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1 the Story of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife 1 The Story of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife: Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers and his Early Jewish and Christian Sources by Emily Wilson A thesis presented for the B.A. degree With Honors in The Department of English and the Independent Concentration Program University of Michigan Spring 2009 2 © March 16, 2009 Emily Wilson 3 Acknowledgments I would first and foremost like to thank my advisor, Professor Ralph Williams, for his patient guidance and inspiration on this project. I also want to thank Professors Adela Pinch and Catherine Sanok for their willingness to help us all through this year, and Professor Peter Bauland for graciously agreeing to read my work at the last second. I am indebted to Dr. Donna Wessel Walker for guiding me through the entire Honors ICP process these last few years, for facilitating this thesis with the Department of English, and for making it so easy to pursue an independent major. Finally, I want to thank my friends both in and out of the thesis cohort for their support, and my family for their constant encouragement. 4 Abstract The story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in the Book of Genesis has captivated the literary imagination of writers for centuries. The entire cycle of Joseph is distinctly literary; it is presented as a coherent, linear story and narrows in on certain episodes with unusual detail. Joseph is a transitional character, whose narrative facilitates the transition from the cycles of the patriarchs in Genesis to the epic of Exodus and ultimately the tribal, disseminated state of the people of Israel. These characteristics, combined with the enigmatic quality of Joseph himself, have led the Jewish and Christian interpreters to study and interpret these texts’ exploration of ‘life among the other’ with particular zeal. The text these interpreters face is fraught with ambiguity. God’s promise of land and prosperity to Abraham, with no indication of a timeline, creates a tension him and for his descendants, between the choices they make in their daily life and their understanding of the role those choices play in the long-term divine plan. This anxiety is realized over and over in the Hebrew Bible, and becomes a particularly urgent tension when the chosen people are faced with ‘life among the other.’ Joseph’s narrative illustrates the pathos of being a chosen people, for it shows that Joseph faces uncertainty in his every choice. This tension between Joseph’s actions and God’s plan will never be resolved one way or the other; the tension is therefore amplified in the early Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions I examine in this study. Centuries later, Thomas Mann seeks to resolve this tension in his epic Joseph and His Brothers. In this thesis, then, I will begin in my first chapter by establishing the complex questions which arise from the original Genesis text on Joseph. In turning next to the ‘inter-biblical exegesis’ on Joseph in the Book of Deuteronomy, the Psalms, the Book of Acts and the Book of Hebrews, I arrive at the first level of ‘displaced’ sacred text. In contrast to these historically bound texts, my third chapter examines the midrash of fourth and fifth-century C.E. Rabbis on Joseph in Genesis Rabbah , which has a heavily theological slant and tends to be a-historical. All three chapters allow me to study the development of the figure of Joseph from his nascent state in Genesis to his more complex incarnation—for example, associated with a tribe and thus a geopolitical reality—several centuries of textual production later. The methodologies of this development, as well as the amplified ambiguities which evolve from it, are critical to understanding Thomas Mann’s project; Mann’s Joseph is laden with such historical and religious meaning, which makes his often irreverent attitude towards this tradition all the more complex. In my fourth chapter, I turn to a body of text on Joseph which represents a sustained examination of the anxieties of his ‘life among the other’—and by implication, his quotidian relationship with God and His plan. The very urgent historical concerns of Hellenistic Jews living in Egypt between the second century B.C.E. and the second century C.E. come to bear in a significant way on their appropriation of the Joseph narrative. In examining these texts, we can better understand how Mann’s own biography interjects into his re-imagination of Joseph, and how he relates his own project to that of these Alexandrian Jews. Mann’s novels respond to both the interpretive pressure inherent in the original Genesis text and the ambiguity amplified in the Joseph tradition. In this final chapter, I study the influence of the author’s own life on Joseph, his methodology in the context of modern biblical criticism, and finally his constructed characters of Joseph and God and their particular relationship. 