’t know. What we do know is they used books of interpretations. If you looked into a mirror, this meant you’d have a second wife. If you looked out a window, this meant you’d prosper in the afterlife. If you went to a certain city, this meant you were going to die.” In a further sign of accuracy, the word the Bible uses for interpreters is Egyptian in origin, as are other details, like the use of cows, which were not common in Palestine. Ultimately, these uncannily accurate details of daily life—perhaps unknowable to later scribes—suggest that the story of Joseph, like those of his forefathers, began as an oral tradition, with deep roots in the Nile.
As if to reinforce that connection, the story soon brings Jacob’s brothers into Egypt. The famine that Joseph predicted forces ten of his brothers to seek relief in Egypt, where they unknowingly appear before their brother. Joseph recognizes them and, in a gesture that seems part a retaliation and part a test, accuses them of being spies. He insists they leave one brother behind and return with Jacob’s missing eleventh brother, Benjamin, whose mother is also Rachel. They do so and Joseph appears to honor them with a banquet, at which point he falsely accuses Benjamin of stealing a goblet. Judah begins to apologize until Joseph cuts him off, reveals himself at last to his brothers, and forgives them. “Do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither,” Joseph says. “It was to save life that God sent me ahead of you.” The brothers then bring their father, Jacob, to Egypt and the pharaoh invites them to live on his best land, in Goshen, part of the fertile Nile Delta north of Cairo. As further proof of the good relations the Israelites enjoy with Egypt, Jacob is mummified when he dies. The task takes forty days, as it would for a nobleman, but he is mourned for seventy days, as if he were a king.
“So what do you think?” I said to Basem. We had been in half a dozen tombs by now and seen countless images that could have illustrated Genesis itself. “Do you think the story is true?”
“Do you want me to speak from the point of view of religion, or the point of view of history?” he said.
“Neither. I want you to speak from the point of view of yourself.”
“Myself ? I think religion is more powerful than history. I think Joseph existed.”
For several more days we traveled at a similar pace, seeing temples during the day, enjoying the river in the afternoons, eating five-course meals at night. Compared with seeing holy places in Israel, most of which have few tangible remains, visiting sacred sites in Egypt is a much more physical—even carnal—experience and hints at what places of worship must have felt like across the ancient world. With their large, blocky walls and soaring columns the temples seem to carve out sacred spaces like brackets dropped from the sky. Enter here and escape the onrush of time; enter here and contemplate eternity.
Because Egyptian temples were built so early in the course of human history, they often seem closer to the natural world than to other man-made structures. One reason is they are unencumbered by architectural precedent; they refer to nature, not to other buildings. Early temples, for example, used actual bound papyrus, like thatch, for columns. When these were replicated in stone, architects copied everything, including the flower at the top and the bulge in the middle. These columns are bulkier than their European counterparts—linebackers, not halfbacks—and are bunched like reeds.
The more striking feature of the temples is their decoration. In Kom Ombo, just north of Aswan, where we arrived on the third day, the temple is a hulking tribute to schizophrenia. One side is devoted to Horus, the falcon-headed god of medicine; the other side to Sobek, the crocodile god of fertility. Wandering around the compound, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the grand, almost torsolike shape of the columns with the graceful finery of the hieroglyphs, tattoos on the body of the gods. It was as if the mere act of storytelling was so powerful that it could no longer contain itself and needed to be splashed onto every surface. This is storytelling of the most public kind, the gradual transference of local myths into the permanence of history. And what stories they were—full of love, jealousy, rivalry among the gods, vicious wars, and tender truces.
Today, five thousand years after this process started, the monuments of the Nile Valley are a testament to the sheer awe that educated and lay Egyptians alike felt at the impact of their own stories. The walls are not merely sprinkled with writing, they are covered with it. Every inch of available space is lined with falcons, ibises, crocodiles, cats, rams, egrets, owls, and beetles. There are houseware hieroglyphs—saws, scissors, knives, jars. Agricultural ones—moons, stalks, flowers, seeds. And gastronomic ones—wines, grains, fruits, nuts. There’s even a Noah-like menagerie—vultures, ducks, salamanders, baboons. These hieroglyphs climb the walls, ring the columns, and line the lintels until one is so numbed by their presence that it’s easy to forget the profundity of it all.
