Walking the Bible (20 page)

That rivalry, of course—the cold war of antiquity—provided the backdrop for the Pentateuch. And I was beginning to realize that if I hoped to understand the Bible I had to take what I learned about Mesopotamia and balance it with similar information about Egypt. Genesis: the gift of the Tigris, the Euphrates,
and
the Nile.

• • •

After Basem left I sat for a while and watched the sun set over the river. It was a vivid scene, made even more poignant by our gradual drift upstream. First the sun was yellow, then orange, then red. The sky turned deeper shades of lavender. At the outset the air was brilliantly clear, a significant break from the haze of midday. Feluccas, narrow fishing boats with crisp, white triangular sails, dotted the water. Boys stood inside them fishing for Nile perch, a process that involved taking a broom and beating the water in back of the boat, then scurrying to the front, where the frightened fish flee, and dropping a net into their path. Bait and switch never seemed so cruelly effective.

On the shore, meanwhile, smoke billowed up from a brush fire. A few bushes lined the edge of the water, followed by a grassy plain and a strip of date palms tilting like pinwheels on a stick, first green, then gold, depending on the light. The call to prayer came, but without visible buildings or minarets, it seemed as if the mud itself was making the cry. As we continued our steady glide upriver, the boat began to feel as if it might be floating back in time: Kurtz, Lord Jim, Livingstone. Not just temples, maybe the river, too, was a pyramid to the past.

After a while I began to realize that, compared to the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile was having a much more visceral effect on me. It’s as if the current was dragging me through a series of mental images, like frames in a filmstrip. On the one hand, each image took me further back in history, from Burton, to Napoleon, to Cleopatra, to Rameses. On the other hand, each memory took me further back into my own imagination, into some shifting realm of fantasies about the unknown, and anxieties about strangers and strangeness.

For me, being on the Nile was a bit like being in a bad night of sleep, with my mind ricocheting through a series of associations before it landed, inevitably, on some truth I didn’t want to face: as much as I romanticized this place, I also feared it. Part of this feeling was self-induced drama, brought on by a combination of little sleep and a few yellowed paperbacks I brought along about the exotic, if deadly, Nile
expeditions of the nineteenth century. Part of it, though, was the water. As safe and anchored as I felt on the land I’d been seeing across the Middle East, I felt uncomfortable on the water. Sand can be touched, laid on, held; water can only be grasped at, passed through. As a matter of pure geography, I prefer the land. I’m clearly not alone in this feeling. If anything, I suspect it’s one reason so many Near Eastern origin stories, including the one in Genesis, begin with land emerging out of watery chaos. Water is turbulent and alien in these formulations; land is safe and secure.

This hints at a deeper reason behind my anxiety: an aversion to the Nile itself. This feeling, I was beginning to see, like many I unknowingly carried around within me, stems largely from the Bible, and the deep cultural prejudices I inherited from it as a child. The Nile may have given rise to the greatest civilization of antiquity, but that civilization, in turn, almost annihilated the Israelites. In my mind, Egypt was the adversary, the aggressor, the other. And before I could embrace—or even appreciate—this part of the Bible, I first had to overcome any latent hostility to Egypt.

After a while the sun slid behind the trees. As richly as the sky had been illuminated, suddenly it began to fade. A breeze appeared, like a warning. The pastels dimmed and saddened a bit. A cottony beard of fog sprouted on the water. It was as if the Nile was cocooning for the night, protecting itself. When your god is the sun, you are bathed in godliness for half of every day. When it goes away, you’re left with emptiness and dread.

The next day we traveled a few miles inland to visit the Valley of the Kings, which, after the pyramids, is probably the most famous cemetery in the world. Located in the hills on the west bank of the Nile so that buried pharaohs would have first dibs on the rising sun, the necropolis is an underground network of dozens of tombs housing the kings and their families. The area is shaped like a human hand, with fingers reaching away from the Nile into the Theban hills. Thebes was the capital of
unified Egypt for much of the New Kingdom, and thus the place most pharaohs wanted to be buried. As a result, tombs were dug so closely together that builders of one crypt would often stumble upon another and have to reroute their corridor, like ants in a colony.

