Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible

by David Plotz

  chapters 40–41

  Joseph is a Sammy Glick—always ingratiating himself with powerful men and angling for the next job. He quickly makes himself indispensable to Potiphar and takes charge of Potiphar’s house. Then, when the Desperate Pyramid-wife sends him to prison on a trumped-up charge of rape, he immediately becomes the warden’s right-hand man. In jail, he’s asked to interpret the dreams of two fellow prisoners: Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker. He tells the cupbearer that his dream means he’ll be free in three days and back in Pharaoh’s favor. And he tells the baker that his dream means he’ll be executed in three days.

  Both dreams, of course, come true. Two years later, when Pharaoh has dreams his sorcerers can’t interpret, the cupbearer remembers Joseph’s talent and urges Pharaoh to have him interpret the dreams. Here’s what follows:

  Thereupon Pharaoh sent for Joseph, and he was rushed from the

  dungeon. He had his hair cut and changed his clothes, and he

  appeared before Pharaoh.

  He stops for a haircut! What a detail—the touch of a genius, an astounding storyteller. It suspends the story for just a moment. It holds the tension, delays the encounter with the king just long enough to make a reader nervous. And it tells us everything we need to know about Joseph: his attention to his public appearance, his awareness of status, his ambition, his gift for seizing the main chance, and his engagement with the political world as much as the spiritual.

  Joseph explains that Pharaoh’s dreams of seven fat cows and seven gaunt cows, and seven plump ears of grain and seven shriveled ones, mean Egypt will enjoy seven rich years followed by seven years of famine. With his eye on the brass ring, Joseph says that Pharaoh needs to hire “a man of discernment and wisdom” to coordinate Egypt’s homeland security, to store the bounteous crops during the fat years, and to ration the surplus during the lean years. And who, pray tell, is such a man? How about, um, Joseph?

  Pharaoh picks Joseph not for his obvious intelligence or moxie, but because he recognizes that Joseph has “the spirit of God” in him. Pharaoh is a polytheist and animal worshipper, but he’s a canny enough monarch to appreciate God’s power. (This perceptive pharaoh is obviously supposed to be contrasted with the detestable pharaoh to come in Exodus, who is so thick-skulled that it takes ten plagues before he acknowledges the Lord.)

  Another incident also suggests Joseph’s strength of character: Pharaoh gives Joseph an Egyptian name, “Zaphenath-paneah,” and orders him to marry a high-ranking Egyptian girl. But when his two sons are born, Joseph gives them Hebrew names: Ephraim and Manasseh. Joseph hasn’t forgetten where he came from, or what God he worships.

  chapter 42

  Let me digress for a moment about a peculiar subject: Egyptian public policy during Joseph’s administration. Joseph is Pharaoh’s viceroy during the fat years and the famine. To hear Genesis tell it, he’s the best viceroy Egypt has ever seen. But to a modern reader, Joseph is appalling. During the seven fat years, he gathers the entire national grain supply in warehouses. When the famine comes, he sells grain to the hungry Egyptians and to foreign buyers. No problem, so far. But as the famine worsens, Egypt’s peasants return to Joseph to beg for help. So Joseph sells them more grain, collecting “all the money that was to be found in the land of Egypt . . . as payment for the rations.” The people are still hungry. Joseph again feeds them, but now seizes their horses, sheep, cattle, and donkeys as payment. The famine continues. The Egyptian people, having given their money and livestock to Pharaoh, come back to Joseph once more. This time, Joseph demands all their land in exchange for grain: “Thus the land passed over to Pharaoh.” Joseph explains the new deal to them: they will be sharecroppers, and will hand over one-fifth of their harvest every year to Pharaoh, keeping the balance for themselves. They reply, “We are grateful to my lord, and we shall be serfs to Pharaoh.”

  So our hero Joseph abolishes private property, turns freeholders into serfs, and transforms a decentralized farm economy into a command-economy dictatorship. This is bad economics and worse public policy. This is China in 1949. Joseph is Chairman Mao. If you want to speculate, you could even argue that the centralized dictatorship established by Joseph is what made possible the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt. Once you create a gargantuan, voracious state apparatus, it must be fed. Is it a surprise that slavery became part of its diet? In a less totalitarian state, perhaps slavery wouldn’t have been as necessary or as feasible. This digression has been brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute.

  chapters 42–46

  But that’s the last bad word I’ll have to say about Joseph. On to Joseph’s reconciliation with his family, which is a four-chapter rush, and the fi rst fully persuasive story in Genesis. Unlike a lot of the other stories, it always makes sense: the plot is clear; the characters behave in complicated, recognizably human ways; and it’s hugely suspenseful.