As I stared into the script, like being swallowed in a three-story dictionary, I tried to think of other buildings with so much writing on them. Not Greek temples. Not Gothic cathedrals. Not Japanese shrines or Muslim mosques. The only thing one can conclude is that language was such a novelty, such a profound revision of how people viewed the world, that builders wanted to inundate visitors with the force of language in the same way that the river inundated people with the force of life. And perhaps that’s the point. The volume of words on the public monuments of ancient Egypt is comparable to that other magnum force of Egypt, the flood. If language is going to triumph over nature, it first must become nature—the pictograms themselves; then divert attention from nature—use those pictograms to tell stories; the
n dominate it—erect tall buildings that show the triumph of stories over nature. Egyptians may or may not have been the first to do this, but they were the most effective, at least in the Near East. And in so doing, they may have laid the foundation for the greatest written document to come out of antiquity.
As scholar Nahum Sarna observed, generations of readers have known that Joseph offers one of the most compelling narratives of the Five Books of Moses. From Thomas Mann to Andrew Lloyd Webber, Joseph has inspired more popular retellings than any of his forefathers. Even a lay reader, upon arriving at the Joseph story, perks up. There’s a thematic explanation for this attachment: In his descent from chosen son to indentured servant, and in his subsequent rise from captivity to freedom, Joseph’s life mirrors the larger story of the Five Books of Moses. But there’s another reason: In its abundance of details and its stirring, Hollywood-style plot twists, the story of Joseph is just plain fun to read.
Wandering around Kom Ombo, I felt for the first time that I understood why. With Joseph the Israelites have their deepest interaction with Egyptians and their prodigious gifts of narrative. One can almost feel the imagination and narrative techniques of the patriarchs progressing as they wandered from Mesopotamia, through Canaan, into Egypt, and from each imbibing clues to the importance of stories. The Bible may be the beginning of Western religion, but it’s also the culmination of a profoundly Near Eastern sense of how to build a people through story-telling. Egyptians, in particular, were interested in the components that make for good yarns: sex, revenge, power, devotion, despair, and reconciliation. The world’s first pulp novels were carved on the walls of Egypt’s temples. And these pulp novels may have inspired the Israelites to rachet up the importance of drama in their own national history. From now on, these stories would have to be public, not only retold for all to hear, but inscribed for all to see. From now on, the written word was king.
Two days later, on my last night in Upper Egypt, I went to see the sound and light show at Karnak Temple. A futuristic presentation with lasers and classical music, narrated with melodramatic commentary, the show is part of a global trend—castles in France, monuments in Israel, battleships in the United States—to lure visitors to abandoned sites at night. “I know it sounds corny,” a friend advised. “But don’t miss it.”
We gathered outside a line of parallel sphinxes and a voice—British, deep, stentorian—began. “May the evening soothe and welcome you, oh Traveler through the night. You will travel no further, because you are come. Here, you are at the beginning of time.”
The voice led us through the largest compound on the Nile. Built over 1,300 years, Karnak is a monstrosity that at its peak in the early second millennium B.C.E. boasted assets including 65 villages, 433 gardens, 421,662 head of cattle, and 81,322 workers. The temple itself, dedicated to Amen-Re, could contain ten Notre Dames or eighteen Parthenons. One Egyptologist called it “an archaeological department store containing something for everyone.”
“The solemn threshold you have just crossed was forbidden to mortals. The City of God was a fortress where a garrison of mystic votaries watched over the divine scheme of things.”
With each step one could sense the accumulation of power: Thut-mose III built this, Seti I added that. The greatest builder was Rameses II, who stuffed 134 columns into the Hypostyle hall and carved images of himself as a triumphant imperialist. One wall shows Rameses crushing the Hittites in Mesopotamia, though records show the contest a draw. Even pharaohs, it seems, had spin doctors.
“Do not be overwhelmed by the sheer size of these ruins. The citadel that arose here was not designed on the scale of man, but on the grand scale of God.”
Eventually I decided that while the nighttime setting was spectacular, the commentary was a bit much, so I ducked away from the group. I tiptoed into the darkness, as green shadows from the lasers ricocheted off the columns. A grit filled the air. The voice continued. “Don’t try to count the columns, the colossi, the sphinxes, the obelisks. Try rather with every step you take to hear the whispered response of the ever-present god.” Out in the open, the sky slowly came into view and I was struck by how every object I could see—the moon, a palm tree, a bird with one leg—was grist for a hieroglyph. And it was while noticing this sense of inclusion, while walking around this abandoned temple where every object was poured into the brew of religion, that I began to realize the extent of the changes I had been experiencing on this trip.