One reason for this congestion was the strict mythology that surrounded death. After the pharaohs died, their souls were believed to survive in order to commune with Amen-Re, the sun god, and Osiris, the god of the underworld. The deceased’s soul passed into a hall of truth, where Osiris held court, judging the king’s life. To pass into the afterlife, the deceased’s body also needed to exist, which inspired the most famous preservation technique in history, mummification. According to one estimate, Egyptians mummified more than one hundred million people. The technique involved removing the brain through the nostrils, extracting the organs, then filling the cavity with burnished myrrh. The cadaver was then soaked in salt—seventy days for the pharaoh, forty days for noblemen—painted, and wrapped in linen. According to Herodotus, the wives of men of rank, as well as “any of the more beautiful women,” were not embalmed immediately. “This is done to prevent indignities from being done to them. It is said that once a case of this kind occurred.”

Entering the tombs today is like entering someone else’s death wish. Each of the corridors, a narrower, creepier version of an airport jetway, is decorated over every inch of every wall and ceiling with elaborate paintings describing the pharaoh’s journey through the underworld. Every night, Amen-Re boards a barque, descends into the underground, and voyages through the hours of the night, before rising again at dawn. The deceased pharaoh follows a similar path. He passes twelve gates, each guarded by a god, before having his heart weighed against the Feather of Truth. If deemed guilty, the pharaoh’s heart is consumed by a crocodile-headed god; if deemed innocent, the pharaoh is resurrected, like Amen-Re. The collective versions of this story are called
The Book of the Dead
.

“As you see, it’s the perfect book,” Basem said inside the tomb of Seti I. “On one wall is the text, on the other the pictures. It even begins with a cover photo, an oversized picture of the pharaoh.”

Actually it’s more like a scroll, and after hours wandering from tomb to tomb, looking at painting after painting in a Freudian display of nocturnal intrigue, I began to realize that nighttime was perhaps even more important than daytime in the Egyptian imagination. This would help explain the fascination with prophecy, magic, and life after death. This would help explain the importance of dreams. And most of all, this would help explain the story of Joseph.

By all accounts, the tale of Joseph, which picks up after the rape of Dinah and occupies the last thirteen chapters of Genesis, is the most unified story in the Hebrew Bible, a novella of perfect proportions. As scholar Nahum Sarna has written:“There is an unparalleled continuity of narrative set forth with the consummate skill of a master story-teller who employs to the full the novelistic techniques of character delineation, psychological treatment, the play upon the emotions and the cultivation of suspense.” By equal consensus, the story owes a clear debt to the darker dimensions of Egyptian life.

Joseph is the eleventh of Jacob’s twelve sons, and the first by his favorite wife, Rachel. At seventeen, Joseph tends flocks in central Canaan with his brothers, and brings bad reports of them to his father. Because Joseph is the child of his father’s old age, the text says, Jacob favors Joseph and gives him what some translations call an “ornamented tunic,” and others a “coat of many colors” (the exact meaning is unclear). This gesture infuriates his brothers. Joseph then riles them further by relating two dreams in which his brothers, represented first by wheat, then by stars, bow down to him. “Do you mean to reign over us?” they ask. In retaliation, the brothers decide to slay him.

One day Joseph follows his brothers to the town of Dothan, north of Shechem in the Galilee, and they announce, “Here comes that dreamer! Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits, and we can say, ‘A savage beast devoured him.’ We shall see what comes of his dreams.” At the last minute, Reuben, Leah’s oldest son, intervenes. “Shed no blood!” Reuben declares. “Cast Joseph into the pit out in the wilderness, but do not touch him yourselves.” At that moment a caravan of Ishmaelites, or Midianites, a people from across the Jordan descended from the brothers’ great-uncle Ishmael,
pass by bearing goods for Egypt. Judah, another of Leah’s sons, announces: “What do we gain by killing our brother and covering up his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites.” After all, Joseph is our brother, Judah says, “our own flesh.” The brothers agree, and they sell Joseph to the tribe for twenty shekels, an amount consistent with contemporaneous accounts of foreigners being sold into Egypt. The brothers then take Joseph’s coat, dip it into blood from a slaughtered kid, and have it carried to their father. “Please examine this,” they say. Jacob recognizes the coat and wails, “My son’s tunic! A savage beast devoured him!” He rends his clothes, puts sackcloth on his loins, and mourns for many days. His children try to comfort him, but Jacob refuses.

