What Naphtali Saw on a Ship in a Dream at the End of His Life

What a Dying Man Leaves

At one hundred and thirty-two years old, Naphtali gathered his sons and told them he had nothing to give them except the fear of God. He said this was an easy thing to carry. He was not being ironic. His sons said they had not strayed from his ways or their fathers' ways. Naphtali thanked God for it, but said he was afraid for what came after. He feared they would eventually drift from the children of Levi and Judah.

His sons asked why he thought this.

He told them two visions, and the visions answered the question.

The Brothers on the Stars

The first vision came when Naphtali was young, pasturing flocks in the field with all eleven brothers. Their father Jacob came and told them to take hold of whatever they could reach. They looked around. There was nothing to take hold of but the sun, the moon, and the stars. Jacob said: take those. Levi grabbed a rod and mounted the sun. Judah did the same with the moon. The other nine brothers each mounted a star or a planet. Only Joseph remained on the ground.

Jacob asked Joseph why he had not climbed. Joseph said: what use does a person born of woman have being in heaven, when in the end they must all come back to earth? Jacob said: you will be great in your generation. The brothers heard this and it entered them like something cold.

The Ship and What Sank It

The second vision came on the shore of a sea. A ship appeared, full, with sails and rigging and a crew, and Naphtali and his brothers were aboard. A great storm came. The ship was breaking apart. Jacob leaped overboard. When he leaped, the sea was immediately still, and the ship rode peacefully in the quiet water.

Another version of the same dream: Joseph was the captain and Naphtali was its navigator. A whirlwind rose and scattered the brothers across the sea. Joseph disappeared. They searched and found him at last, clinging to the shore in the land of Egypt, and when they pulled him in, the ship was suddenly filled with food and goods, more than they could carry, and they embraced him and wept.

Naphtali told his sons that the second dream was about what envy does to a vessel. It makes it sink. The ship was the family, and the family had nearly broken on the same jealousy that the older vision had shown rising in the brothers when Jacob named Joseph great.

The Fear That Drove the Visions

When Naphtali finished, he told his sons again: hold to Levi and Judah. He said Judah's blessing was the sun and Levi's was the moon and they would give light to all the tribes of Israel in the dark. He said if they separated from those two, they would walk blind. He was not speaking in abstractions. He was a very old man who had seen the ship nearly sink, who had watched his brothers pull Joseph out of the water in Egypt, and who knew how long the wreckage of that event had taken to come back together.

The fear of God he was leaving them was not a legal concept. It was the memory of the storm, and the knowledge of what the family looked like when it was scattered across the water.

The Pattern the Old Man Saw

Naphtali at one hundred and thirty-two had the perspective of a man who had watched the same story play out across a century. He had seen the jealousy in his brothers' faces when Jacob said Joseph would be great. He had watched them sell Joseph into Egypt. He had lived through the years of famine and reunion and the decades in Goshen. The two visions were not prophecy at that point; they were memory that had already proven itself. He was not warning his sons about something that might happen. He was explaining to them the mechanism of something that had already happened once and would happen again if the family forgot what they were supposed to hold onto.