  A summary: Facing famine in Canaan, Jacob dispatches all his sons except his beloved Benjamin to Egypt to buy grain. They call on the vizier, Joseph, to beg for help. They don’t recognize Joseph, but he recognizes them. Testing his brothers, he calls them spies and demands that one stay as a hostage until they return with their youngest brother. Inexplicably—since they don’t recognize him—the brothers realize that this is the payback for their cruelty to Joseph: “Alas, we are being punished on account of our brother, because we looked on at his anguish, yet paid no heed as he pleaded with us.” Joseph overhears them and weeps

  (1) privately. They depart with grain, and Joseph takes Simeon as his hostage. At home, Jacob refuses to let Benjamin return to Egypt, even after Reuben offers Jacob his own two sons as a sacrifice if Benjamin is hurt. (You need a flowchart to follow it: One son, Reuben, offering two grandsons so he can take another son, Benjamin, back to ransom yet another son, Simeon, all at the behest of still another, missing son, Joseph.) Finally, the famine is so severe that Jacob agrees to dispatch Benjamin to Egypt. When Joseph sees his younger brother, he again weeps (2) privately. He sells the brothers more grain, but plants a silver goblet in Benjamin’s sack. Then he sends his servants to search the brothers and arrest them for theft. He demands that whoever stole the cup serve as his slave. When it turns up in Benjamin’s bag, the brothers prostrate themselves before Joseph (as in his dream). Judah pleads eloquently for Joseph to spare Benjamin, saying that enslaving him would kill their father. Judah implores Joseph to take him as a slave instead. Finally Joseph, “who could no longer control himself,” reveals himself to his brothers. Joseph weeps (3) again. “His sobs were so loud that the Egyptians [in other rooms] could hear.” Then Joseph forgives them sweetly and wholly.

  He sends the brothers back to Jacob, but not before throwing his arms around Benjamin and weeping (4) one more time. Jacob and all his sons and their families—seventy people in all, not counting wives or daughters, as, of course, the Bible doesn’t—move to Egypt. Joseph meets them along the way, embraces his father, and weeps (5) “on his neck a good while.” Then they settle in Egypt with Pharaoh’s blessing and prosper.

  The beauty in this story, beyond its basic happy ending—brothers redeemed, father at peace, etc.—is the heart of Joseph. Even as he tricks his brothers and makes them suffer, he is anguished. His tears signify goodness rather than weakness. He forgives his brothers for the terrible wrong they did him, because he knows his enslavement was all part of God’s plan.

  Do not be distressed or reproach yourselves that you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you. . . . God has sent

  me ahead of you to ensure your survival on earth, and to save your

  lives in an extraordinary deliverance. So it was not you who sent

  me here, but God.

  For me, Joseph is the most persuasive argument in Genesis for faith. His consistent belief in the Lord, even through slavery and prison, carries him forward. This faith doesn’t merely make him great and powerful. It also makes him good. It makes him able to weep, and weep, and weep som
e more, and forgive.

  I also favor Joseph because he doesn’t require any divine intervention. No miracles occur in the making of this patriarch. It’s a story of human achievement. Joseph does right, perhaps because he believes in God—or perhaps because he is an inherently good man. God sends Joseph symbolic dreams, but He never talks directly to Joseph, as He did to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Joseph’s faith is our modern kind, a faith in the unseen. Joseph is in the same position that we—assuming you are as vision-free as I am—find ourselves in, trying to live faithfully with God in the background.

  chapters 48–50

  Jacob can’t stop his old tricks. On his deathbed in Egypt, he decides to adopt Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh as his own. Jacob intentionally places his right hand on the younger son, Ephraim; and his left hand on the older son, Manasseh. Joseph tries to switch the hands— “Not so, Father . . . for the other is the first-born; place your right hand upon his head.” But Jacob refuses. He says Ephraim deserves the greater, right-handed blessing, because Ephraim will be the greater man. Even in death, Jacob has to wheedle and play favorites.

