Genesis 37–
Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Dreams
In “The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East,” A. Leo Oppenheim generalizes:
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For the ancient Near East, it can be stated—with the oversimplification which should be permitted only in such preliminary remarks—that dream–experiences were recorded on three clearly differentiated planes: dreams as revelations of the deity which may or may not require interpretations; dreams which reflect, symptomatically, the state of mind, the spiritual and bodily “health” of the dreamer … and thirdly, mantic dreams in which forthcoming events are prognosticated” (184). |
On the surface, the dreams that Joseph interprets belong to the third group. He,
however, emphasizes that God has sent them as part of his plan for his people; thus,
they are revelation. The Hebrew word ch–a lam, used throughout the Joseph
saga, meant both to dream and to be healthy, as if dreaming were part of a spiritual
or physical mechanism that brought health. Consequently, the dreams might also have
special reference to the state of the dreamers.
On all three levels, dream interpretation was a major business. The English word “exegesis” comes from one Greek term for that activity, which extended later to scriptural hermeneutics and eventually to the study of secular literature. To the Socrates of the Phaidros, poetry and prophetic dreaming are all forms of divine madness (Lieshout 124). Thus, cause exists to think that the hermeneutics of dream and scripture might have methods in common, albeit paradoxical ones.
Like the Pentateuch (traditionally considered the work of God and Moses), so the dreams have a double origin. In the ancient world, two notions of dreaming were that it came from the human dreamer’s daily preoccupations or from the divine, the source of precognition (Lieshout 38, 41. The Cup–bearer and Baker dream of their occupations, carrying a cup and bread respectively, yet the dreams are prophetic.
The Cup–bearer and Baker are complementary figures, personifications of the two staple foods—typical of the way Egyptians are portrayed. For Genesis, the Nile is the place of plentiful harvests, where Abraham and his descendants immigrate or consider visiting every famine. After acquiring Joseph, Potiphar concerns himself only with his own nutrition (39.6). As representative of Egypt, Pharaoh has a pair of dreams about food, but, even if that subject is made to seem an Egyptian obsession, the dreams are also prophetic.
What the four Egyptian dreams prognosticate requires expert exegesis.
On the same night as one another, Pharaoh’s servants “dream a dream,” a phrase that
sounds as if it were the same event, which it almost is. Each vision involves three
units of food and someone eating. Joseph interprets both as meaning that in three
days the dreamer will “have the head lifted,” an idiom signifying “to comfort, pardon,”
“to lift off the head, behead,” and “to poll, take the census of, give minute attention
to” (Speiser 308). Both of Pharaoh’s servants will be lifted up, one to life, the
other to death, while first Joseph in his interpretation, then Pharaoh in his passing
sentence attends to detail. Because of the punning, Joseph’s interpretation itself
requires interpretation, joining the reader to hermeneutics:
Some midrashic commentators considered Joseph’s interpretations of these dreams too
ephemeral, and therefore suggested more edifying ones that Joseph had discreetly
kept to himself. Thus the vinestock represented the world… its blossom, the Assembly
of Israel; and its grapes, the righteous souls of each generation. Or the vinestock
represented Israel… its budding, Israel’s tribal increase in Goshen; its blossom,
her redemption from bondage; and its grapes, the Exodus that would make Pharaoh’s
pursuing army stagger as if drunken (Graves and Pattai, 259).
Midrashic commentary transformed the Baker’s dream into a prophecy
of the fall of the Roman empire, destroyed at the coming of the Messiah (Graves and
Pattai, 259). Thus, in Ancient Rome commentators were accustomed to reading symbolism
as typology and presuming it to be an apocalyptic revelation of the whole history
of the Jewish people.
Much traditional Biblical Criticism has insisted on underplaying the connection between
prophecy and prediction, stressing instead the role of the prophets as moral critics.
More recently, awareness of how the prophecies were interpreted has reasserted their
connection with prognostication. In terms of the Qumran period, for example, “Most
Jews at this time appear to have equated prophecy with prediction, and associated
it with soothsaying or fortune–telling.” Eisenman and Wise 50).
The ancient view was that a cryptic and paradoxical order emerges miraculously from
seemingly random events. This trust manifested pervasively, ranging from tosses of
runes to the glossolalia of the Greek Pythoness or of charismatic Christians. According
to .R gveda 1.147.4, the Transcendent reveals itself through seventy million primary
and countless secondary mantras, sounds that are generally indistinguishable from
stochastic permutations of phonemes (Bharati 17-120). According to Jewish Kabbala,
the Bible is a similar sacred labyrinth: “Torah [scripture] is really the name of
God, repeated again and again” (Kamenetz 190). Kabbalists employ haphazard recombinations
of the Bible’s letters to discover that underlying Name or search for other secrets.
