When Joseph saw his father placing his right hand on Ephraim’s head he was displeased; so he took hold of his father’s hand to move it from Ephraim’s head to Manasseh’s head. Joseph said to him, “No, my father, this one is the firstborn; put your right hand on his head.”
And his father refused, and said, “I know, my son, I know. He also shall become a people, and he also shall be great; but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations.” And he blessed them that day, saying, “God made thee as Ephraim and Manasseh; and he made Ephraim before Manasseh.”
Joseph was not pleased with this, but a blessing given cannot be withdrawn.
Jacob spoke to each of his twelve sons, in order of their birth, but he did not make his firstborn Reuben the foremost of the brothers. Reuben still had to pay for his night with Bilhah.
It was Judah who was the favoured son. “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,” Jacob prophesied, “nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet.”
To Joseph he promised that God almighty would bless him
“with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that couches beneath, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb. The blessings of your father are mighty beyond the blessings of the eternal mountains, the bounties of an everlasting life.”
And his blessing of Benjamin seems strange indeed, little Benjamin who seems to have caused no one any trouble.
“Benjamin is like a vicious wolf. Morning and evening he kills and devours.”
There seems little indication that he did so, though God skips over him, and over Joseph, to choose Judah as the brother from whose tribe the great king David would spring. Perhaps in a prophetic way Jacob was seeing his son’s fierce descendants—the Benjamite warriors like Ehud and Saul and Jonathan—famed for their archery.
When Jacob yielded up the ghost and was gathered unto his people, Joseph fell upon his father’s face, and wept upon him, and kissed him. And Joseph commanded the physicians who served him to embalm his father, and the physicians embalmed Israel. And forty days were fulfilled for him, for so are fulfilled the days of those who are embalmed, and the Egyptians mourned for him threescore and ten days.
Again that extraordinary number, forty!
But when the days of his mourning were past, Joseph spoke unto the house of Pharaoh, saying, “If now I have found grace in your eyes, speak, I pray you, in the ears of Pharaoh, saying, My father made me swear, saying, Lo, I die. In my grave which I have digged for me in the land of Canaan, there shalt thou bury me. Now therefore let me go up, I pray thee, and bury my father, and I will come again.” And Pharaoh said, “Go up, and bury thy father, according as he made thee swear.”
So Joseph went to bury his father.
And when Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, “Perhaps Joseph will hate us, and will certainly require us all the evil which we did to him.”
Like many of us, they could not believe that they were forgiven for what they had done. Joseph had welcomed them into the land of Goshen, and treated them with love and kindness, once he had revealed himself to them as Joseph, and still they were afraid.
And they sent a messenger to Joseph, saying, So shall you say to Joseph, “Forgive, I beg you, forgive the trespasses the servants of your father’s God have done.”
And Joseph wept when he heard their words.
And his brothers fell down before his face, and they said, “Behold, we are your servants.”
And Joseph said to them, “Do not be afraid, for am I in the place of God? But as for you, you thought evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it happened, that many people have been saved alive from starvation. So do not fear: I will nourish you, and your little ones.” And he comforted them, and spoke kindly to them.
All things worked together for good to Joseph, for he loved God. Terrible things happened to him, and wonderful things happened to him, and Joseph grew strong and compassionate, very different as a man from the spoiled bragging brat he had been as a child.
Indeed his brothers did bow down before him, but that was no longer what was important. What was important was that because Joseph had come to love God in this land of strangers, he no longer needed to brag, to thrust himself onto center stage. He had learned to love.
I know that all things work together for good as God ultimately works out the creative and loving purpose of the universe. Just as Joseph learned to understand that God could use the wickedness of his brothers—in selling him into Egypt—for the saving of many lives from the slow and agonizing death of starvation, so God can come into all that happens to us, our griefs and our joys, and use them for good toward the coming of the kingdom.
Simeon and Levi, who slaughtered Shechem and all his tribe, and all the brothers when they conspired to kill Joseph, and when they sold him into Egypt, were indeed a horror and a hissing and an everlasting reproach. But through the prophet Jeremiah God not only warns, he encourages,
“My people, do not be afraid, I will come to you and save you. I will make you well again; I will heal your wounds. People of Israel, I have always loved you, so I continue to show you my constant love. The time is coming when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel. It will not be like the old covenant….The new covenant will be this: I will put my law within you and write it in your hearts.”
For God is indeed a God of mercy, waiting for us to say, “I’m sorry! I want to come home!” And then the Almighty arms are opened to receive us into joy.
Joseph’s life, with its sudden reversals of fortune, was more dramatic than most of our lives. But I have learned much from him on my journey toward becoming human. Surely after his brothers sold him into Egypt he learned how to observe and contemplate, looking out on all that was around him, rather than in toward his own pride and arrogance. In Egypt he learned to see everything as belonging to God: his dreams; the stars at night; the prisoners under his care; Asenath, his wife, and their two sons; the starving people who, like the prisoners, were entrusted to his care, and for the appeasing of whose hunger he was responsible. He had learned to live in the moment, rather than in the projections of his grandiose dreams. It was only when he let his pride go that there was any possibility of the dreams being fulfilled.
