But seeing Egypt with Hugh was a revelation to my understanding of Scripture. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all made trips to Egypt, which was as different from their desert setting as another planet. And yet Egypt was bordered by desert. Wherever the Nile flood waters did not reach was desert. The fertile valley was little more than a narrow strip kept fruitful by the spring flooding of the river.
I am grateful to have the memory of Egypt with Hugh, for what we have had can never be taken away from us. The sand blew in our faces as it must have blown when Joseph was there. The smells, too, took me back many centuries, smells of donkey and camel dung and cooking food and many bodies. Sound is different. The new sounds obscure the old. Horns honking: That will always be Cairo for me. And there is the sound of loud speakers amplifying the recording of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Once upon a time (but long after Joseph) it would have been a real man up in the minaret making the strange and beautiful call. The mechanical voice has lost the resonance of life.
Then there are sounds of cars backfiring and sometimes the sounds of gunshots. Sounds of war, of people divided against each other. Joseph’s brothers divided him from the home tents and sold him (and what would have happened if they hadn’t?).
But they did, and Joseph learned. He was a handsome young man, and honest, and he honoured his master. Somewhere on the journey between Canaan and Egypt he had developed integrity. He did well. Potiphar trusted him, and Joseph did not betray that trust.
Potiphar’s wife, who lusted after him, is one of the nastiest women one could imagine. As soon as she looked at the young Hebrew she wanted him.
In the French Jerusalem Bible Potiphar is referred to as a eunuch, which I find both confusing and suggestive. Why would a woman marry a man who was a eunuch? Historically, eunuchs did not marry. On the other hand, if Potiphar were a eunuch, it would explain, if not excuse, the behaviour of Potiphar’s wife. It is more likely that Potiphar was an officer of Pharaoh, and an ordinary man, who needed someone in his household he could trust implicitly. And that someone was Joseph.
Potiphar’s wife (we are never given her name) would have been well-dressed according to the Egyptian fashion, wearing jewels, and heavy makeup which was as much a protection from the sun as an aid to beauty. The deep black around women’s eyes was originally to diffuse the sun’s rays, and the red paint on the lips was to protect them from dryness. But they soon became symbols of beauty.
Egyptian men were also dressed ornately, and to an over-sophisticated woman Joseph must have seemed simple and earthy. Potiphar’s wife wanted Joseph, and she ordered him bluntly,
“Lie with me.”
But Joseph refused, telling Potiphar’s wife that his master trusted him with everything.
“Nor has he kept anything back from me but you, because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?”
Potiphar’s wife knew nothing about Joseph’s God, and his refusal made her want him more than ever, and whenever Potiphar was away she tried to tempt him.
One day when they were alone in the house she caught him by his garment, saying, “Lie with me.” But he left his garment in her hand and fled and ran outside.
That gave the scorned woman her chance for revenge. She called all the other servants and told them that her husband had
“brought in a Hebrew to mock us. He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice. And it happened, when he heard that I lifted my voice and cried out, that he left his garment with me and fled outside.”
She kept Joseph’s garment and told the same lie to Potiphar when he came home.
“The Hebrew servant whom you brought to us came in to me to mock me,”
and she told her husband that she had screamed, and that Joseph had run away, leaving his garment with her.
And Potiphar, believing his wife, was outraged, and put Joseph in prison.
Again Joseph was betrayed, this time by a woman who felt herself scorned and had to lash out and see to it that Joseph was punished. She was not a nice woman, Potiphar’s wife.
And Joseph lay in prison where he had plenty of time to observe and contemplate.
POTIPHAR’S WIFE
He is fat, fat and lazy, the old Pot. His belly is as big as though he is pregnant. But he does not produce. He lets others do his work for him. Just as well. They do better than he could.
I was given to him in marriage. Given to a man old enough to be my father, and who was willing to pay a large bride price and to ask little from my parents, who had little to give. I did not expect him to be as greedy for me, for my young body. I had thought that since he was old, our bed would be a quiet place. But his lust was, it seemed, insatiable, as night after night he drove himself into me, hurting me with his violence, and with never a thought for my pleasure or pain. No wonder he was exhausted by day and let others do for him any work he could escape.
I found love, then, with one of the young servants who was gentle with me, concerned for my needs, waking in me undreamed-of pleasure. But he left, moving away from our household, leaving me aroused but, after his leaving, with no way to satisfy my need. And Potiphar grew more and more demanding. I do not know whether or not he suspected the young servant, or whether or not his suspicion caused my lover’s departure.
I am beautiful. I could have anyone I wanted, and I sometimes did. But I was no longer satisfied.
Then the young Hebrew came, bought from some wandering Ishmaelites. Oh, he was beautiful, with his curling hair and beard, his lean young body, his dark, exciting eyes. At first he simply did his work, quietly, not speaking, for he did not know our language. Then, as he began to be able to speak, Potiphar gave him more and more responsibility until he was managing first our household, and, at last, the entire estate.
Why, I thought, had Potiphar bought him, if not for me?