A widespread (though not always orthodox) practice in many faiths has been bibliomancy,
opening scriptures at random to answer a question or predict the future.
Such trust in what is now called “self–organization” comes from
attitudes in the scriptures themselves. Proverbs 18.18, for instance, advocates the
tossing of the lot (g–o r–a l), which “puts an end to disputes and
decides between powerful contenders.” In addition to settling disputes, casting the
g–o r–a l determined guilt or innocence of criminals (e.g., 1 Sam 14.42),
selection of the Biblical scapegoat (Lev 16.9), and division of land (e.g., Num 26.55).
The Jewish high priest placed the most prestigious lots for soothsaying (the “Urim
and Thummim”) in his breastplate, above his heart, before entering the Holy of Holies
(Exod 28.30). These constituted a major means of communication between his people
and YHWH, comparable to the Bible itself.
.
Not consulting any of the many dream books circulating then, Joseph
emphasizes that the interpretation comes from God and thus is no routine application
of any system. As often, the pairing focuses attention on an anomaly, almost identical
images with an opposite meaning. Since readers do not know any details of the servants’
legal cases, the antithetical verdicts are as mysterious as God’s attitudes toward
the sacrifices of Cain and Abel. One enters a double bind: told how important hermeneutics
is but given no system.
After two years, Joseph interpreted the Pharaoh’s two dreams, again doublets of one
another: seven lean kine devour seven fat; seven thin ears of corn devour seven fat.
This time, though, the dreams have the same meaning. Dreaming variants of a single
dream was a fairly common motif in ancient Near Eastern orality, another instance
of the predilection for paired variation. By the late classical period, however,
the oral approximateness (one person’s having almost the same dream twice) gave way
to the motif of two people having exactly the same one (Oppenheim 209).
According to the Genesis Rabba (fifth–century C.E.), before Joseph solved the enigma,
pharaoh’s soothsayers interpreted the kine as daughters, the corn as kingdoms. That
midrash thus derides the exegetes for being wrong. But in having them interpret the
second dream differently from the first, the commentary falls back into assumptions
of its own later age, that different words customarily do not have the same meaning.
About the difference between Joseph’s hermeneutics and that of later interpreters
of his story, Regina Schwartz (in The Bible and the Text) writes:
In the Joseph story, and by extension, in the Hebrew Bible, interpreting is depicted as an activity of repressing and reconstructing, of forgetting and remembering, and that activity, by its very nature, resists completion. It is no accident that Joseph’s interpretations are life–giving, for what is at stake in his narrative is not truth—veiled only to be revealed—but survival: the continued life of Joseph, of his people, and of the ancient text that tells their story. I will contrast a typological reading of the Bible with an understanding of repetition that is at once more contemporary and more ancient….
In place of typology, she looks at the narrative in terms of psychology,
trying to guess how repression may have affected the personality of Joseph. This
approach is certainly more modern than typology but not necessarily more ancient.
Indeed, the concept of repression is very literary, an offshoot of typology, obviously
in Jungian theory when related to an archetype. In a different way, repression also
functions as typology in the Freudian, where the repressed incident is the type and
the symptom the antitype, with analysis requiring the kind of close reading that
people acquired from literacy. For a modern culture repressing dreams as too chaotic
to be meaningful, psychology brought a new decoding. In Joseph’s day, however, the
dreams were not as likely to be ignored in the first place. What called attention
to them was not always a symptom but often their fractal symmetry, their uncanny
repetition as in the Joseph saga where the dreams are only presented after their
being paired.
Schwartz well presumes that Joseph’s interpretations might offer a method for understanding
Genesis, but she then turns to Freud rather than to Joseph. Her modernism is understandable
because, in a sense, the patriarch has no precise method. Nonetheless, readers see
him in action enough to glimpse a characteristic way of proceeding. First, the problems
come to attention because they are doubled (he remarks that both prisoners are sad
and thus learns of their dreams; the pharaoh calls for help after the second dream).
Next, he insists that interpretations come from God, implying that explication transcends
any human system, i.e., that, despite being double, the dream stories avoid stereotypes.
