Judah's Hidden Threats and Benjamin's Peaceful End

The Plea That Was Also a Warning

Judah stood before the viceroy of Egypt and spoke carefully. He was asking for his youngest brother's life, and the viceroy had all the power in the room. But Judah did not beg in the way a powerless man begs. He wove his petition through with reminders.

He reminded the viceroy what had happened to Pharaoh when he took Sarah, the matriarch, for himself. He mentioned Abimelech, who had done the same and suffered for it. He recalled what Abraham had done to the nine kings of Elam with only a small band of men. He named what his brothers Simeon and Levi had done to eight cities of the Amorites on account of their sister Dinah.

He was cataloguing, for the benefit of this Egyptian official who held Benjamin in custody, the historical record of what happened to people who took members of this family against their will.

The Man Who Was Listening

The account in Legends of the Jews makes clear what was remarkable about this speech: it was simultaneously a petition and a threat, a prayer and a list of precedents, and the viceroy hearing it knew exactly what Judah was doing. The viceroy, of course, was Joseph. He had not revealed himself. He was listening to his brother describe the family's capacity for violence in defense of its own, and he had to hold himself together.

Judah told the viceroy that Benjamin had been the consolation of his brothers for the loss of Joseph. He said this to the man he had sold into slavery, the man whose loss he was describing as the wound that Benjamin had been salving for twenty years. Joseph heard his own story told back to him as evidence of Benjamin's importance.

It was at this point that Joseph could no longer maintain his composure. He cleared the room and revealed himself.

Benjamin's Memory

Benjamin had been in the room for all of it. He had heard Judah's speech, the historical precedents, the veiled threats, the family record laid out before a stranger who turned out not to be a stranger. He had watched Joseph weep. He had learned, in that room in Egypt, that the brother he had mourned his entire life was alive and powerful and had been testing the family to see whether they were still who they were when they sold him.

Legends of the Jews gives Benjamin a deathbed scene that circles back to this moment. At one hundred and twenty-five years old, surrounded by his children, he told them what he remembered. He had been born to Isaac in his old age, he said, as a gift. He had seen his brother Joseph, whom he had thought dead, ruling Egypt with a name he had not been born with. He had seen Judah speak for him in a room where they were powerless and leave with all of them free.

The Peaceful End

When Benjamin had finished speaking to his children, he kissed them and gave them his final words. Then he sank into sleep and died. His sons carried him, as he had asked, to Hebron, to be buried with his fathers. The text says he died peacefully, which is a notable thing to say about a man whose life had included the selling of his brother, years of grief, and the confrontation in Egypt that resolved it.

The peace at the end was not naive. It was the peace of a man who had lived through the worst of his family's history and seen it turn. The grave he was carried to was the same one that held the patriarchs who had set the family's covenant in motion, and Benjamin was being added to it as a man who had survived everything the family had done to itself.