Joseph Sat Alone Reciting What His Father Taught Him

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The Buyer Who Asked for a Guarantor

The Ishmaelites brought the boy into the Egyptian market and Potiphar stopped in front of them and did the arithmetic out loud.

Look at the men selling. Look at the merchandise. It runs the other way in every other stall in this market. That is no slave.

He bought him anyway. He was too careful a man to walk away from a bargain and too careful a man to take one on trust, so he made the traders produce a guarantor first, the way a buyer does when he thinks the goods have been stolen out of somebody's house. The traders found him one. The money changed hands. Joseph was seventeen and had been in a pit that morning and in a caravan by afternoon, and the God who had gone down the road with him from Dothan came into that house behind him and stayed.

What the Master Had Bought Him For

Potiphar had not bought a steward.

He had bought a beautiful boy for himself, and everyone in the household knew what that meant, and there was nothing in Egypt to stop him. There was something outside Egypt. Gabriel came down and took the man's manhood from him before he ever laid a hand on Joseph. When a bear starts killing the children of a province you do not argue with the bear. You break its teeth.

Even the man's name came out of the affair damaged. He goes into the record as Potiphar and he comes out of it as Potiphera, one letter longer, the way a scar is longer than the cut.

So the boy bought for a bed ended up running the accounts instead. Every slave costs a household something. This one made Potiphar rich. Every slave is watched for theft. This one gathered every coin the house earned and handed it over. The Egyptian stopped counting after a while and left everything in Joseph's hands, and the field and the herd and the granary all did better than they had any right to.

The Sabbath in the Empty House

One day Joseph came into the house to do his work and there was nobody in it.

Rabbi Eliezer worked out which day that was from the word for work, the same word used of the seventh day, when God rested from all His work. It was the Sabbath. And what work does a man have on the Sabbath?

He sat down alone in his master's empty house and went over what his father had taught him, out loud, reciting it the way Jacob had said it to him in a tent in Hebron years before, a boy's whole inheritance carried into Egypt inside his head because nothing else had survived the pit. There was no one in the country who could correct him if he got a word wrong. He said it all anyway.

Then the door opened.

The Woman Who Was Set Over Him

She had been coming at him for a year, and heaven had let her.

The tale Joseph once carried to his father about his brothers, the bad report he brought out of his own mouth, had a bill attached to it, and the bill came due in his master's house wearing his master's wife's face. He was drawn up out of the pit on cords of love, and the same hand that pulled him up raised an enemy over him.

Every slave in Egypt was assumed to be available. This one was not. She talked, and he did not listen. She reached, and he was already at the door. He left the coat in her hands and went out into the yard, and the coat became the evidence, and the evidence went to Potiphar, and the man who had once wanted him for himself now had every reason in the world to want him buried in a cell.

The Warden Stopped Looking

In the prison the keeper handed him the keys within a month and after that never inspected anything. Not the stores, not the accounts, not the prisoners. He looked at what was under Joseph's hand exactly once and then stopped looking for the rest of the years, because whatever had come down the road from Dothan had come into the prison too, and it prospered whatever the boy touched. It had done the same thing upstairs in the master's house when life was easy. It did it in the cell when life was not.

Years later a cow was being dragged toward the slaughterhouse and would not walk. So they took her calf and led it out in front of her, and she followed it down the road on her own legs, against everything in her.

Jacob should have gone down to Egypt in iron. God said, he is My firstborn son, and I will not bring him down in chains. So He drew the son ahead, pit to caravan to cell to throne, and the old man came after him.