  I happen to reach this passage shortly after Hanna and I decide to start holding a family Shabbat dinner. I don’t know if we are doing this because I’m reading the Bible, or because it seems like a nice ritual, or because Hanna found a good recipe for challah, but whatever the reason we are trying to keep a regular date with our Shabbat candles on Friday night. To be honest, it’s all mumbo jumbo to me—lighting candles, drinking wine, blessing bread, accompanied by incomprehensible Hebrew prayers—pleasant rituals, but meaningless. But when I read about the blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh, it clicks for me. On Shabbat, one of my duties is to bless our children. I put my hand on my Jacob’s head (usually my left hand, since I am left-handed), and recite the prayer, which—I suddenly notice—is for God to make Jacob like Ephraim and Manasseh.

  Till now, I didn’t know who Ephraim and Manasseh were, or why I should bless my son in their name. But here it is, right in Genesis. I am following Jacob’s own instructions: “By you shall Israel invoke blessings, saying: God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.” It’s unsettling, in a good way, to fi nd that the very words I am speaking to my son are those that my fathers and forefathers have been speaking to their sons on Friday night for 3,000 years. For almost the first time in my life, I feel a sense of continuity with my ancestors. I understand that I am heir to an ancient tradition, and am responsible for preserving it.

  Yet even in this lovely tradition, the Bible compels ambivalence. In speaking the biblical blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh, I’m honoring the scheming of Jacob. And that’s not the only thing troubling me as I finish Genesis. I began reading Genesis as a do-nothing Jew who believed in God. But as I have been reading, I find myself turning into the opposite, practicing my Judaism but doubting in God. The God of Genesis is capricious, unreasonable, and cruel: why should I want to believe in Him? It’s a strange internal battle, and I don’t know which side is going to win.

  Jacob summons his sons to his deathbed for their blessing. We learn he has been paying very close attention. He strips Reuben of the rank of firstborn, because Reuben slept with Jacob’s concubine—an incident that Jacob never mentioned when it happened. “For when you mounted your father’s bed, you brought disgrace!” The next two sons, Simeon and Levi, were the murderers of Shechem’s family—an incident Jacob made little of at the time. But now, he casts them out, condemning their tribes to subservience and weakness: “Cursed be their anger so fierce, and their wrath so relentless.” The fourth son, Judah—the stand-up guy who offered himself as a slave in Benjamin’s place—is called the “lion” by Jacob and blessed with authority over the others. The other brothers are dealt with more cursorily, but there are lots of great animal metaphors: Dan is a “serpent by the road.” Issachar is a “strong-boned ass.” Benjamin is a “ravenous wolf.” It’s pretty obvious that these paternal blessings are a way of explaining the status of each of the tribes at the time Genesis was written. Because the tribe of Judah was supreme in Israel, Jacob’s blessing elevates Judah. The tribes of Simeon and Levi were a mess, so Genesis explains this with Jacob’s curse. Jacob and Joseph die, and that’s the end of Genesis.

  TWO

  The Book of Exodus

  Let My Complaining, Whining, No-Goodnik People Go!

  In which the Israelites multiply in Egypt; Pharaoh enslaves them and then orders the slaughter of all firstborn Israelite boys; his own daughter saves one such boy, Moses, who flees Egypt after killing an Egyptian; God brings Moses to a burning bush, and orders him and his brother, Aaron, to free the Israelites; Pharaoh rebuffs Moses’s demands, so God sends ten plagues, including the slaying of Egyptian firstborn males; finally the Israelites are allowed to leave and cross the Red Sea while Moses holds back the water; Pharaoh’s army pursues them but drowns; God feeds the Israelites manna in the desert; they walk to Mount Sinai, where God issues laws and the Ten Commandments to Moses; the Israelites make a golden calf, which infuriates God; the Israelites build a tabernacle to carry the holy ark containing God’s laws.

  chapter 1

  acob’s descendants have multiplied and prospered in Egypt, “and the land [is] filled with them.” The new pharaoh is alarmed at the population explosion and has “oppressed them with forced labor.” Oddly, my translation never describes the Israelites as “slaves.” Hmm. Maybe it’s a peculiarity of the translation. Or maybe not. The Israelites do perform forced labor for Pharaoh, and they have Egyptian taskmasters who have “ruthlessly imposed” on them. But they don’t seem to be owned by Egyptians. There appear to be limits on their maltreatment: they are compelled to supply labor, but there’s no mention of their being deprived of property or banned from other work. None of this minimizes their suffering. I’m just struck by the absence of that word “slave,” which is thrown about so casually everywhere else in the Bible (and which we repeat endlessly at the Passover seder: “We were slaves in Egypt . . .”).

