Asenath Prayed Seven Days Before Joseph Could Kiss Her

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The Kiss He Would Not Take

Asenath leaned in to kiss him, and Joseph moved his face away.

She was the daughter of Potiphera, priest of On, and nobody in Egypt had ever pulled back from her before. She had come down out of her tower to meet the Hebrew who read Pharaoh's dreams and now held the grain of an empire, and she had offered him the ordinary courtesy of a household kiss. He would not take it, and he told her why without softening any of it. A man who blesses the living God, who eats blessed bread and drinks from the cup of immortality and anoints himself with holy oil, does not put his mouth on a woman who blesses dead idols, eats putrid bread, drinks libations of deceit, and anoints herself with the oil of destruction.

She stood in front of him while her whole life was read out as a table of spoiled food, item by item, and then she cried.

He had his reasons for being careful with an Egyptian woman who wanted something from him. Years earlier, in the house where he was a slave, Potiphar's wife had gone sick with wanting him, and the women around her had encouraged her until she stopped asking politely. She swore no harm would come to him. She asked whether he had ever seen a woman to match her in beauty, and said she was wasting away, and wanted to know why she should die on his account. He kept out of her reach for a year, so she finally fastened an iron shackle under his chin to force his head up and make him look at her, and when that failed she turned the whole thing into an accusation and he went to prison on it.

The viceroy of Egypt had a settled policy about being wanted, and Asenath had walked into it with a kiss.

Neither of them knew where she had come from. Jacob had taken a plate of gold and cut the holy Name into it, the Shem HaMeforesh (שם המפורש), and hung it around the neck of a child before she was carried out of his house. The angel Michael brought her down into Egypt and set her in Potiphera's household, where the wife was barren and raised her as a daughter. The woman Joseph had just refused as a stranger had left his own father's house with the Name at her throat.

Sackcloth for Seven Days

Joseph did not leave her with nothing. Before he went out he asked God to pour His spirit over her and bring her in among His people and give her a share in the life that does not end. Then Asenath went up to her chambers and shut the door.

She took off the robes of state. She took off the jewels, put on sackcloth, poured ashes over her head, and for seven days and seven nights she did not eat, did not come out, and let no one in. The idols went out of the room. She prayed the entire time, which was not a thing she had been raised to do, since the gods of that house had been handled by priests and not by daughters.

The Honeycomb of Paradise

On the morning of the eighth day a man came into the room without using the door. He told her to get up, wash her face, take off the mourning clothes and put on her best, because she had been born again, and from this morning she would eat the blessed bread of life and drink from the cup of immortality and anoint herself with the oil that does not run out.

She went to set food in front of him, because that is what a daughter of that house did with a guest, and on the table there was a honeycomb, white and giving off a smell that did not belong anywhere in Egypt. She had not put it there. He told her the bees of Paradise had made it, that it was what angels eat and what the chosen of God eat, and he broke off a small piece for himself. Then he put the rest of it into her mouth with his own hand.

Her bones would grow strong as the cedars of that garden, he said, and her youth would not wear out and her beauty would not spoil, and she would stand like a city with a wall around it. She asked him to bless her seven attendants as well, so he blessed them to be seven pillars in the City of Refuge. Then he went out of the room in a chariot of fire behind four horses of fire, and left her standing in the ashes she had poured on herself.

He Did Not Know Her Face

Joseph came back to the house that same day, so she ran to wash before she went down, and the water gave her back a face she had to look at twice.

He looked at her and asked who she was.

"I am your maid-servant Asenath," she said, and then she told him all of it. The idols were gone. A man had come in without the door and given her the bread of life and the blessed cup and the comb from the bees of Paradise. The last thing he said was that he gave her to Joseph as his wife and Joseph to her forever, and that her name would not be Asenath any longer but City of Refuge, where the nations would run for safety. Then she asked Joseph whether the man had come to him too.

He had heard it. He put his arms around her and kissed her, and the refusal was finished.

Egypt Stopped for Seven Days

Her parents made a banquet for the betrothal, but the wedding waited for Pharaoh. He set golden crowns on both their heads and blessed them in front of the magnates and princes of Egypt and the princes who had come in from other countries, and then he put on a feast that ran seven days. For those seven days no one in Egypt was permitted to do any work, on pain of death.

She had spent seven days shut in a room with ashes in her hair and the door bolted. Now an entire country was forbidden to do anything except stand outside and celebrate her.