Joseph Was Called a Leaping Man and He Knew to Look at the Teeth

The verse says that Joseph was a successful man. The Hebrew word is matzliaḥ, and it is the kind of word that can be translated in a dozen ways -- successful, prospering, making progress -- without any of the translations quite capturing what the rabbis heard in it. Rabbi Berekhya, whose name appears repeatedly in the midrashim of the third and fourth centuries CE, heard in matzliaḥ something more specific and more physical: a leaping man. His proof text came from II Samuel 19:18, where the word vetzalḥu describes people crossing the Jordan before the king. The connection is etymological -- same root, same essential motion -- but what Rabbi Berekhya made of it was a portrait of Joseph as someone who leaped over obstacles rather than being stopped by them.

The analogy Rabbi Berekhya offered to illustrate this is one of the strangest and most vivid in the midrashic literature: imagine a she-bear standing in the street, adorned with gems and precious stones. Everyone who can jump onto the bear gets to take the gems. There is a clever man standing in the crowd. While everyone else is calculating how to jump on the bear to take what is on it, the clever man says: you are looking at what is on it. I am looking at its teeth. The bear can jump. Its power lies in the ability to leap. And you are greater than it -- meaning Joseph, confronting the wife of Potiphar, was the one figure in the story who understood where the real danger lay. Everyone else was looking at the surface. Joseph saw the teeth.

This reading of the Potiphar episode connects to the larger question of why God was specifically "with Joseph" in Potiphar's house. The text says it plainly -- "the Lord was with Joseph" -- but the rabbis found this strange. Was God not also with the other eleven brothers? Rabbi Yudan addressed this with an analogy about an animal driver with twelve animals loaded with wine. One of the animals wanders into the shop of an idolater, and the driver abandons the eleven to follow the one. Why? Because the eleven are in the public domain, where there is no danger of idolatrous contamination. The one that has wandered into the idolater's shop is at risk. So too Joseph: his brothers were adults in their father's household, under Jacob's protection, with the structures of family and tradition around them. Joseph was young, alone in a foreign country, in the house of an Egyptian official, subject to pressures his brothers had never faced. God went with the one who needed it.

From the house of Potiphar to the prison of Pharaoh the path ran through false accusation, and the prison became the place where Joseph's ability to read beneath surfaces found its full expression. The baker saw that Joseph had interpreted the butler's dream favorably, and decided to share his own dream: three wicker baskets on his head, and in the uppermost basket, baked goods for Pharaoh, and birds eating from that uppermost basket. The interpretation Joseph gave the baker was the one no one wanted to hear. The three baskets, in the rabbinic reading of Midrash Rabbah, represented the first three kingdoms that would subjugate Israel -- Babylon, Media, and Greece. The uppermost basket, the one from which the birds ate, was the fourth kingdom, Rome, which would impose taxes on all the nations of the world. The birds eating from it were the nations that would eventually consume Rome after they had consumed everything else.

But Joseph was not delivering a lecture on the succession of empires to the baker in Pharaoh's prison. He was telling a man that in three days his head would be lifted from him and he would hang on a tree. The baker's dream alluded to the nations that would subjugate Israel, and so Joseph's response was proportionate: you gave me bad tidings, and I will give you bad tidings in return. The leaping man, the one who saw the bear's teeth, was also the one who did not soften an interpretation to make it palatable. When Pharaoh's birthday came three days later, both dreams resolved exactly as Joseph had said: the butler was restored, the baker was hanged.

What the tradition found instructive in these two moments -- Joseph evading Potiphar's wife, Joseph reading the baker's dream without flinching -- was the same quality in each case: the ability to see past the surface to what is actually at stake. The gems on the bear are not worth the risk of the bear's leap. The favorable interpretation of the baker's dream would have been flattery, and flattery was not what the situation required. Joseph, in the midrashic imagination, was the man who was with God precisely because he had mastered this particular form of clarity. He could leap. He could see teeth. And he knew the difference between what a dream looked like and what a dream meant.