Asenath at the Tower Window and the Honeycomb of Paradise

The moment the runners cried that Joseph was at the gate, Asenath left the courtyard and climbed to the high room of her tower, where no suitor had ever been permitted to stand. She had sent away every prince and noble's son in Egypt. She had told her father, Potiphar, the priest of On, that she would marry the heir to Pharaoh's throne or no one. Now she pressed herself to the window slit to look down on the Hebrew her father wanted to give her, the one she had called a vagabond and a slave.

The Slave She Had Mocked Came in Light

She had a speech ready, all contempt. He was the son of a Canaanite herdsman. He had been dragged to prison over another man's wife. Pharaoh had let him out for reading a dream, but a dream did not wash off a brand. She had said all of this to her father with her chin up. "Why would you want me to marry a vagabond, a slave?" she had demanded. "I am willing to marry the son of Pharaoh, the future ruler and king of Egypt."

Then the chariot came through the gate and the man stood up in it, and the speech died in her throat.

The light off him was like the light off the sun, and it came into her father's house and filled it. She gripped the cold stone of the window and began to weep. "Poor, foolish me," she said into the empty room. "What shall I do? I permitted myself to be misled by friends, who told me that Joseph was the son of a Canaanitish shepherd." She had looked down on him. She had spoken absurd nonsense against him. She said it aloud, naming her own audacity and folly to the walls. "I knew not that he was a son of God, as he must be, for among men such beauty as his does not exist."

She did not go down to the banquet with a bride's smile. She bent her head against the stone and prayed. "I pray Thee, O God of Joseph, grant me pardon. It was my ignorance that made me speak like a fool. If my father will give me in marriage to Joseph, I will be his forever."

Seven Days in Sackcloth and Ash

When at last Joseph spoke to her, his words went into her like a blade, and she wept again. He lifted his hands and asked his God to pour out the divine spirit upon her, to gather her into the people of the Lord, to grant her a portion in the life that does not end. Then he went out.

Asenath returned to her chamber and stripped herself. Off came the robes of state. Off came the jewels she had worn to outshine every other daughter in Egypt. She pulled rough sackcloth over her skin and raked ashes into her hair, and she shut the door. For seven days and seven nights she neither ate nor drank. She lay in the dark and begged forgiveness for every idol she had ever served, every false god in her father's house, and she would let no one in to comfort her.

On the morning of the eighth day the light came back, but this time it came inside the room.

The Angel and the Honeycomb of Paradise

An angel stood over her. He told her to throw off the mourning sackcloth and put on her finest garments, because she had been born new. The bread of life was hers now, he said, and the cup of immortality, and the oil that does not let beauty perish.

She rose to be a host even to a being of fire. She would set food and drink before her guest. And there on the table, where nothing had been, lay a honeycomb, white and enormous, breathing out a fragrance that filled the whole room. She stared at it. She had not made it. No bee of Egypt had made it.

The angel told her what it was. The bees of Paradise had built it, food for angels and for the chosen of God, and whoever ate of it would never die. He broke off a small piece and ate. Then he reached out and put the rest of it into her mouth. "From this day forth," he said, "thy body shall bloom like the eternal flowers in Paradise, thy bones shall wax fat like the cedars thereof, strength inexhaustible shall be thine, thy youth shall never fade, and thy beauty never perish, and thou shalt be like unto a metropolis surrounded by a wall."

The girl who had wanted only a crown now thought of her servants. She asked the angel to bless her seven attendants too. He did. "May the Lord bless you and make you to be seven pillars in the City of Refuge."

A New Name and a Husband Who Did Not Know Her

Then he gave her the name. "Thy name shall not any more be called Asenath, but thy name shall be City of Refuge, whither the nations shall flee for safety." When he left, he left like the thing he was, in a chariot of fire drawn by four steeds of fire, climbing back into the sky until the room was ordinary again.

She went to wash her face for Joseph's return, and the water gave her back a stranger. The angel's visit had remade her. The beauty in the basin was not the beauty she had carried up the tower stairs.

When Joseph came, he looked at her and did not know her. "Who are you?" he asked.

"I am your maid-servant Asenath," she said. She told him she had cast away her idols. She told him a man of heaven had fed her the bread of life and the blessed cup, and had given her to Joseph as his betrothed forever, husband to wife and wife to husband, never to be undone. Then she asked the one thing she could not see for herself. The angel had said he would go to Joseph as well. "Now, my lord, thou knowest whether the man was with thee and spoke to thee in my behalf."

They embraced and kissed in token of their betrothal, and Potiphar and his wife threw open their house for the feast. The wedding itself came later, in the presence of Pharaoh, who set golden crowns on both their heads and blessed them, and ordered seven days of celebration in which no one in Egypt, on pain of death, was permitted to do any work. The idolater's daughter who had refused everyone but a king became the mother of Joseph's sons, and the wall around her city held.