Previously, after his tale–bearing raised the anger of two sibling
lines, “the sons of Bilhah, and … the sons of Zilpah,” Joseph told two of his own
dreams: the first, where the brother’s sheaves bow to Joseph’s sheaf; the second,
where the sun, the moon and eleven stars bow to him. As in imagery of the covenant,
the first draws symbols from earth, the second from heaven. His brothers asked if
he thought he would reign over them (employing an expression twice containing the
same root as that of “king, ” mlk). One notion
sometimes encountered in the ancient Near East was that no dreams could be precognitive
unless received by a king or his proxy:
It appears explicitly in Homer (Il. II, 80 sqq.), where Nestor attributes validity
to Agamemnon’s dream only because he is a king. The conviction underlies also Xerxes’
proposal to Artabanos to evoke the repetition of his dream in a person different
from himself, who for that reason has to deck himself with the regalia, sit on the
throne and sleep in the King’s bed (Her. VII, 16—Lieshout 197).
Since kings usually claimed divine descent, their being privy in their sleep to visiting
immortals might be a matter of kinship, though, as myths often emphasized, the gods
could sometimes be fooled by outward signs, e.g., with Artabanos’s proxy. Apparently
with this pagan stereotype in mind, the brothers interpret the dream as one of Joseph’s
future royalty, something he almost but not quite achieves. Jacob interprets the
next dream as meaning that he, Joseph’s mother, and the other sons will bow to Joseph.
By stereotype, if Joseph’s father is the sun, the moon must be his mother. But his
mother is dead! Furthermore, Joseph’s privileged position in Egypt never causes him
to treat Jacob as a mere subject (unlike the Koranic version where father and mother
do bow to him). Only in an approximate way do the family’s interpretations point
toward the remainder of the saga. In particular, the brothers consider the dreams
more threatening than they really are. Then, the brothers’ attempts to prevent Joseph’s
rise, ironically, bring it. Their taking action comes only after both dreams, and
it evidences that they have partly misunderstood them. Puzzling over Joseph’s astronomical
dream (Genesis 37.9), a Jewish commentary of the fifth–century C.E. (Berakhot
57b) admits that dreams never entirely come true, even those sent by God.
Whatever the source of discontinuities, the present text of the Joseph saga itself
has a dreamlike quality. The most conspicuous disjunctions are those involving odd
pairings. The brothers, for instance, decide to sell Joseph to Ishmaelites. Next
(if the pronoun at 37.28 is to be construed in a usual way) Midianites find Joseph
and sell him to the Ishmaelites. This is confusing enough; then, in Egypt, without
any mention of their regaining him, the Midianites again sell the lad. One L4 approach
is to declare “Midianites” and “Ishmaelites” to be the same people. Genesis suggests
otherwise. The Ishmaelites descend from Abraham’s concubine Hagar (16.3), the Midianites
from her successor Keturah “called both wife and concubine. She, too, is sent away
with her children, and Isaac named as heir” (Meeks et al. 37). Because the tribes
have an analogous complaint against Isaac’s seed, they both appear in the kidnapping
of Joseph—an elegant variation, their names neatly alternating with one another in
the text, but at the cost of the kind of narrative continuity later ages expected.
Soon after Joseph’s story resumes, he is rushing away in naked innocence from Potiphar’s wife. In and of itself, this incident makes him seem two–dimensional, virtue personified. The depth comes from its relationship to the tale of Tamar that precedes it. Onan marries her but refuses to father a child, for it will be ascribed to his brother, her deceased former husband. Leviticus 18.16 and 20.21 both forbid canonical incest while Deuteronomy 25.5–10 enjoins it for brothers–in–law of childless widows. God punishes Onan, then her father–in–law Judah, believing her accursed, refuses to marry her to another son. He fears such a marriage would bring the death of one of his own children. To seduce Judah into siring a child with her, she pretends to be a prostitute, called at 38.21, a “holy one,” a pagan priestess whose earnings go to the temple of some god. These two incidents in the life of Tamar seem to teach that virtually anything—canonical incest, risk of murder, or prostitution (even of an idolatrous sort)—is justified if it will further the dissemination of Abraham’s seed. God kills Onan for refusing to advance the promised propagation and rewards Tamar with twins for seeking it. She becomes the ancestor of the Davidic line of kings. Then, after these adjurations to procreation, comes Joseph’s unwillingness to continue Abraham’s line. In this context, his godly flight from sin no–longer seems quite so simple.
Ovid places its analog, young Hippolytus’s refusal to commit adultery, in a section about the punishments of piety. Egeria, wife of Numa, is so dutiful that, at his death, she annoys everyone near her with her loud lamentations. In an unsuccessful attempt to quiet her, Hippolytus tells of how her misery pales before the agonies his own purity earned. Prefacing the section, Pythagoras lengthily sermonizes against eating meat, a vegetarianism that, as Joseph Solodow argues, Ovid presents as ridiculously finical (162-68). Typical of ancient literature, Metamorphoses juxtaposes extreme positions.
