Benjamin, Born From Grief, Chose His Brother's Way

Rachel called him Ben Oni. The son of my sorrow. She was dying on the road to Bethlehem when she named him, having labored through the night to give birth to her second son, and the name she chose in that final moment was not a blessing but a witness. A record of what his arrival cost. Jacob would not have it. He renamed the child Benjamin, son of the right hand, son of strength, son of days, and he built a pillar on his mother's grave and walked away carrying both her absence and this new child who had caused it.

Benjamin grew up between two absences. Rachel, who died for him. Joseph, who vanished when Benjamin was still young, sold into slavery by the ten brothers who would one day prostrate themselves before him without knowing who he was. Benjamin knew his mother only as a grave on the road to Ephrath. He knew his brother Joseph only as a coat soaked in goat's blood and his father's inconsolable weeping.

The Jubilees account of Benjamin's time with Joseph focuses on the cup. Joseph, as viceroy of Egypt, had ordered his silver cup placed in Benjamin's sack. The brothers searched, beginning with the eldest and ending with the youngest, and found it exactly where it had been planted. Benjamin protested: we and our sacks, search them, and wherever you find the cup in the sack of any man among us, let him be slain. He was willing to offer his life for his innocence. He did not know his brother was behind the cup. He did not know the test being run on him and the ten others.

The Jubilees record of Rachel's death gives us the date with the calendar precision that characterizes that second-century BCE text: the eleventh day of the eighth month, in the first of the sixth week of a jubilee. Jacob named the child Benjamin. Rachel was buried in the land of Ephrath, which is Bethlehem. Jacob built a pillar on her grave. Then he went south to Magdaladrael and made his camp.

What Benjamin was in that camp, in those years between Rachel's death and the descent to Egypt, was the youngest child of a devastated father. He was the living reminder of the wife Jacob loved most and the son Jacob had lost. He was the object of Jacob's protectiveness so fierce it nearly destroyed everyone: when Joseph held Simeon hostage in Egypt and demanded that Benjamin be brought as proof that the brothers were not spies, Jacob refused. He would not send Benjamin. Not after Joseph. Not this one. Not again.

And then came Judah's surety, and the second journey, and the silver cup.

The Testament of Benjamin, preserved in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a text likely composed in Hebrew or Aramaic in the second century BCE and drawing on far older traditions, records what Benjamin said at the end of his life to his children. He spoke of Joseph. He said: when I came down to Egypt, my brother Joseph recognized me, and he asked what my brothers had told our father regarding him. And I told him: they sent Jacob his coat stained with blood, and said, Know now whether this be your son's coat or not.

But then Benjamin added what Joseph had told him in private. Joseph said: Canaanite merchants stole me with violence, and on the way they wanted to conceal my coat to make it seem a wild beast had killed me. He was protecting his brothers even then. He told Benjamin a story that removed the brothers from the guilt entirely. He summoned the brothers and told them the same story. He instructed them to repeat it to Benjamin and to their father Jacob. The truth of what they had done was to be buried in mercy.

Benjamin understood something from this. He told his children: a good man has not an envious eye. He has mercy with all, even with sinners whose evil designs are directed against him. By his good deeds he conquers the evil, since it was ordained of God.

Benjamin named his ten sons for the brother he had never properly known and then recovered. The names catalogued in Jubilees and Genesis speak the obsession plainly. He named them for aspects of Joseph's life: the pit, the sale, the prison, the elevation, the brothers who had returned, the father who had wept. He was making a monument in flesh and blood. He was saying: I know what happened to my brother and I will not let it be forgotten, not in my children's names, not in the stories I tell them on my deathbed.

He died at one hundred twenty-five years old. He asked his sons to carry his bones up out of Egypt and bury him near his fathers. In the ninety-first year of Israel's sojourn in Egypt, the text records, they did. Benjamin came home to Hebron, buried at the feet of his fathers. The son of sorrow and the son of strength, the same child, was finally laid down in the promised ground.