Asher Taught That Every Soul Walks Two Roads at Once

Asher was the tenth son of Jacob, born of Zilpah, Leah's handmaid. His name means happiness, and his mother called him that because of what his birth brought her. But when he gathered his children together in the hundred and twenty-fifth year of his life to give them the wisdom of his long life, he did not speak about happiness. He spoke about something harder: the double life that most people live without knowing it, and why it leads to ruin.

The teaching of Asher, preserved in the account drawn from the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and carried through Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, begins with what sounds like a philosophical principle and becomes, by the end, a prophecy so dark Asher's children must have sat in stunned silence.

Two ways hath God put before the children of men, and two inclinations hath He bestowed upon them, two kinds of actions and two aims. Therefore all things are in twos, the one opposite to the other.

This is not a novel observation. The existence of the good inclination and the evil inclination, the yetzer hatov and the yetzer hara, is one of the oldest frameworks in Jewish moral thought. What Asher adds to it is a surgical critique of the person who thinks they can inhabit both at once.

He describes, in the full text of his testament, a series of cases that seem, on the surface, morally mixed. The man who uses money stolen through wickedness to give generously to the poor. The man who fasts and prays but commits adultery. The man who shows compassion to a stranger while defrauding his neighbor. Each of these, Asher says, has a twofold aspect. But the whole is evil. The good deed does not redeem the evil one. It disguises it.

This is the trap of double-facedness. The person who commits evil while performing good acts has not balanced the scales. They have committed a second evil, because they have made it harder for themselves and others to see the first one clearly. They have used righteousness as a cover for wickedness, and in doing so they have corrupted both.

The Testament of Asher, written between the second century BCE and the first century CE, makes the positive case with equal force: the man who does good with a single face, even when others mistake his abstaining from wickedness for sin, is just before God. The man who hates the wicked person and refuses to make peace with their evil deeds may seem harsh. But the whole of his action is good, because he has followed the Lord's example of not accepting the appearance of good as genuine good.

Asher spends his last teaching on this: the cultivation of a single face. Not a face without shadows, but a face turned consistently in one direction, toward what is truly good, without the hedging and the performance and the careful management of appearances that characterizes the double-faced person.

And then, after all of this philosophy, Asher ends with a warning drawn from the most vivid example of double-facedness in all of ancient memory.

Be not like Sodom, my children, which recognized not the angels of the Lord, that ye be not delivered into the hands of your enemies, and your land be cursed, and your sanctuary destroyed, and you be scattered to the four corners of the earth.

The connection between Sodom and double-facedness is not immediately obvious, but Asher draws it precisely. Sodom was a city of performed sociality: they had laws, they had judges with names recorded in the Book of Jasher, they had a system of hospitality that functioned in perfect inversion of its stated purpose. The Sodomites gave silver and gold to strangers and then made sure no one in the city fed them, so the stranger would die and his gifts could be reclaimed. They had beds for travelers and measured every guest against the bed, stretching short men and compressing tall ones. Their mercy was designed to look like mercy while functioning as torture. Their law protected no one. Their judges adjudicated theft disguised as compensation.

When the angels of God arrived in Sodom, the city did not recognize them because a city that has inverted all its values cannot see clearly anymore. This is Asher's point: the double life does not end in balance. It ends in blindness.

Asher's prophecy for his own children follows directly from this. He told them he had read in the tablets of heaven that they would become disobedient, would follow human laws rather than God's law, and would be scattered like Gad and Dan among the nations, losing even the memory of their land, their tribe, their language.

But the promise at the end holds. God would gather them in faithfulness, for the sake of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Even from the farthest scatter, the single face turned toward God would be visible, and God, who sees clearly, would not miss it.