With a surreal doubleness, the story of Joseph’s ensuing adventures also assumes the usual, fractal structure. After she twice denounces Joseph (once to the men of the house and once to her husband), Potiphar places him in Pharaoh’s prison, where again Joseph rises to be master of the place, then, unpredictably, without explanation, is only a servant waiting on the Baker and Cup–bearer. Two years pass. Upon interpreting the royal dreams, Joseph receives a second name (“Zaphnathpaaneah),” makes Egypt his second home, and has two sons.
All but one of his brothers arrive. As they prostrate themselves,
Joseph remembers his dreams about them and engineers their obsequious return, to
see them kowtowing twice as in his dreams. Two times in his first conversation with
them, he falsely accuses them of trying to “see the nakedness of the land” (42:9,
12). The word ervah means both naked and unclean. Land and people should not
be seen au natural as the brothers reduced Joseph to that condition or as
he suffered it again at the hands of Potiphar’s wife. He has money hid in their sacks,
which they discover twice—once at a camp, once in the presence of Jacob—each time
with terror. Only on their second trip, when they arrive with double money and the
last brother does he reveal himself. In two interviews, Pharaoh assigns lands to
Joseph’s family in what may be stages of Jacob’s coming or separate versions of it.
The epilogue is Jacob’s prophecy, his blessing of Jacob’s two sons, and the death
of Jacob and Joseph.
Precarious Balancing
In the Hebrew scriptures, coupled words or phrases tend to be near equivalents
(e.g., daughter of Zion and daughter of Jerusalem) or complementary opposites (e.g.,
heaven and earth). Coupled stories, however, tend to qualify each other, somewhat
in the manner of complex sentences except that Genesis leaves the qualification undefined.
Are the two creations, for instance, sequential, simultaneous, or an atemporal allegory?
A complex sentence might summarize them: although fashioned in the divine image (Gen.
1), humanity should not impiously try to steal divinity itself (Gen. 2-3). Nonetheless,
the paradoxes formed by the juxtaposed versions (e.g., made in the likeness of God/forbidden
to be like God) could yield countless other theologies. Dogmas demand passive acceptance
while enigmas require active puzzling. Resembling orality, early writing depends
on a live and lively performance, inviting audience thought or even participation.
Admittedly, though, the ancient sensibility enjoined a balancing of curiosity and
caution. Almost at the beginning of Genesis, the second creation warns against heedless
pursuit of “knowledge.” But almost at the end of the book, Joseph’s dream interpreting
introduces a puzzle solver as hero.
Such a balance, however, tipped more and more toward L4:
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The historical context in which Ovid wrote may illluminate [his] conspicuous theme [of people or animals punished by the gods for speaking too freely]. It has been remarked that under Augustus “free speech, at least among the upper classes, was confined within increasingly narrow limits. (Keith 135; Kenney 297). |
In Metamorphoses 9.481, Ovid has Byblis say: “No one can witness dreams, and the pleasure we seem to enjoy does no harm” (Innes 216). Whether or not Ovid offers this idea without irony, his own erotic works seem to have an analogous hope behind them, that reading could be private entertainment, free from public regulation. His exile suggests that he underestimated the opposition—governmental desire to control even dreams. The new desire for privacy had many probable sources, among them imperial intrusiveness. In an age of persecutions, Christianity at first avoided political involvement, trying to detach itself from a corrupt society. Complementary to this, hermeneutics became apocalyptically political, offering vast promises of future power, compensating for present impotence:
Early second-century texts indicate that the faithful mostly imagined that they were living close to the end of time. A physical millennium on this earth was close at hand. Jerusalem was to be rebuilt and inhabited for 1000 years by the resurrected Elect (Leach 123).
There was still a human desire for balance, but its relationship
to reading had shifted. Read publicly in Jerusalem before the city’s conquest, Genesis
might teach a moderate life. Clandestinely perused in the Roman catacombs, the political
situation (and the psychological effects of increased literacy) inclined toward perfectionism,
balancing degradation in other areas of life. When Christianity became the state
religion, the situation did not change significantly, for furthering free inquiry
was not its highest priority. “[I]n 381, the Christian emperor Theodosius made ‘heresy’
a crime against the state (Pagels 1988, 62). By the Middle Ages, so long as no one
contradicted the orthodoxies of miter and crown, hermeneutics could be as extreme
as the exegetes wished, dreaming grandiose dreams in the scriptorium before returning
to the paucity of monastic cells. Genesis, an indefinite beginning, was read as what
it had become, foreshadowings of a dogmatic end. The movement toward clarity also
manifests in the Koran, where, for instance, Joseph is no tale–bearer but a perfect
prophet, with immaculate behavior and a penchant for long speeches against idolatry.
Biblical personae are more chaotic.
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