Benjamin Said Nothing and the Temple Was Built on His Land

The Road Back Into Egypt

They were walking. Manasseh had found the silver cup in the last sack, and now the eleven brothers were on the road back to the city, back to the Viceroy's court, back to an accounting none of them had wanted. The ten older brothers were furious and frightened. Benjamin was the source of both feelings, or seemed to be, and fury that cannot find its real target lands on whatever is available.

As they walked, they struck him on the shoulder. They repeated what they had already said: you thief, son of a thief, you have brought on us the same shame your mother brought on your father. Rachel and the stolen idols. The accusation they had already aimed at him was aimed again, and this time it came with the physical punctuation of a blow.

What He Had Already Said

He had answered them once. Back at the moment when the cup was found, when their rage was fresh, he had asked whether this matter was as grave as the matter of the kid of the goats, as the act of selling one's own brother into slavery. That question had landed. The room had gone quiet around it. He had named the crime that no one among them could refute, and he had named it precisely once.

Now they were striking him, and he said nothing. Not because he had nothing to say. He had already said it. They had not answered then, and they could not answer now. Saying it again would only multiply the words. Benjamin walked and received the blows on his shoulder and kept the silence that his single question had already filled.

Why the Temple Was Built on Benjamin's Land

The tradition asks the question Jacob's final blessings invite. Judah received kingship. Ephraim received the birthright in place of Reuben. But which tribe received the honor of having the Temple itself built within its borders, that specific patch of earth where the presence of God would rest for the next thousand years? The answer is Benjamin, the youngest, born last, the child whose birth had cost his mother her life.

The midrashic tradition gives the reason. The Shekinah, the divine presence, rested on the land of Benjamin because Benjamin had suffered unjustly on that road and had kept his mouth closed. The blows on his shoulder were undeserved. He knew they were undeserved. He had the argument to make that would have demonstrated they were undeserved, and he had already made it once, and he chose not to make it again. That restraint, the tradition says, was exactly the disposition required to carry the weight of the divine presence. A tribe that could absorb unjust treatment in silence, that could trust what it had already said without needing to say it again, was the kind of tribe that could carry the Shekinah without it becoming a burden of personal vindication.

Benjamin's Own Teaching

The Testament of Benjamin, one of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, records what Benjamin himself told his sons at the end of his life. He described Joseph as the model for all human conduct: the man who had been thrown into a pit and sold into slavery and had not required that those who wronged him be punished before he could continue living in the right direction. Follow Joseph's example, Benjamin told his sons. Do not use the injuries done to you as the organizing principle of your life. The instruction he gave to his children is the same quality of mind that the tradition says he demonstrated on the road to Egypt, when he walked in silence with blows on his shoulder.

The land the tribe of Benjamin received, and the Temple that would stand on it, are the tradition's way of saying that this disposition was worth something lasting. The Shekinah did not need a tribe that had never been wronged. It needed a tribe that knew how to carry being wronged without being defined by it.