Reuben Who Lost Everything and Died Without Complaint

Reuben was the eldest. He was the firstborn of Jacob and Leah, the one who carried all the weight that word implies in the ancient world. The birthright was his by right. The double portion was his. The leadership of the brothers was his. He had been born first and that fact was supposed to govern everything that followed.

It governed nothing. By the time Jacob gathered his sons to bless them, Reuben had lost the birthright, the double portion had passed to Joseph's two sons Ephraim and Manasseh, and Jacob's blessing to his eldest son was more accusation than praise: "Unstable as water, you shall not excel" (Genesis 49:4). It was a devastating public accounting, and it happened in front of every one of his brothers.

What Reuben did to deserve this is recorded plainly in Genesis: he lay with Bilhah, his father's concubine, and his father heard of it (Genesis 35:22). The verse stops there, almost mid-sentence, as if Jacob turned away from what he was reading. The rabbis who compiled the traditions around this incident argue that Reuben did not do what it appears he did. He was defending his mother Leah's honor. After Rachel died, Jacob moved his bed into Bilhah's tent rather than Leah's, and Reuben, furious that his mother was being slighted, moved the bed. The act was about honor, not transgression. But the appearance of the thing was damning, and appearances in the ancient world could destroy a man as thoroughly as deeds.

That same year, the year Joseph was sold, Reuben also failed in the one thing he tried to do right. He had gone to the pit where his brothers threw Joseph with the intention of returning and pulling the boy out. He was the only one who objected. He planned to rescue Joseph in secret and bring him back to their father. He left, thinking Joseph was safe in the pit, and returned to find the pit empty. The traders had already taken him. Reuben tore his clothes and cried out, "The child is not there. Where shall I go?" (Genesis 37:30). His grief was real. His failure was real. He meant to save his brother and he was too late.

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a Second Temple period apocryphal text that presents the last words of each of Jacob's sons to their children, preserves what tradition imagined Reuben said at the end of his life. He was married, he had children, he had lived his full span of years. And he spent his last words telling his sons to learn from what he had done. He did not minimize the incident with Bilhah. He did not explain it away. He told them that he had fasted and wept in repentance for seven years, that he had abstained from wine and flesh for that entire period, and that the meat he ate during those years had been uncooked. He was not performing grief. He was doing the work of a man who knew what he had done and intended to carry the cost of it honestly.

The tradition preserved in the account of Reuben's death pairs interestingly with a separate midrashic story about another Rabbi Reuben, a scholar whose son was condemned to die young. The Angel of Death came to announce the decree, and the rabbi asked for thirty days so the boy could be married first. On the wedding day, the groom met Elijah, who told him his death was coming but advised him how to meet the Angel of Death with hospitality and kindness. The angel was moved by the young man's grace and the young wife's tears, and he went before God's throne and petitioned for an extension. God added seventy years to the young man's life.

These two Reubens bracket something. The patriarch Reuben lost his birthright and lived with it. The rabbi's son faced death and was granted more time. Both stories are about the same thing: what a person does when the sentence comes down and there is no appeal that seems adequate. Reuben the patriarch did not appeal. He accepted. He fasted, wept, and told his children the truth. He died with his record intact, not because he had never failed but because he had never pretended otherwise.

The apocryphal traditions that imagine the patriarchs' deathbed speeches have a particular quality of honesty that distinguishes them from hagiography. Reuben in the Testaments is not a saint. He is a man who made the biggest mistake of his life when he was young, who tried to do right by his youngest brother and arrived too late, who watched Joseph disappear into Egypt, and who spent the rest of his life as the eldest son who had lost the right to act like the eldest son. When he told his children, "Before the Lord we will walk according to His law," he was not speaking from a position of easy virtue. He had tested that law on his own bones and found it was real.