Two Women Wanted Joseph and Only One Understood Him

Zuleika had tried everything. She had tried beauty, then pleading, then accusation. She had sent Joseph to prison. She had watched from her window as he rose in Pharaoh's court to become the second most powerful man in Egypt. And still she could not let it go.

The Legends of the Jews, Rabbi Louis Ginzberg's monumental synthesis of rabbinic tradition compiled in the early twentieth century from Talmudic and midrashic sources stretching back two millennia, follows Zuleika through the years of Joseph's imprisonment with unsettling attention. When she grew ill, the women of her household knew the cause: unrequited love for a man who had rejected her to her face and was now sitting in a dungeon because of it. She was the wife of a powerful man. She had done what powerful people do when refused. And it had not helped at all.

The tradition makes Zuleika's obsession theologically interesting rather than simply pathetic. She had recognized something in Joseph that was not available in the rest of her world. She was not wrong about what she saw. She was wrong about how to respond to it. The rabbis understood the distinction: desire that cannot be fulfilled is not evidence that the desire was false. It is evidence that the response was misaligned with the reality.

Joseph's reality, according to the midrashic tradition, was that he was bound for someone specific. Legends of the Jews records his first encounter with Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera, priest of On. She wanted to kiss him. He refused sharply. She was the daughter of a foreign priest. He was not interested in the daughter of idol worshippers. The text records his rebuke with uncomfortable directness: a man who fears God and blesses God and rejects foreign women does not kiss a woman who worships dead idols.

But Joseph's father Jacob had prayed for her. The midrash preserves a tradition that Asenath was not entirely what she appeared. She had a connection to the house of Israel that ran deeper than her Egyptian upbringing. There is another tradition, preserved in later texts, that she had stood in a tower throwing down gold rings to catch Joseph's attention when the caravan bringing him to Egypt first passed below her window. She was praying, not seducing. The gold was devotion, not bribery. The soul she had sensed in that first glimpse was the thing she was reaching toward.

He became the ruler of Egypt. Jubilees 49 gives a brief but arresting account of the night of the final plague, when divine powers passed through Egypt executing the divine sentence. The Israelites were passed over entirely. Not a single soul among them was harmed. Joseph, now governing the country that the plague was destroying around him, held both identities at once: the Egyptian official responsible for the granaries and the son of Jacob who was watching God protect his family while Egypt collapsed.

The choice he faced when his brothers arrived starving from Canaan. The brothers who had stripped him of his coat, dropped him in a pit, and sold him to a passing caravan. That is where his character shows most clearly. Legends of the Jews records what Joseph told his children in his final years: "Have pity and compassion on all men, that the Lord may have pity and compassion on you, for in the measure in which man has mercy with his fellow-men, God has mercy with him." He did not say this as someone who had never been tested on it. He said it as someone who had been in a position to destroy the men who had destroyed his youth, and had chosen differently.

The mercy and the suffering are the same story. Zuleika's obsession, Joseph's imprisonment, the years in the pit and the dungeon. All of it was the preparation for a man who would need to stand before his brothers with the power of life and death in his hands and choose to weep rather than condemn. The soul that Asenath had glimpsed from her tower, the thing Zuleika had recognized and could not possess, was not simply charisma or beauty. It was the particular character that grief builds in a person who does not let it harden them.

He married Asenath. They had two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, who would become two of the twelve tribes. The blessing Jacob gave them on his deathbed, crossing his hands so that the younger received the right hand and the elder the left, was the last act of a blind old man who had spent his entire life watching the expected order get inverted. He knew what he was doing. So did Joseph. And neither of them tried to stop it.