5 CONTENTS Short Titles i Introduction 1 Chapter One: Joseph in Genesis 9 Chapter Two: Joseph in the Bible 27 Chapter Three: Joseph in Midrash 42 Chapter Four: Joseph in Egypt 58 Chapter Five: Joseph and His Brothers 77 Conclusion 109 Works Consulted 111 6 i Short Titles IPH : Kugel, James L. In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990. 2Intros: Kugel, James L. “Two Introductions to Midrash.” Midrash and Literature. G.H. Hartmand and S. Budick, Eds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. pp. 77- 103. 1 Introduction Thus some origins are of a conditional sort, marking both in practice and in fact the primal beginning of the particular tradition kept by a given community, people, or family of faith, but in such a way that memory, even when advised that the well’s deeps can in no way be considered earnestly plumbed, may find national reassurance in some primal event and come to historical and personal rest there. Thomas Mann, ‘Descent into Hell’ (1933) A handsome young man is accosted by an older woman; after he rejects her on account of his loyalty to his father and his God, she falsely accuses him of rape and he is thrown in jail—but is later restored to greater fortune. The story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in Chapter 39 of the Book of Genesis fits a literary archetype which has incarnations in the folklore of an impressive range of world cultures. In John D. Yohannan’s work Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife in World Literature: An Anthology of the Story of the Chaste Youth and the Lustful Stepmother, he diagrams the genealogy of the archetype. He includes both proven historical connections and mere conjecture; he claims that “some stories resemble each other because they were diffused from a common source, and others despite the fact that they were independently created.” 1 In other words, Yohannan’s family tree for this archetype argues the existence of four root stories, all of which may have come into being independently of each other: the Egyptian ‘Tale of Two Brothers’ (c.1500 B.C.E.), the Biblical narrative in Genesis 39 (c.1500-1000 B.C.E.), the classical drama of Euripides’ Hippolytus (c.500 B.C.E.), and the Buddhist myth of Kunala and Tishya-rakshita (c.500 C.E.). The proposed descendants of these tales include, among others, apocryphal works by Jews in Hellenistic Egypt, the story of Yusuf in the Qur’an and its relatives 1 John D. Yohannan, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife in World Literature: An Anthology of the Story of the Chaste Youth and the Lustful Stepmother, (New York: New Directions Books, 1968), 2. 2 in medieval Persian poetry, Racine’s Phèdre and, finally, Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. Although the permutations of this tale are clearly numerous, the story generally unfolds in a similar manner. Yohannan argues that “The tone of these and other variations on the theme ranges from the didactically moral through the somberly tragic, the lyrically musical and the humorously ironic to the flippantly diverting” (Yohannan, 1). He explains that the tenor of the story varies with the motive for the woman’s seduction, from lust, love, or sometimes even concern for the succession of her children. The youth invariably remains chaste, but not as a result of asceticism. His reasons more commonly result from a fear of divine or earthly repercussions, “or from a concern for social morality” (Yohannan, 6-7). In this thesis, I will focus on the branch of this story rooted in the Book of Genesis. The conspicuous literary features of the Joseph narrative, as well as the range and depth of thematic material explored, have drawn generations of exegetes to the story. Just as the archetype of the ‘chaste youth and lustful stepmother’ has spread across the pages of literary history, interpreters have disseminated the particular story of Joseph across the varied and diverse communities of the Jewish and Christian traditions. What does it mean to re-imagine the narrative of a sacred text? To embark upon such a project is to displace the sacred text; to borrow its sacredness—its resonance in our common cultural memory—but to focus its attention to another purpose, whether that purpose be theological, historical, or some combination of both. When borrowed in the context of early Jewish and Christian communities, the exegete is by definition working in a religious sphere. Thus the Genesis text is always present in the writer’s mind, always revered and never fully replaced, but supplemented with material loyal to the writer’s intent and context. 3 Yet the Genesis text that is foremost in these interpreter’s minds is fraught with ambiguity.
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