Asenath Wore the Amulet That Explained Everything

There is a question the plain text of Genesis does not answer. Joseph was the most scrupulous of men. He refused the advances of an Egyptian woman on the grounds that he could not defile himself. He maintained his faithfulness to the laws of his father's house across years of exile in a foreign country. He would not eat with Egyptians at a shared table. He arranged his brothers at a separate feast by their birth order in a country that should not have been able to guess what that order was. And then he married an Egyptian woman, the daughter of Potiphar, priest of On, and had two sons by her.

The tradition was not satisfied with this. It supplied an answer.

When Simeon and Levi massacred the men of Shechem, Dinah had been in the city and refused to leave. She said, where shall I carry my shame? Simeon swore he would marry her, and he did. But before that marriage, from her brief union with Shechem the son of Hamor, a daughter had been born. The brothers wanted to kill the infant, that the fruit of sin would not remain visible in Jacob's household. Jacob did something different. He took a piece of tin, inscribed the Holy Name upon it, bound it around the infant girl's neck, and set her under a thornbush and left her there. An angel carried her to Egypt, where Potiphar adopted her as his own child because his wife was barren.

Her name was Asenath. The tradition recording this origin story notes that she grew up in Potiphar's house as a sheltered daughter who had never permitted men to be near her. Joseph was the first man she had ever looked upon when her father brought her to greet him. She saluted him with the words, "Peace be with thee, thou blessed of God Most High," and he returned the blessing. Then, as she turned to go, the amulet at her neck caught his attention. He recognized the tin disc, recognized the inscription of the Holy Name, and understood who she was.

The account of their meeting in the Ginzberg tradition specifies what Asenath had given him when Joseph traveled through Egypt as viceroy. Women threw gifts at him from windows, gold chains and jewels, to make him look up at them. Asenath had nothing to throw. So she took the amulet from her own neck and gave it to him. That was the moment he understood her lineage: she was not Egyptian. She was connected to the house of Jacob through her mother.

The midrashic tradition that disputed who carried Joseph's coffin during the Exodus assigned different identities to the men who had become ritually impure on Passover eve. Rabbi Yishmael said they had been carrying Joseph's coffin. This connects two ends of the Joseph story in a striking way: the woman who became Joseph's wife arrived in Egypt as an infant carried by an angel, and the man who became Joseph's ancestor arrived in the afterlife as a man carried by his descendants. Both journeys were made possible by a kind of impurity willingly incurred in service of something larger.

Jacob had inscribed the Holy Name on the tin disc. He had not explained what it was for. He had not known, presumably, that it would serve as an identification document for his granddaughter in a foreign country decades later. He had acted on the instinct of a man who had wrestled an angel and survived, who knew that the Name carried power and that an abandoned infant deserved whatever protection was available. He pressed the Holy Name against her skin and let her go.

Joseph's marriage was not the compromise it appeared to be. He married his niece, Dinah's daughter, the granddaughter of Jacob and Leah, raised in an Egyptian household by an adoptive father who happened to be Potiphar, the same Potiphar whose wife had sent Joseph to prison. The story's irony is complete: the wife of the man who imprisoned Joseph turned out to be the adoptive mother of the woman Joseph married, and the tin amulet that identified Asenath as family had been hanging around her neck since Jacob placed it there when she was an infant.

The Ginzberg tradition does not draw this connection explicitly. It simply records the facts in sequence and lets them accumulate. But the accumulation is the teaching. Nothing in this story happened by accident. The thornbush, the angel, the tin disc, the Holy Name, the viceroy's procession through Egyptian streets, the woman at the window who had nothing to throw but the amulet from her own neck. Each was a thread, and they had been woven together a generation before Joseph arrived to receive them.

The midrash on Pesach Sheni, the second Passover, complicates the picture still further. In the account preserved in Sifrei Bamidbar, Rabbi Yishmael identifies the men who came before Moses on Passover eve, ritually impure and asking for inclusion, as the very men who had been carrying Joseph's coffin. If so, then Joseph's bones were still circulating through Israel's legal life generations after his death, still generating questions that needed answering, still producing new law by their presence. The tin amulet identified Asenath as family. The coffin identified the men who carried it as men worthy of the second Passover. Joseph arranged his own funeral formation before he died and set in motion a chain of consequence that reached from Canaan to Egypt to Sinai to the wilderness and all the way to the promised land where his bones were finally buried at Shechem (Joshua 24:32), the city where his brothers had first planned to kill him.