No Accuser Walked Egypt the Seventy Years Joseph Lived

The morning Jacob was carried up to Canaan for burial, something in the unseen world went quiet, and stayed quiet for seventy years.

No accuser walked the roads of Egypt. No whisperer leaned over a granary clerk to teach him the trick of the short measure. The thing that the old books called Mastema, the one who tests and torments and stands at God's right hand to lay charges against the living, found every door in that land shut against him. For the length of Joseph's remaining life, ten full weeks of years, the Adversary was simply held back, the way a flood is held behind a wall it cannot see.

The Masters Who Bowed to the Slave's Children

Egypt had bought Joseph for twenty pieces of silver and put him in a pit of a prison. Now the grandchildren of those same Egyptians lifted their eyes to the children of Israel and honored them. The men who had held the whips bowed in the street to the descendants of the man they had once owned. A foreign people, shepherds, an abomination to Egyptian custom, were treated as nobility, and no one in all that kingdom could say why the hatred had drained out of them like water from a cracked jar.

Joseph walked through it without pride. He had counted his own life out in stages and knew exactly what each had cost. Seventeen years a favored son in Canaan. Ten years a slave. Three years forgotten in a prison cell. Then eighty years standing at the right hand of the king, ruling all the land of the two rivers. The boy who had been thrown into a dry well now opened the storehouses of the world, and grain moved out of Egypt to every starving nation, and nobody starved who came to his door.

The Charge His Great-Grandfather Carried Out of the Water

What Joseph guarded in those years was older than Egypt. It went back to a man standing on a drowned and steaming earth, the only earth that had been scrubbed clean by water.

Noah had come off the ark into a world where the ground itself remembered murder. God had given him and his sons one charge above all others, and Joseph kept it like a coal cupped in two hands. Cover the blood, the command ran, and do not let the soul be eaten with the flesh, that your own blood, which is your life, may not be required at the hand of anything that sheds it on the earth. The blood was the nefesh. To spill it carelessly was to leave a stain the ground could not absorb. "The earth will not be clean from the blood that has been shed upon it," Noah had told his children, "for only through the blood of him who shed it will the earth be purified throughout all its generations."

And then the old man had given them the work that came after the warning. "Work judgment and righteousness," he said, "that you may be planted in righteousness over the face of the whole earth, and your glory lifted up before my God, who saved me from the waters of the flood."

A Land Where No Blood Cried Out

Joseph took that planted righteousness and made a country out of it. In his seventy years no blood cried out of the ground of Egypt, because justice answered for it before it could cry. The accuser had nothing to bring, no charge to lay, no quarrel to fan, no jealousy to feed, because the land was already living the way Noah had begged his sons to live. There was no Satan, the record says, and no evil in all the days of Joseph's life that he lived after his father Jacob. Brother did not turn on brother. Master did not crush servant. The earth was clean.

This was not the world as it usually runs. This was the world with the wall holding. For ten weeks of years a single righteous man kept an entire kingdom inside the charge given on the drowned earth, and the heavens left the Adversary chained because there was nothing for him to do.

The Day the Wall Came Down

Then Joseph died.

He died at a hundred and ten, and they embalmed him and laid him in a coffin in Egypt, and the brothers who survived him carried out the oath he had pulled from them with his last breath, that his bones would not stay forever in that soil. But the moment the breath left him, the unseen wall that had stood for seventy years came down.

Mastema walked back through the open door. The hatred returned to the Egyptians like blood rushing back into a numbed limb, and they looked at the children of Israel, grown numerous and strong, and remembered that these were the descendants of slaves. A new king rose who knew nothing of Joseph and nothing of the grain that had once saved his nation. The whips came back out. The bricks began. The accuser, idle for seventy years, found a kingdom full of work, and the long bondage that the prophets had foretold to Abraham closed its hand around the family of Jacob.

Seventy years of a clean earth, bought by one man holding a command out of the flood. And the day they sealed his coffin, the flood of bondage began.