Before setting out on this journey, reading the Bible for me had been largely an act of imagination, of trust—that these characters saw these things, said these things, did these things. The characters were almost completely disembodied from time and space. But now, reading the Bible from the inside, as it were, from the places themselves, I could feel myself moving closer to the stories. The Bible was no longer metaphor to me. It was no longer the story of some other people in some faraway places. The places, at least, were familiar now. And for someone from a distinctive place, whose favorite books were always ones with rich, almost overpowering settings—Faulkner’s South, Tolstoy’s Russia, Updike’s New England—that sense of immersion was the first step to the most satisfying feeling I ever have while reading: a feeling that I actually inhabit the story. I climb through the pages, slip through the scenery, and enter some parallel place full of swamps, or canyons, or castles, or dales. And not until I cross that divide—not until I walk in that world—can I fully enter the minds of the characters, and feel their desires as my own.
Three verses from the end of Genesis, Joseph, on his deathbed, tells his brothers:“I am about to die; but God will remember you, and bring you up out of this land to the land which he swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” It was his greatest prediction, and with it Joseph seems to draw a distinction between himself and his forefathers. He’s not a patriarch, he’s a prophet. And for me, standing now in the capital of ancient Egypt, perhaps in the very place that Joseph stood, at the farthest point of the Fertile Crescent from where his great-grandfather was born, and realizing that Joseph predicted the Exodus, which meant that he knew his descendants would be enslaved by the pharaoh and then freed by God, was the most powerful expression of optimism—and faith—I had ever encountered.
It was also, at that moment, an overpowering challenge that I sensed I could no longer continue to avoid. Would I place such credence in a generations-old promise I never actually heard? Could I meet this standard of commitment—to anything? Would I have such faith? Here, at the end of Genesis, was a stirring new prototype of dedication. Even among all the pantheon of Egyptian gods—tactile, visual, with suns for bodies and crocodiles for heads—Joseph continued to believe in his own god: invisible, untouchable, unknowable.
Yet undeniably real.
2. And They Made Their Lives Bitter
This is what it takes to cross the street in Cairo: First you have to determine which cars are moving and which are not. This is not as easy as it might seem. Streets have no particular distinction between where cars should be driven and where they should be parked. Step onto a thoroughfare at, say, 9:00 on a Tuesday morning in early winter, as I did with Avner from our hotel, and one is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cars. Cars in the left lane going in one direction, cars in the right lane going in the same direction. Cars on the sidewalk going in the opposite direction. Cars in the middle parked. Often the only way to tell which cars are operating is to feel the hood. A warm hood means the engine is running and it’s best to stand back. A cold hood means the car is stalled and the driver has stepped away—for a few days.
“Making this walk reminds me of what a friend of mine said of Tehran,” Avner said. “Wake up on one side of the street, stay there until tomorrow.”
If Egypt is the gift of the Nile, Cairo is the cleanup job left after all the boxes have been opened and all the guests have gone home. Named Al Kahira, the “Conqueror,” by tenth-century Arabs, Cairo has been the largest city in Africa and the Middle East for almost a millennium.
Today, with a population nearing twenty million, the “Mother of the World” has more vehicles than the Nile has fish. As a result, it has more congestion than almost any place on earth and a daily derby of pedestrian crossing. The biggest hazard is the blue-and-white buses, which careen around the city like boxes of SweetTarts being kicked around crowded movie theaters, threatening to spew their contents. The next gravest threat is the public vans, like the ones I used on my first trip, which constantly speed up and slow down as the barker hanging out the passenger window reaches down to scoop up a veiled lady and her basket of cabbage and deposit them in the backseat. Taxis are the most ubiquitous. Black with white splotches over their front and back bumpers, they look like holstein cows being herded down the street. Unlike real cows, though, these taxis have horns that work. As Avner put it, “The only reason these cars have steering wheels is so they have a place to put their horns.”
Even Cairenes are overwhelmed by the traffic. When we finally arrived at our destination, the Egyptian Museum, I asked the director of public relations, a friend of Avner’s, if she had any advice for how to cross the street. She took the question as a matter of life or death. “Look left, look right, look ahead of you, look behind you, then stare at the driver and make yourself appear strong. Then they’ll let you in.” She added, “Above all, take nothing for granted.”
Inside the museum we left our bags and proceeded into the atrium. More like a warehouse than an archive, the Egyptian Museum feels like a giant pharaonic pawn shop, where four-thousand-year-old sarcophagi are stacked on top of three-thousand-year-old cartouches on top of five-thousand-year-old mummies. And everything needs dusting. Founded in 1858, the museum outgrew its current facility within months and has never quite recovered. Allowing one minute for each object, it would take nearly nine months to view its 136,000 artifacts. Forty thousand more objects lie crated in the basement, where many have sunk into the ground, requiring excavations. Egypt: where even the museums are archaeological sites.
