Joseph Was Seventeen, Vain, and Completely Unprepared

The Joseph most people carry in their minds is the one standing before Pharaoh, composed, prophetic, interpreting dreams while all of Egypt listens. That man was built out of someone considerably less composed: a seventeen-year-old who painted his eyes, walked with a studied elegance, and regularly brought bad reports about his brothers to their father.

Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's early twentieth-century synthesis of the rabbinic tradition, preserves this portrait without softening it. Joseph was brilliant, brilliant enough to have absorbed everything his father Jacob had learned and to transmit it to his older brothers as Torah. He was generous with his learning. He was the favorite among the sons of the handmaids Bilhah and Zilpah, precisely because he treated them with some warmth. And he could also report his brothers for eating meat torn from living creatures, for disrespecting the handmaids' sons, for lusting after Canaanite women. Both things were true simultaneously: the learning and the tattling, the scholarship and the vanity. He was seventeen. He had not yet been tested.

When the brothers threw him into the pit and sold him to the Ishmaelite caravan heading south toward Egypt, the journey south had barely begun before a violent storm struck. Animals collapsed. The Ishmaelites panicked. They came to Joseph, not to apologize, not to release him, but to ask him to pray for them. "We have sinned against God and against thee," they said. "Entreat Him to take this death plague from us." Joseph prayed. The storm stopped. The traders, who had just watched a miracle performed by the property they were transporting, immediately began debating what to do with him. One suggested returning him to Jacob. The others decided instead to sell him faster, they had already come this far, and they calculated that distance was the cleanest solution to a problem they did not understand.

The caravan reached Ephrath. Joseph saw the stone marker and recognized it. This was his mother's grave. Rachel had died here, on the road, the Torah says, and Jacob had buried her where she fell rather than carrying her body to the family cave at Machpelah. Joseph broke away from the caravan and ran to the grave and collapsed over it. What he said, according to Legends of the Jews, is recorded in the Midrash as one of the most desperate passages of grief in the entire rabbinic tradition. He cried: "O mother, arise, come forth and see how thy son hath been sold into slavery, with none to take pity upon him. Arise, see thy son, and weep with me over my misfortune." He begged her to intercede before God, to be his advocate, to comfort his father who did not yet know what had happened. Rachel did not rise. The caravan waited and moved on.

In Egypt, Joseph was sold to Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's guard. The Torah says simply that Potiphar's wife "cast her eyes upon Joseph" (Genesis 39:7). The tradition fills in the mechanism behind that gaze. In Ginzberg's retelling, the woman, named Zuleika in the midrashic tradition, had been told by astrologers that she would have descendants through Joseph. She interpreted this as meaning a direct relationship. The prophecy was correct. The interpretation was wrong. Joseph would eventually marry her daughter Asenath, and their sons Ephraim and Manasseh would become two of the twelve tribes. The future she had been promised arrived through a different door than the one she kept trying to open.

Joseph refused her. Consistently, for years. He redirected her requests for music and conversation toward God. He answered her threats, prison, blindness, labor, with verses from Psalms. "The Lord executeth judgment for the oppressed. The Lord looseth the prisoners. The Lord openeth the eyes of the blind." Threat by verse, he conducted a systematic theology of divine responsiveness under pressure, from inside a household that was trying to break him.

What connects the vain teenager, the boy weeping at Rachel's grave, and the man refusing Zuleika year after year is a single thread: Joseph was paying attention to something larger than his immediate situation. At seventeen, he was paying attention to the Torah he had been taught. At Ephrath, he was paying attention to his mother. In Potiphar's house, he was paying attention to God. He had not been tested in the way that reveals character until the caravan reached Ephrath and he ran to his mother's grave and wept into stone. That was the test. Not Zuleika's threats, not the prison, not the pit, but the moment when everything had been taken and there was nothing left but grief and he poured the grief out anyway and called it prayer. He had no idea yet that the capacity to hold on under pressure was the quality that would eventually save an entire civilization from starvation. He just knew, somehow, that holding on was worth it.