Naphtali Saw Levi Take the Sun and Judah Take the Moon

Naphtali was forty years old and standing on the Mount of Olives when the sun and the moon stopped moving.

He described the scene to his children ninety years later on his own deathbed, in the hundred and thirtieth year of his life. He had made them a feast the night before. In the morning he told them calmly that he was dying. They refused to believe him. He was still strong. He was still lucid. He glorified the Lord and the strength poured through him like a second wind. Then he sat them down around the bed and told them about the vision he had been carrying since he was a young man.

A Dead Grandfather Calls a Footrace

He was standing on the Mount of Olives in the vision, east of Jerusalem, looking west. The sun and the moon were suspended in the sky together, one bright with day and one bright with night, frozen there, refusing to rise or set. And then Isaac appeared. Naphtali's grandfather. Dead for years. Alive in the dream. Isaac looked at the two celestial bodies hanging in the air and looked at the brothers standing in the field and he called a footrace. Whoever could catch the sun and the moon would have them.

The brothers ran. All twelve of them ran toward the sky over Jerusalem in a race with no track and no finish line, only the two lights hanging there waiting to see who reached them first.

Levi caught the sun. Judah caught the moon.

The rest of the brothers were still running when Levi and Judah arrived. The two of them held the lights and were given them and did not let go. The other ten caught up, one by one, and each one received a single star. Naphtali, eighth of the twelve, held a star. Levi and Judah held the sky.

What Isaac Explained

Then Isaac spoke to them. He is the interpreter of his own grandson's vision, which gives the scene an unusual quality: a dead patriarch appearing in a living man's dream in order to explain what the dream means before it ends. He told them what they had just done was not a children's game. He told them that from Levi and Judah the Lord would cause salvation to arise for Israel. The sun was the priesthood. The moon was the kingship. The stars distributed among the other ten were the other inheritances, real but lesser, orbiting the two that held the lights.

This account comes from the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a Jewish pseudepigraphical text probably composed in the second century BCE in Hebrew or Aramaic and preserved in Greek and Armenian manuscripts. Naphtali is the eighth son of Jacob, born of Bilhah. His deathbed chapter is unusual among the twelve: where most patriarchs confess a sin, Naphtali tells his sons what he saw. The vision is his testament.

Jacob at the End of His Own Life

The tradition that Jacob himself reinforced the same message is preserved in the Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's synthesis of rabbinic tradition. When Jacob gathered his sons on his own deathbed, he told them: honor Judah and Levi, for from them the Lord will cause a savior to arise for Israel. He was not making a neutral observation. He was issuing an instruction backed by a lifetime of watching which of his sons had the kind of character the future required.

He also told them something harder. The vision was not permission to assume everything would work out. He warned that the enemy nations would become powerful when Israel forgot what Levi and Judah represented. The sun and moon could be held. They could also be let go.

The Child Born on Rachel's Lap

Naphtali told his sons one more thing before the vision. He told them about his birth. His mother was Bilhah, the handmaid Rachel had given to Jacob in her own place because she could not yet bear children. Naphtali was born on Rachel's knees, and she named him, and she loved him deeply because he had come into the world through her. When he was young, Rachel would kiss him and say: May I have a brother of yours from my own womb, like you.

And so Joseph was born, and Joseph was like Naphtali in all things.

The man who saw the sun and moon taken on the Mount of Olives was the man who grew up as the closest thing to Joseph that existed before Joseph arrived. He had run the same footrace all his life. He had not caught the sun. But he had a star in his hand, and he knew whose merit the sun had gone to, and he had been at peace with the arrangement for ninety years.