Joseph, meanwhile, arrives in Egypt and is sold as a servant to the house of Potiphor, a courtier of the pharaoh and his chief steward. God stays with Joseph during this time, the text says, and Joseph rises to become head of the household. Described as being “well built and handsome,” Joseph rejects repeated advances from Potiphor’s wife. One day she grabs him by the coat and says, “Lie with me!” But in an echo of the story of his brothers, he leaves his coat behind and flees. She takes the coat and says to her husband, “The Hebrew slave whom you brought into our house came to dally with me; but when I screamed at the top of my voice, he left his coat with me and fled outside.”

Potiphor promptly throws Joseph into prison, but God stays with Joseph, the text says, and assures that the chief jailer is kind to him. While in prison, Joseph hears that two of his fellow prisoners, a cupbearer and a baker, have had dreams that they cannot interpret. “Surely God can interpret!” Joseph says. “Pray tell me your dreams.” The cupbearer’s dream involves three branches that bud into grapes, which then get pressed into the pharaoh’s cup. Joseph says the dream means that in three days the cupbearer will be pardoned. The baker’s dream involves three open baskets of food, which birds pick clean. Joseph says the dream means that in three days pharaoh will behead the baker and birds will pick his body clean. In three days, the pharaoh’s birthday, both dreams come true.

Two years later, the pharaoh has a dream that out of the Nile emerge seven cows, handsome and sturdy, that graze on the land. They
are followed by seven more cows, ugly and gaunt, that eat the earlier set of cows. He has another dream in which seven ears of grain, solid and healthy, grow on a single stalk. They are followed by seven ears, thin and scorched, which swallow up the seven solid ears. None of the pharaoh’s messengers can interpret his dreams, so the cupbearer recommends Joseph, who’s still in prison. The pharaoh sends for Joseph and asks him to interpret the dreams. “Not I!” Joseph says. “God will see to Pharaoh’s welfare.” The dreams are one and the same, Joseph declares. “Immediately ahead are seven years of great abundance in all the land of Egypt. After them will come seven years of famine, and all the abundance in the land of Egypt will be forgotten.” As for why the pharaoh has the dream twice, “It means that the matter has been determined by God.”

Joseph further recommends that the pharaoh take steps to preserve food from the seven fat years to use during the seven lean years. The plan pleases the pharaoh, and he asks Joseph to organize the effort. “You shall be in charge of my court,” the pharaoh says. “Only with respect to the throne will I be superior to you.” Removing the signet from his hand, the pharaoh puts it on Joseph’s hand, and dresses him in linen robes, yet another important coat in Joseph’s life.

According to scholars, foreigners did, on occasion, become prime minister of Egypt. Also, the swearing-in ceremony, during which Joseph receives the ring and robes, is well known from art during the New Kingdom. As for interpreting dreams, it was a highly coveted skill, usually performed by priests. As Basem explained, “They might have been magicians; we don’t know. What we do know is they used books of interpretations. If you looked into a mirror, this meant you’d have a second wife. If you looked out a window, this meant you’d prosper in the afterlife. If you went to a certain city, this meant you were going to die.” In a further sign of accuracy, the word the Bible uses for interpreters is Egyptian in origin, as are other details, like the use of cows, which were not common in Palestine. Ultimately, these uncannily accurate details of daily life—perhaps unknowable to later scribes—suggest that the story of Joseph, like those of his forefathers, began as an oral tradition, with deep roots in the Nile.

As if to reinforce that connection, the story soon brings Jacob’s brothers
into Egypt. The famine that Joseph predicted forces ten of his brothers to seek relief in Egypt, where they unknowingly appear before their brother. Joseph recognizes them and, in a gesture that seems part a retaliation and part a test, accuses them of being spies. He insists they leave one brother behind and return with Jacob’s missing eleventh brother, Benjamin, whose mother is also Rachel. They do so and Joseph appears to honor them with a banquet, at which point he falsely accuses Benjamin of stealing a goblet. Judah begins to apologize until Joseph cuts him off, reveals himself at last to his brothers, and forgives them. “Do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither,” Joseph says. “It was to save life that God sent me ahead of you.” The brothers then bring their father, Jacob, to Egypt and the pharaoh invites them to live on his best land, in Goshen, part of the fertile Nile Delta north of Cairo. As further proof of the good relations the Israelites enjoy with Egypt, Jacob is mummified when he dies. The task takes forty days, as it would for a nobleman, but he is mourned for seventy days, as if he were a king.