We, too, are to live in the moment, the very now. Our roots are deep in the past, but our branches reach up into the future. In the present we observe and contemplate all that God has made, and all that we, with our stiff-necked pride and greed and judgmentalism, have made of what God has made. Are we not created to love and care for our planet, and to love each other enough to live in peace? If we love God, then the Source of Love can come into our lives with redemptive power.
This past Sunday when I knelt at the altar in church, the minister put the bread into my hands, and I took it into my mouth. That morsel of bread, my hands, the minister’s hands on my head as he prayed for me, all the other people in church, in other churches, on the streets, alone, all, all, are made of the same stuff as the stars, that original stuff with which Jesus clothed himself when he came to live with us. I ate the bread, took the cup, and with it all the truth of the stories that tell us about ourselves as human beings. And I was as close to Joseph as I was to the people on either side of me.
After church I went home for lunch with a few of the people who had shared communion with me. I had made a mess of pottage, that mixture of lentils, onions, and rice, which Joseph’s father, Jacob, sold to Esau for his birthright. It wasn’t nice of Jacob to sell it and defraud his brother, but the pottage was a tempting dish. Friends, food, the love of God, all calling us to be human—not infallible, but human.
We are amazing, we human beings. We do wonderful things, and we do terrible things—but, above all, we make marvellous stories.
JOSEPH
Sometimes at night, after Asenath and our boys are asleep, I go to the temple to speak to my father-in-law, the high priest of On. The temple is made
of stones that gleam with the gold of the sun god he serves. The stones are fitted together so that not even the thinnest blade of knife or sword can slip between them. On the day when night and day are the same length, neither one shorter or longer than the other, the midday sun moves through the portals and strikes all the way through the chambers of the temple to touch the altar.
One night, because he knows that numbers are beautiful to me, he worked them out for me, the movement of the heavenly bodies and the days and nights and months, so that I understood the calculations, and how the temple had been built, just so, so that he could know the very moment when the rays of the sun would reach the altar. A holiest of holy days. He knows, he says; he can do the purest mathematics, he says, because the sun does not move around the earth, he says. Instead, the earth moves around the sun, and the moon around the earth. His beautiful numbers are very persuasive. Would it disturb the Maker of the Universe if this were so?
At night he takes me out and shows me stars that are not just pricks of light, he says, but heavenly bodies like our earth, that dance around the sun. It is a holy dance, he says, this circling of the sun who is his god.
How strange it seems to me. I can see that the heavenly bodies which he tells me are not stars are different from the stars—steadier, less sparkling. We watch the great night sky, and he asks me about my God. I tell him of my great-grandfather, Abraham, who was taken out into the desert at night.
“Count the stars if you can,” my God told Abraham. “So shall your descendants be.”
“And has it happened?” asked the priest of On.
“It is happening,” I tell him rashly, and I think of my brothers at home, so far away, and I wonder about their wives and their children. What is happening at home I do not know, nor if my father is still alive, nor my little brother, Benjamin. And yet I know that God’s promises are never empty, and that it is through God’s promise that I have been brought to this alien land and given power far beyond anything I could have had at home. Power beyond my dreams.
My father-in-law, the priest of On, says, “Then if your great-grandfather’s descendants are to be as many as the stars in the sky, there will be jealousy of them.”
He may be right. I know all about jealousy.
Sometimes we talk about our dreams. I had a dream in which I watched my father bless the Pharaoh, and I and my father were together once again. Will that happen? My father blessing the Pharaoh? And I and my father together once again? It was a dream of comfort.
The priest of On nods, but sadly, for, he says, he will die before that time of fulfillment. He is old, old and wise. He tells me of his dreams. He dreams of strange chariots, bearing people, flying across the sky. He dreams of buildings towering higher than the highest temples. He dreams of a great cloud that is brighter than a million suns. These dreams, he says, may or may not come to pass, depending on the paths chosen. He tells me of his dreams, but they are in a strange language which does not lend itself to interpretation. And though God does not give me the interpretation, I sense that these dreams are not against the plan of God. And I am troubled.
He laughs and tells me that he has dreamed of a child of God who will come to save us. “But I will be long dead before he comes,” he tells me, “and you, too, and your children, and your children’s children.”
He questions me about my life at home, and about my brothers, and about the journey to Egypt. He wags his head as I tell him about Potiphar’s wife, and I cannot tell what he thinks. He asks me about my time in prison, and I tell him of a foreign sailor who came there with a ring in his nose. He had been captain of a ship and he talked of the four corners of the earth, and how his sailors had feared they would sail off the edge, where strange and fearful monsters waited, and they had rebelled and cast him out of his ship, and a sea god found him a log which carried him to shore. And the priest of On laughed deep in his throat and talked once more about the great dancing circles of the earth and stars.
