Judah's Hidden Threats and Benjamin's Peaceful End

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. 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 account of Judah's speech before Joseph, drawn from the midrashic tradition collected in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, is remarkable for this quality. It is simultaneously a plea and a warning, 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 yet. 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 a man who was Joseph. He described the grief of an old father who could not lose another son from Rachel. He said all of this to the son from Rachel who was standing in front of him wearing Egyptian clothes and speaking through an interpreter. The scene is almost unbearable, and the tradition lingers in it deliberately.

What Benjamin himself remembered of all this is preserved in the account of his death, recorded in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a Second Temple period apocryphal text that gives each patriarch's final words to his children. Benjamin died at one hundred and twenty-five years old, surrounded by his sons, and what he told them about himself was not about the reunion with Joseph or about Egypt or about any of the great events he had witnessed. He told them about his birth.

He said: as Isaac was born to Abraham in old age, so I was born to Jacob when he was stricken in years, and therefore I was called Benjamin, the son of days. He said: my mother Rachel died at my birth, and Bilhah her slave nursed me. He said: Rachel had no children for twelve years after bearing Joseph, and she prayed and fasted twelve days, and then she conceived and bore me. He said: our father loved Rachel deeply and had longed for two sons by her.

What Benjamin carried to his death was this: he was the son his mother had prayed and fasted twelve days to conceive, the child she had died bearing, the last gift she had managed to give Jacob before she was buried by the road to Bethlehem. He was born into grief and into love simultaneously, and he had lived all one hundred and twenty-five years of his life in the shadow of both.

Judah's threats before the Egyptian viceroy were real. The family had a record, and Judah was not bluffing. But the deeper argument in his speech was the argument every Israelite made about survival: the family had already lost Joseph, and it had not recovered. It could not lose Benjamin too. The loss of one son from Rachel had broken Jacob in a way that the old man was still carrying twenty years later. A second loss was not something Jacob could survive.

Joseph, hearing this, wept in a side chamber before he could compose himself enough to continue. He had lived in Egypt as the viceroy, as the administrator of a famine, as the man who had saved two civilizations. But he had never stopped being the son from Rachel, the brother Judah was threatening empires to protect, the boy whose bones would one day be carried out of Egypt in the same formation Jacob had specified: Judah and Issachar and Zebulon at the front, Benjamin and Ephraim and Manasseh at the back, the family arranged around their dead the same way they had arranged themselves around their living.

Benjamin lived to be one hundred and twenty-five years old. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written during the Second Temple period and preserved in Greek, gives him a full chapter of farewell speech. He instructed his sons in the ways of a good man. He warned them against the works of Beliar. He told them that Joseph had been the model of a righteous man who endured every trial without returning evil for evil. He held his brother before his children as the example they should imitate. Benjamin, the youngest, the one everyone had been so afraid to lose, spent his last breath praising the brother who had been lost first. The two sons from Rachel, separated by the worst years of their family's history, had lived long enough to grow old together in Egypt, and what Benjamin remembered at the end was not the Egyptian viceroy but the boy his father had loved and his mother had prayed twelve days to conceive.