  The Israelites keep multiplying, so Pharaoh orders Hebrew midwives to kill all boys born to Hebrew women. It doesn’t work: two heroic midwives—Shifra and Puah—disregard the order. (These two are nearly the only working women in the whole Bible—at least the only working women who aren’t prostitutes.) Increasingly panicked, Pharaoh demands that all newborn Hebrew boys be thrown into the Nile. Bad move. God is keen on tit for tat: in the Bible, when you do a wrong the very same wrong is often visited on you later. Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery in Egypt, and their descendants end up in bondage (or whatever) to Pharaoh. Pharaoh tries to kill the Hebrew firstborns, but in a few chapters, it will be the Egyptian firstborns who die. It’s divine retribution, or, to use a catchier modern term, karma.

  chapter 2

  I don’t know where the Disneyfied idea about Moses, Prince of Egypt, comes from, but it certainly isn’t in the Bible. Exodus has only the sketchiest details about Young Moses. The baby is floated down the Nile in a wicker basket and is rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. The princess then pays Moses’s own mother to raise him. That’s it. The story jumps immediately from the baby’s rescue to Moses as an adult. There’s not a word about Moses as an Egyptian prince. Pharaoh’s daughter is not mentioned again, much less described as his mother. Moses never races a chariot, Heston-like, with Pharaoh’s sons, or woos the almond-eyed princess Nefertiti, or marshals the Egyptian army, or competes for the double crown. Is Prince Moses just a modern confection, manufactured to lend some glamour to the story of Exodus?

  Unlike greedy young Abraham, boring young Isaac, deceitful young Jacob, and proud young Joseph, Moses is born ready to do God’s work. From the beginning, he stands up for justice and the little guy. His first recorded act (not including being plucked from the river) is murdering an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew worker. Fleeing Egypt to escape Pharaoh’s retribution, Moses continues crusading for justice. As soon as he arrives in Midian, he routs some obnoxious shepherds who are preventing a young w
oman from watering her fl ocks. Then he marries her. Her name is Zipporah, which clears up a family mystery. My Israeli father-in-law, who has a terrible memory for names, calls all men Moishe (Moses) and all women Zipporah. I always thought they were just common Israeli nicknames. Now I get the biblical joke.

  Meanwhile, back in Egypt, the Israelites’ “cry for help from the bondage rose up to God. God heard their moaning, and God remembered His covenant. . . . God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.”

  Well, thanks, Lord, but what took you so long? What were you doing during our four bad centuries on the Nile delta? At the beginning of Genesis, God was a hands-on Sovereign of the Universe—fashioning man from dirt, wandering through Eden in search of Adam, sniffi ng thoughtfully at Noah’s burnt offerings, dropping by Abraham’s tent to discuss Sodom and Gomorrah. But as Genesis progressed, He was increasingly an absent father. He never appeared to Joseph, and now He has left the Israelites sweating in Thebes for hundreds of years. I know He’s a busy deity, what with all those galaxies to manage, but how come He didn’t have time to check up on His Chosen People for twenty generations?

  chapters 3–4

  Now that God has finally decided to pay attention, He really pays attention. He throws up a burning bush to stop Moses in his tracks, then calls out to him, “Moses, Moses.” Moses answers, “Here I am.”

  (This exchange—the repeated name, followed by “Here I am”—exactly duplicates the conversation between Abraham and God when the Lord stopped the sacrifice of Isaac.)

  The episode of the burning bush is both high drama and low comedy. On the one hand, it is a profound encounter between a man and his maker. At the same time, it feels like nothing so much as a discussion between an enthusiastic father and his extremely sullen teenage son. God tries so hard with Moses, and Moses just brushes Him off. The Lord begins with a straightforward attempt to persuade Moses to help Him. He outlines the whole big story for Moses: My people are suffering, I have heard them, I am going to rescue them and bring them to a land “fl owing with milk and honey.” Then He says, rather gently, that He wants to send Moses to negotiate the Israelites’ release. But—the gall of this young prophet!—Moses resists, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?”