I listen to many stories of gods who live in the sun, and in the sea, and in the moon, and also in strange beasts. I do not know whether my father-in-law, the priest of On, believes in these gods, or only in the sun.
His eyes are bright as he talks about the sun god who holds the heavenly bodies that dance around it, but never come close. For them, to come close would be to burn. The sun god is fire, and fire burns, and does not care about what is burned.
The God who showed my great-grandfather Abraham the stars walks with us. That is the difference. The sun god shines with brilliance but does not touch its people. The God of my fathers, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is with us. When my brothers threw me into the pit, God was there, in the pit with me. When I ruled over Potiphar’s household, God was there in my ruling. When I refused Potiphar’s wife because I would not dishonour my master, God was there in my refusing. When I was in prison, God was there in my bondage. In my days of power, God is with me, guiding me.
And is God with my brothers and my father? When Simeon and Levi killed Shechem, did they escape God? Or when my brothers sold me into Egypt was not God there? With them? With me?
If my heart is cold toward my brothers, does not that also chill the heart of God?
The sun god looks down but is not part of the lives of those who worship the burning light. But my God—how can we bear a God who cares?
The high priest of On can turn away from those who disobey him or those who hurt him or those he does not love. He can condemn them to death.
Oh, my brothers, because God is with us, how can I turn away from you without turning away from God?
Oh, yes, my father-in-law, you who are the high priest of On, the sun burns, but it burns not because it is a god but because it was made by God, to burn me until I love my brothers once again.
Oh, my brothers, I thank you for all that you gave me when you sold me into Egypt. Because of you, it is my riches of understanding that I value, not my palace and my power. Yes, the sun burns, burns away anger and outrage, and my heart opens like a lotus flower.
And now my brothers have come, oh my brothers, and now that I love them, and they are freed to love me, joy will come again, and laughter.
And I will praise God.
Chapter 1: Reuben
1. What does this chapter say about death, and about our reaction to it? Have you ever felt the disbelief in death that the author describes?
2. What does the author believe we, as a society, have failed to do that is resulting in a “fragmented human race”? Why is fragmentation destructive? How can we instead work toward unity?
3. What is the story of Joseph, his brothers, and his family about? L’Engle acknowledges that Joseph suffers “betrayal, anger, abandonment, unfairness, and pain.” Have you experienced these things? In what ways do you relate to Joseph?
4. “Grief is one of the most human of all emotions,” the author says. What does she mean by this? Have you experienced the kind of grief she is talking about? How does grief connect us to our humanity and to one another, if at all?
5. L’Engle says, “It is an amazing thing that Jacob wrestled with an angel and yet seldom wrestled with himself.” What does wrestling with ourselves require? Have you ever wrestled with yourself? How did that experience challenge or change you?
6. When does God reprove us? What criterion should we use to decide whether an image of (or belief about) God is truly God’s image? How do we do this? Does this idea challenge you in any way?
7. Reflect on Reuben’s story in this chapter. What about the story stands out to you? How did it make you feel? Do you see yourself in the story or the character in any way?
Chapter 2: Simeon
1. After her husband’s death, L’Engle moved into the apartment she owned in New York, where her granddaughter lived with a roommate. In her grief, she says that these girls, “by their very existence, kept me in life.” Have you ever felt that someone has “kept you in life”? What does it mean to be kept in life amidst deep grief or
suffering?
2. Have you ever witnessed a terrible thing redeemed in an unexpected way? The story of Joseph is an example of redemption that took many years to come to fruition. Is God’s redemption evident when you look back over the years of your life? How so?
3. The story of Joseph is described here as “not a pretty story, but we are so overfamiliar with it that repetition has blunted the ugliness of what the brothers did.” How does repetition blunt our sense of compassion or justice? Is it dangerous to become overly familiar with a story or a situation? Can you think of ways in which you’ve become blunted against the ugliness of something?
4. L’Engle says, “Grief is different from unhappiness.” What is the difference between the two? What has been your experience with grief? With unhappiness? Why is the difference important?
5. Reflect on Bilhah’s story in this chapter. What about the story stands out to you? How did it make you feel? Do you see yourself in the story or the character in any way? Why do you think the author chose to speak from Bilhah’s perspective rather than Simeon’s?
Chapter 3: Levi
1. The author says that God, as seen through the lens of these stories, “seems to be almost two separate gods.” What dos she mean by this? How are they different? In what ways have these views informed our history, our actions, and our perception of God?
2. Do you ever wonder if humanity is a mistake? Do you look at the world and see the injustice, violence, hatred, and rebellion, and wonder how God can care about us? How do you wrestle with these questions?
3. How does L’Engle define icons and idols? Why is the difference important? She asks, “Have all our icons become idols?” What does she mean by this? In what ways are our icons becoming idols in today’s society?
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