Benjamin's Pebbles Struck Down the Prince Who Ambushed Asenath

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The Prince Who Wanted Another Man's Wife

The heir to Egypt could not stop looking at another man's wife. On the road one day the son of Pharaoh passed Joseph traveling with Asenath, and the sight of her beauty lodged in him like a splinter that would not work loose. He had asked for Asenath once, before Joseph ever came, and she had refused him. Now she rode beside a former slave, a Hebrew lifted out of a prison pit, and the prince decided that the only clean way to possess her was to remove the man at her side.

He did not trust his own soldiers with a murder that touched the viceroy of Egypt. He wanted Joseph's own blood to do it. So he went to Simon and Levi, two of Joseph's brothers, and he flattered them and asked them to help him be rid of Joseph.

Simon's hand was already moving. His temper had drowned a whole city once. But Levi, who had the gift of prophecy and had read the prince's heart before the prince finished speaking, brought his heel down hard on Simon's foot. "Why art thou so angry, and so wroth with the man?" he said under his breath. "We that fear God may not repay evil with evil." Then he turned to the prince and let the mask fall. They would never lift a hand against Joseph, he said, and if the prince did, he would answer to the same sword that had emptied the streets of Shechem. The prince dropped to the dirt and begged. Levi raised him by the arm. "Fear not," he told him, "but abandon thy wicked plan, and harbor no evil design against Joseph."

Six Hundred on the Open Road

The prince abandoned nothing. He only changed his target. If he could not reach Joseph through the brothers, he would take Asenath from the road itself.

She rode out with six hundred attendants around her, a whole household on the move. The prince's riders came down on the column without warning. Fifty armed men drove into six hundred servants who had brought no war with them, and the caravan broke apart. Attendants scattered. Asenath's chariot wheeled to run, and the dust and the screaming and the turning horses closed over her like water.

She was not alone in the chariot. Beside her stood the youngest of the brothers, Benjamin, still a boy, Joseph's only full brother, the one their father could not bear to let out of his sight.

The Boy and the Fistful of Stones

Benjamin did not wait to be rescued. He jumped from the moving chariot, bent low, and came up with a fistful of pebbles off the roadbed.

The first stones flew. He had no sling and no bow, only his arm and the hard stones of an Egyptian road, and he threw them into the riders as they wheeled for another pass. One pebble left his hand, crossed the whole distance, and struck the son of Pharaoh square in the forehead. The prince rocked in his saddle. Blood sheeted down his face. The wound was deep, and it did not close.

The charioteer threw himself into the boy's fight. He gathered stones and pressed them into Benjamin's hands as fast as the boy could throw, and rider after rider went off his horse. When the count was finished, forty-eight of the fifty lay in the road.

The Swords That Fell From Their Hands

Help was already on the way. Levi's prophecy had shown him the ambush, and he had gathered the sons of Leah and ridden hard to reach her. They fell on what was left of the prince's men and cut them down.

Asenath should have been safe then. She was not. The sons of the handmaids, Jacob's sons by the secondary wives, came up now with their swords drawn, and their eyes were on Asenath and Benjamin. Their plan was to kill the two of them and vanish into the woods before the sons of Leah understood what had happened.

Asenath had no sword and no brother's arm to raise. She lifted her voice to God instead. She cried out for help in the open road with the blades already over her, and the blades did not fall. The swords dropped out of the hands that held them and rang on the ground. The men stood empty-handed, staring at their own fingers. They knew whose side heaven had taken. They threw themselves down at Asenath's feet and begged her to let them live.

She bent over the men who had meant to kill her. "Be courageous and have no fear of your brethren, the sons of Leah," she told them. "They are God-fearing men. Do but keep yourselves in hiding until their wrath is appeased."

Mercy in a Family Built on a Sale

When the sons of Leah came, Asenath threw herself down in front of them and begged for the lives of the handmaids' sons. Simon would not hear it. Their guilt was overflowing, he said. These were the men who had sold Joseph into slavery and broken their father's heart, and now they had drawn swords on Joseph's own wife. Let them die.

Asenath kept begging. And she had a quiet ally. Levi knew exactly where the handmaids' sons were hiding, and he said nothing to Simon, because naming the place would only feed the fire. The hidden men stayed hidden, and Simon's rage burned down for want of a target.

There was still the prince, bleeding in the road from a boy's pebble. Benjamin stood over him to finish him. Levi caught the boy's arm. Instead of the killing blow he washed the wound, lifted the son of Pharaoh into a chariot, and drove him home to his father. Pharaoh, who had sent his son out to steal and to murder, took him back from the hands of the man his son had wanted dead, and he wept over Levi's kindness.

The wound had gone too deep. Three days later the prince died of the pebble a child had thrown from a chariot on an open road. Pharaoh followed his son into grief and then into death, at the age of one hundred and seventy-seven. The crown he left went to Joseph, the Hebrew his son had schemed to kill, and Joseph wore it over Egypt for forty-eight years before he set it on the head of Pharaoh's own infant grandchild, a boy he had raised as a son of his own.