Joseph Flees the House Where Zelicah Served Citrons

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Four Hundred Pieces of Silver

The Medanim took Joseph into Potiphar's courtyard and asked four hundred pieces of silver. Potiphar wanted proof the youth was a slave, not a kidnapped freeman who would bring blood-guilt. The Ishmaelites spoke. Potiphar paid. Joseph, eighteen, beautiful-eyed, unlike anyone in Egypt, took the keys of the house until the Lord blessed the Egyptian for Joseph's sake.

Then Zelicah, Potiphar's wife, fixed her soul on him the way a hook fixes in a fish. Daily words. Flattery of hair and eyes and song. Joseph turned each compliment toward the Creator and the grave. Eyes that dazzle Egypt will be horrors in the dust, he said. Words best used for praise should not be spent on a master's wife.

"How long will you speak these words?" he asked. "Rise and attend to your domestic affairs." She claimed there was no other work left in the world but him.

A Knife and a Citron

Desire made her ill. When the women of Egypt came to visit, she set a banquet and served a knife and a citron before each guest. Then she had Joseph dressed and walked him through the room.

The women cut their hands without noticing. Eyes locked on the Hebrew. Blood mixed with fruit. "What have you done?" Zelicah asked, almost laughing through the lesson. "I gave you citrons and you have cut yourselves. You saw him a moment. I see him every day. How shall I not decline?"

Their advice was simple and poisonous: seize him in secret. On a working day she ambushed him, fell, wept, promised her husband's blindness to the crime. Joseph refused the betrayal of master and of God.

The Festival House

On the Nile festival she pretended sickness. The house emptied. She perfumed the rooms, waited in fine garments, and seized him as he passed. He fled. The garment tore and stayed in her hand like a trophy that would become a lie.

She changed clothes, called the household, and inverted the flight into an attack. Potiphar beat Joseph until an eleven-month-old child spoke the truth of the room. Priests examined the tear in the garment's front and knew he had been running away, not forcing his way in. Scandal still demanded a prison. Even there Zelicah came daily. Joseph chose the cell over the sin.

In Canaan, Jacob mourned without comfort, not knowing his son was winning a war of eyes and hands in a foreign house. The blessing on Potiphar's estate continued to argue for Joseph even while the legal process failed him. Truth had a witness in an infant's mouth and in the geometry of cloth. Power still preferred a quiet jail to a public shame for the captain's wife.

What the Serpent Lost

Joseph sat on the prison stone and remembered an older ledger his father had told. The serpent grasped at what was not its own and lost what it held. God had meant it to be king among animals. It became lowest. Upright walk became belly in the dust. Human food became dirt. The hope of taking Eve collapsed into eternal enmity with the woman. Each line of the curse undid a gift it once enjoyed.

A woman who sets her gaze on a man not hers risks losing the husband she had. Zelicah reached. Joseph refused to be the stolen portion. The garment in her fist was all she kept of him, and even that became evidence against her story.

He named God in the corridor while the perfume still hung in the air. Prison is cold. It is still warmer than the fire that takes another man's house and calls it love.

Hands Off the Portion

Blood on citrons. Dust on a serpent's tongue. A cloak torn at the front. He had felt everything and still run. That was the strength. Not that the house held no heat. That he left the heat in her hand and took the door.

She came to the cell with the same words she had used in the banquet hall. He turned his face to the wall. The perfume thickened in the corridor and found no one to follow.

The portion that was not his would have cost more than it promised. The serpent crawled away with empty hands. Joseph slept on stone and kept the keys he had not stolen.