The Image That Stopped Joseph

The seduction of Joseph is one of the oldest stories in the world. The Egyptian records it in one version, the Torah in another, and the ancient Jewish storytellers spent centuries arguing about what actually happened in that room.

What is not in dispute is this: Zuleika, whom later tradition names as the wife of Potiphar, wanted Joseph. She had wanted him since he first entered the household. She tried words. She tried tears. She tried the slow work of months and years. Then she tried force.

She chose the day of the Nile festival carefully. All of Egypt went to the river on that day, men and women both, nobles and servants. She stayed home, claiming illness. She rose from her sickbed and dressed herself in her finest garments, set precious stones at her head, perfumed the hall with cassia and frankincense, and arranged herself at the entrance through which Joseph would have to pass to reach his work. She had waited a long time for this moment.

Joseph entered and turned back when he saw her. She called out to him. He went to his seat and took up his master's work. Then she stood before him and said what she had come to say. And this is where the Legends of the Jews say something the Torah leaves out: for just one instant, Joseph's resolve broke. He was on the point of giving in. It was the first and last moment his steadfastness failed him, but it was real.

What stopped him was not his own virtue. It was a vision. The image of his mother Rachel appeared before him. Then his aunt Leah. Then his father Jacob, who spoke to him directly: your name belongs on the breastplate of the high priest alongside your brothers. Do you want to lose that? Do you know what happens to a man who keeps company with harlots? Joseph's face changed. Zuleika saw it happen and asked what had frightened him. He told her: I see my father. She said: there is no one here. And he said: you belong to a people that perceives nothing. I belong to those who can see.

He fled. But the story of that room was not over. He got outside and the passion came back, and he turned back toward the house. At that moment, the Ginzberg texts record, God appeared to him holding the Eben Shetiyah, the Foundation Stone, the stone upon which the earth was created and balanced. God said: if you touch her, I will cast this away, and the world will fall to ruin. Joseph was sobered. He ran.

Zuleika caught his garment as he ran. She held a sword to his throat. He wrenched free, leaving cloth in her hand. She kissed the cloth because she could not have the man. Then she thought about what she had just done and understood the danger she was in. She dressed in ordinary clothes, went back to her sickbed, and arranged the evidence carefully before her husband came home.

The Book of Jasher, a text preserved in later manuscripts and quoted in the Hebrew Bible itself at Joshua 10:13, fills in more details. The trial that followed. The examination of the torn garment. The judges who noticed the tear was in front, not behind, which meant she had been pulling him toward her, not pushing him away. The infant son of Potiphar who miraculously spoke in Joseph's defense, telling the court everything that had happened.

Potiphar was convinced of Joseph's innocence before he imprisoned him. He said so out loud: I know you did not commit this crime, but I must put you in prison so that no stain clings to my children. He imprisoned an innocent man he knew to be innocent because the alternative was worse for his family. This, too, the tradition records without excusing it.

Prison was where everything would turn again. In the dungeon, Joseph interpreted the dreams of the Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. Two years later, Pharaoh himself dreamed. The cupbearer finally remembered the Hebrew who had read dreams in prison, and Joseph was brought up from the pit. But the Midrash Rabbah, the great collection of rabbinic homilies on the Torah compiled between the 4th and 10th centuries CE, asks why it took so long. The answer given is that Joseph had shown insufficient faith when he asked the cupbearer to remember him before Pharaoh. He had trusted in human help rather than God alone, and so he remained in prison two additional years beyond what was necessary.

The ancient storytellers who built up the Ginzberg tradition were not trying to reduce Joseph to a simple moral lesson about resisting sin. They were tracking something more uncomfortable: a man who was almost broken, who needed help from the dead and from God to keep himself whole. The vision of Jacob was not a sign of Joseph's strength. It was a sign of how close he came to losing everything, and how much it cost to pull him back. The same man who stood firm against Zuleika would later, in the pit of prison, forget where his help came from.