So I turned to him, the young Hebrew. I offered myself to him.
And he said No. Something about his god and honouring Potiphar or not dishonouring Potiphar or some such nonsense.
He has only one god, so I went to the temple of Isis, or Osiris, and On, to temples whose gods are vultures, or crocodiles, or great, venomous snakes. Surely all our gods can override his one god.
And still he said No. I rimmed my eyes with more than the usual kohl, rouged my lips and cheeks and the lobes of my ears, oiled and perfumed my hair.
And all I got for my pains was his garment, and with it I destroyed him. Potiphar has thrown him into jail, and that will be the end of him.
But oh! I wish he had not gone.
Naphtali is a hind let loose, he giveth goodly words.
GENESIS 49:21
Naphtali was Bilhah’s second son, Jacob’s sixth, and we don’t know much more about him than we do about Dan. He was the head of the tribe that bore his name, and he shared his territory with the Canaanites. Twice his tribe answered the call of Gideon to battle against invading Midianites.
Jacob blesses this son, but tells him that although he was born a mountain ewe, wild and free, he would give birth to lambs in the fold, a veiled warning that Naphtali’s land would lose its independence. Moses, too, blesses him, saying,
“Naphtali, sated with favour, and filled with Yahweh’s blessing, possesses the sea and the high lands.”
And, in the Song of Deborah, Naphtali is lauded with Zebulun for helping in the bloody battle against Sisera.
Otherwise we know little about him. He went along with most of the other brothers in selling Joseph into Egypt as a slave.
Joseph had done so well in Potiphar’s house that again he was specially favoured (much as Jacob had favoured him). Yet once again he was betrayed. It must have been bitter indeed for Joseph to be put in jail by Potiphar because he had refused to betray his master. And perhaps Potiphar did not escape a tug of jealousy; Joseph was younger than he, handsome, and in the full strength of his youth.
What must Joseph have thought about as he lay in prison? There were
as yet no Psalms to comfort him, no written Scripture to give him guidance and hope. Again, he was plunged into the darkness of betrayal, alone with his thoughts, in a strange land among strange people. And this time he had been slandered as well as betrayed.
Slander from the mouth of a selfish and greedy woman is more understandable than slander from those who loudly proclaim themselves as Christians. Potiphar’s wife slandered because she didn’t get her own way. “Christians” often appear to slander for love of slander. “Christian” groups—or individuals—read books looking for key words which will enable them to say the book is not Christian, or that it is pornographic.
I have received a good bit of this treatment. When A Wrinkle in Time was yet again attacked during Hugh’s last summer, at a time when he was at home between hospital stays, he said, “They are afraid,” and I suspect that he was right. It is particularly ironic that this book should come under fire since it was the book—my seventh—with which I realized that my work is vocation, not career. My work is God’s gift to me, and I try to serve it, and in Wrinkle I was writing about that perfect love that casts out fear.
One night when I had received a gratuitous attack on one of my books by a woman concerned with smelling out books she considered unChristian—and her tools for condemnation did not include either reading the book or knowing what it was about—I turned to Scripture for comfort and perspective and opened to the Beatitudes and read, suddenly in a completely new and different way,
“Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”
This did not mean that I was thinking of myself as one of the prophets, but that I was reading about the present, rather than about the long past. Holding the Bible in my hands, I knew that I was hoping to turn all my writing toward my Maker, to write for the sake of the Creator, and not for this small servant who struggles with words in order to serve the Word.
Thank God we do not have to make moral judgments, that this is God’s prerogative, not ours. Hugh again pointed out that the attackers are afraid, afraid that their safe little God-in-a-box may not be safe at all—loving, perfectly loving, but not safe in a finite sense. Or afraid that their cozy and exclusive beliefs may possibly be too narrow. But when we truly have faith in God’s love, then the wideness of God’s mercy does not terrify. And Hugh’s pointing out the fear of the censors was witness to his own courage in the face of terrible illness.
I would not knowingly or willingly read a blasphemous or pornographic book, though I have found some on the bestseller lists. But such books do not hurt me, because I am safe in God’s love. I may be made uncomfortable or unhappy or angry by such a book because it is worthless or ugly, but it is not going to hurt me or shake my faith in the joyous power of love. And maybe it will have lessons to teach me, even if they are only to let me know what not to do. But it will not frighten me, because there is no place too dark for Love’s light to shine, no place of filth without a spot where Love can come in and clean.
Then I came across these words of Brother Andrew, an Episcopal monk:
…fear can lead us to a compulsion to try to convert others to our point of view. We feel threatened by the possibility of our being wrong. [Oh, yes, I understand this. Hugh warned me of this.] Or we dread the possible changes that might enter our lives if we changed our minds about an important issue.
So I must be very careful not to fear the stinging accusations, but to look at them objectively and compassionately without imposing moral judgments.
I turn to the Psalms not only when I need comfort, but as a daily devoir, reading the Psalms each day so that at the end of a month I have read all one hundred and fifty. One evening I was reading in Coverdale’s translation, and came to the verses about Joseph’s imprisonment, and read,
The iron entered his soul.
