Issachar the Farmer Who Saw God With a Single Eye

The Least Dramatic Brother

Levi went through seven heavens and came back with the priesthood. Judah caught wild animals with his bare hands and was promised the royal line. Reuben confessed the worst sin a firstborn could commit. Dan admitted he had spent his whole life planning to murder Joseph. Naphtali ran faster than any man alive. Simeon killed the men of Shechem.

Issachar farmed.

He grew grain and gave tithes and traded with the Canaanites when it was necessary and went home to his wife and his sons. His life did not generate the kind of material that gets written down. He had not ascended. He had not descended. He had not committed any act dramatic enough to require a public confession at the end of his life.

When his time came to call his sons together and tell them everything, Issachar began with his birth, which was strange, and ended with a claim that none of his brothers had been able to make.

The Strange Birth

He had started as a transaction. Reuben had found mandrakes in the field and brought them to his mother Leah. Rachel wanted them desperately, because the Lord had not yet given her children, and mandrakes were known to aid fertility. Leah would not give them up. A bargain was struck: Rachel would receive the mandrakes, and Leah would have Jacob that night.

Jacob came home from the fields and Leah went out to meet him and said: you must come to me, for I have hired you with my son's mandrakes. He went with her. God heard Leah and she conceived Issachar. He was the child of a fertility transaction, purchased from a sister with a plant, born from a mother who had bartered her husband's attention for the very herbs associated with fertility.

He grew up understanding that he had been wanted, bargained for, that his existence was the result of his mother's desire rather than accident. He grew up to be a farmer. A careful one. A methodical one. A man who paid his tithes and went home.

The Single Eye

The teaching Issachar wanted to leave his children was about how he had managed it. I was the first to labor in the land, he told them, and I never had leisure for frivolity or frolicking. In toil I spent all my life and never turned aside from what was good.

The term the tradition uses for his way of life is single-mindedness: the single eye. Not simplicity in the sense of stupidity, but singleness of focus in the sense of an undivided attention that never allowed a second competing desire to take root alongside the first one. He wanted to work the land and fear God and give what was required to the poor. He did not want other things badly enough to be pulled toward them.

He knew other men were pulled. He had watched Dan spend his life in hatred. He had watched Reuben's desire overwhelm his judgment. He had watched Judah at the crossroads give his signet and staff to the first veiled woman he encountered. He understood that what separated his life from theirs was not virtue exactly but architecture: his desires were arranged in a single direction and had never needed the kind of corrective force that their desires had needed.

The Claim He Actually Made

The specific claim in the Testament of Issachar is extraordinary by the standards of the other testaments. I never sinned, he told his children. Not: I tried not to sin. Not: I repented when I sinned. Never, in all my years, against my father, against my mother, against my wife, against another person. He was not boasting. He said it as a description of the outcome of the single eye: when the focus is undivided, the apertures through which sin enters are closed from lack of use.

The Dan confession came immediately after Issachar's in the arrangement of the Testaments, and its opening was almost a direct response: Dan admitted that in his heart he had resolved the death of Joseph from the day Joseph was sold. The contrast was deliberate. Dan: fractured attention, hatred as a constant companion. Issachar: single eye, no room in the architecture for the thing that destroyed Dan.

Issachar's sons listened to all of this in the shadow of their uncles' more dramatic lives. They would inherit neither kingship nor priesthood. They would inherit a farm and an instruction about focus and the claim that the single eye, turned in one direction and never diverted, was its own kind of achievement. More, their father implied, than catching lions or ascending through the heavens.