In most other translations it reads,
They put an iron collar on his neck.
But I like better the implications of the iron entered his soul. Joseph was still in the process of maturing, developing from the pampered boy to the strong man.
We are not told how Joseph felt about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob while he was in prison. We do not know whether or not he prayed, whether or not he was angry at those who betrayed him and forsook him, whether or not he remembered his dreams of grandeur. What could have seemed more remote to him as he lay in prison?
But, just as Joseph had done well in the house of Potiphar, so he did well in prison,
for the Lord was with Joseph, and shewed mercy, and gave him favour in the sight of the keeper of the prison. And the keeper of the prison committed to Joseph’s hand all the prisoners that were in the prison; and the keeper of the prison no longer had to do anything because the Lord was with Joseph and made everything he did to prosper.
We are not told of Joseph’s own dreams while he was in prison. But when the butler and the baker offended Pharaoh, and he put them in the prison where Joseph was now in charge, we learn about their dreams.
The butler, the baker, the candlestick maker were all there in jail with Joseph. No television, no radio, no newspapers, nothing to keep them in touch with the outside world except the gossip of the jailer.
But Joseph was a dreamer, and so he must have dreamed. Perhaps by now he had learned to keep his dreams to himself.
Most of us dream, even if we don’t remember our dreams. I have several every night, and I don’t bother to write them down unless they seem to have special significance, otherwise I wouldn’t write anything else. The dreams come in three categories—ordinary, easily translated dreams; dreams that are story, in which I may be only an observer, not a participant, but stories which are enough on their own (only twice have I used a dream in something I was writing); and the special dreams, which are pure gifts of grace.
I had one of the golden dreams shortly before Hugh got ill. It started out grey. I was with a great many people in a wasteland of mud and dirt. We could look through a high hurricane fence into a large sunny garden full of flowers and trees, and brightly dressed people singing and laughing together. But the great gates were closed against us. And someone told me that it was my responsibility to speak to the people with me outside the garden and to warn them of their hardness of heart. And I cried out, “How can I possibly be the one to do that when there is still coldness in my own heart, when I have not yet learned fully to forgive, when I haven’t learned nearly enough about love…?”
Then I looked up and the gates were swinging open.
While Hugh was dying my dreams were mostly garbled, neither good nor bad, jumbles of colour and confusion. I was tired, bone weary. I would take out some of my frustration over what was happening to Hugh by taking the whacker and going after the weedy sumac trees which were springing up and obscuring my view of the western hills. Weeds were profuse in the vegetable garden, and I made great piles of them. Almost every evening we ate out of the garden, medleys of green and yellow beans, peas, broccoli, baby beets and carrots, reminding me of the harvest Psalms where the hills dance for joy.
What was Joseph given to eat in prison? Nothing like the tender green bounty of our vegetable garden.
How long was he there before the butler and the baker told him their dreams and things once again changed for him? Not a short time. Months, at the very least. Was he ever afraid? Did he turn to the God of his fathers for courage and strength? We are told that God was with him, but we are not told of his own awareness of God.
While Hugh was dying I was acutely aware of God, far more than when things go on in the ordinary way. Without that awareness how would I have survived? I wondered, as the weeks dragged on, if I was being faithful enough in prayer. I went through the motions, said the words, read the Scripture passages, but I was not always there.
And the wonderful thing is that
this is all right. We don’t have to be perpetually and flawlessly faithful. Only God is that. In God’s love I may be angry, I may be anguished, I may be exhausted, but I am not afraid, because God is love and Love casts out fear.
Perhaps Joseph was closer to God in prison than when he was bragging about his dreams.
And the butler and the baker each dreamed a dream, and the dreams disturbed them.
Joseph came in to them in the morning and looked at them, and saw that they were sad. So he asked them, “Why do you look so sad today?”
And they said to him, “We have each dreamed a dream, and there is no interpreter of it.”
And Joseph said, “Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell me your dreams.”
Joseph had learned that dreams belong to God, and that the interpretation of dreams belongs to God. During the long nights in jail he must have pondered his own grand dreams which seemed far indeed from the possibility of fulfillment. And yet he still believed in them, and that they came from God. But now, rather than having a swelled head, he was increasing in probity and trustworthiness.
The chief butler told his dream to Joseph and said to him, “In my dream I saw a vine set before me, and in the vine were three branches, and it was as though the vine budded, and the blossoms shot forth, and from their clusters came ripe grapes. And Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup, and I gave the cup into Pharaoh’s hand.”
And Joseph said to him, “This is the interpretation of it: the three branches are three days, yet within these three days shall Pharaoh lift up your head and restore you into your place, and you shall deliver Pharaoh’s cup into his hand, and once again you will be as you were when you were his chief butler. But remember me when it is well with you, and show kindness to me, I beg you, and mention me to Pharaoh, and bring me out of this prison. For indeed I was stolen away out of the land of the Hebrews, and here in Egypt also I have done nothing that they should put me into this dungeon.”
Sold into Egypt Page 9
