Pharaoh’s Willing Executioners (פרשת שמות)

In Parshat Shemot (פרשת שמות), we read that after the death of Joseph and his generation, “the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew very vast, and the land was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7). As Bible translator Robert Alter notes, these terms (including the Hebrew word for land, ארץ, which also means earth) allude to the Creation story. In a fulfillment of God’s covenantal promise that Abraham will become “a great and mighty nation” (Genesis 18:18), Alter writes, “the Hebrews now exhibit the teeming fecundity of the natural world.”

It is precisely this teeming fecundity that so alarms Pharaoh:

And a new king arose over Egypt who knew not Joseph. And he said to his people, “Look, the people of the sons of Israel is more numerous and vaster than we. Come, let us be shrewd with them lest they multiply and then, should war occur, they will actually join our enemies and fight against us and go up from the land.”
(Exodus 1:8-10)

There is some debate about whether the words רַב וְעָצוּם מִמֶּנּוּ should be translated as more numerous and stronger than us, as Alter does, or too many and too strong for us, as Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, the 1917 JPS translation of the Bible, and Nehama Leibowitz do. The difference, it seems to me, is immaterial. Regardless of how we understand this phrase, Pharaoh’s antagonism toward the Jews clearly stems from a perceived demographic threat and from a perception of Jewish power.

Pharaoh’s paranoid fears find contemporary echoes in the slogan “Jews Will Not Replace Us” that far-right extremists chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. As the Anti-Defamation League explains: “The slogan is a reference to the popular white supremacist belief that the white race is in danger of extinction by a rising tide of non-whites who are controlled and manipulated by Jews.” This extremist “replacement theory” has fueled murderous acts of hatred around the world, including mass shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand in 2019.

Motivated by a similar conspiratorial belief, Pharaoh implemented a three-stage policy: first, he imposed a special tax on the Jews in the form of a corvée (forced labor); second, he directed the Jewish midwives Shifrah and Puah to kill all Jewish boys at birth; and third, when the midwives courageously foil his plan, “Pharaoh charged his whole people, saying, ‘Every boy that is born you shall fling into the Nile, and every girl you shall let live’” (Exodus 1:22).

Why does Pharaoh need to “be shrewd”? He was the most powerful ruler in the ancient world. Why not declare open war on the Jews from the outset and destroy them immediately? Summarizing Nachmanides, Leibowitz suggests three reasons: first, Pharaoh needed a pretext to ruthlessly exterminate an entire people, especially one that came to Egypt at the bidding of his predecessor; second, his own subjects would not agree; and third, it would have meant risking an unnecessary confrontation with a strong people. For these reasons, Nachmanides argued, Pharaoh shrewdly formulated his three-stage policy.

Leibowitz writes: “The originality of Ramban’s interpretation lies in his explanation of this command [to kill every male Jewish child]. The text states that Pharaoh commanded ‘all his people’ rather than ‘his princes and servants.’ This was not therefore an official royal edict, but behind-the-scenes provocation. The government gave no order but merely closed its eyes whilst the Egyptian masses ‘spontaneously’ vented their indignation on the foreigners.” Today, too, powerful leaders close their eyes to nativism and xenophobia. But there is a problem with Leibowitz’s interpretation. How do we square it with her earlier suggestion that Pharaoh’s own subjects would not agree to genocide? “He could not suddenly order the indiscriminate slaughter of persons,” she writes, “who had been good neighbors for so long.” (Leibowitz is probably thinking here of Exodus 3:22.)

So what was the provocation that induced Pharaoh’s people to become his willing executioners—so willing that (according to Nachmanides) they searched Jewish homes to take children from there, and things eventually got so out of hand that Pharaoh had to suspend the decree? Perhaps it was Pharaoh’s propaganda depicting them as lazy idlers (Exodus 5:17), but that hardly seems sufficient. Nor can it be the resistance of Shifrah and Puah because Pharaoh arranges things so that he cannot be implicated in the actions he commands them to do. (“Who,” Leibowitz asks, “would be able or dare to point an accusing finger at Pharaoh?”) The answer, I suspect, lies in Joseph’s actions in Parshat Vayigash (Genesis 44:18 - 47:27). In that portion, Egypt’s peasants offered their land and themselves for some of the grain that Joseph had the foresight to stockpile. Joseph accepts, and they consequently become a class of landless, enslaved sharecroppers for Pharaoh. The peasants, we read there, are grateful to be kept alive. But, as I have written elsewhere, it seems likely that their gratitude would eventually turn to resentment, directed not at Pharaoh but at Joseph and his people. A new king in Egypt could easily exploit such resentment.

The Figure of Shiloh: Reading Vayechi with Thomas Mann (פרשת ויחי)

This week’s Torah portion, Parshat Vayechi (פרשת ויחי, Genesis 47:28–50:26), includes Jacob’s deathbed blessings for his twelve sons (and his two grandsons, Manasseh and Ephraim, whom Jacob raises to the status of his own sons).

Translator Robert Alter notes that Jacob’s blessings, which take the form of a long poem, comprise “one of the oldest extended texts in the Bible.” He points out that “the antiquity of the poem, as well as the fact that it may be a collage of fragments, means that there are words, phrases, and occasionally whole clauses that are not very well understood. Sometimes this is because of the use of a rare, presumably archaic, term, though there are also at least a few points where the received text looks defective.”

This may be frustrating for the translator, who (says Alter) “can do no more than make an educated guess,” but it provides a splendid opportunity for imaginative and poignant retellings of the scene like that in Thomas Mann’s novel Joseph und seine Brüder. Among other embellishments, Mann suggests that “astronomical meanings and allusions were repeatedly mixed in with Jacob’s message to his sons.” He identifies Jacob’s twelve sons with the twelve signs of the zodiac. Reuben (“unsteady as water,” Genesis 49:4) is associated with Aquarius, Shimeon and Levi with Gemini (the twins), Judah with Leo, etc.

Furthermore, Mann places a significant figure from Judah’s past—one whom this Torah portion does not mention—at the deathbed scene. That person is Judah’s daughter-in-law Tamar. In Parshat Vayeshev (פרשת וישב, Genesis 37:1–40:23), Tamar’s husband dies, and she is therefore given in levirate marriage to Judah’s second son Onan (Genesis 38:7–8). Onan refuses to impregnate her (he instead “waste[s] his seed on the ground”) and also dies (Genesis 38:9–10). Perhaps understandably given this string of misfortunes, Judah does not marry Tamar off to his third son. But Tamar, determined to have a child from Judah’s family, disguises herself as a prostitute and sleeps with her father-in-law, Judah himself (Genesis 38:12–23). When Judah learns that she is pregnant, he initially orders her to be executed for whoring but then changes his mind when she confronts him with evidence that he is the father. Tamar then gives birth to twin sons, Peretz (identified in Ruth 4:18–22 as an ancestor of King David) and Zerach (Genesis 38:27–30). Parshat Vayeshev is the last that we hear about Tamar in the Torah. But in Mann’s retelling, Tamar is present with the crowd that gathers outside of Jacob’s tent:

The setting sun outlined figures in the crowd outside against the orange hues of an evening sky, making shadows of them, so that it was not easy to discern individual faces. But the opposing light from the two oil lamps flickering on high stands at the foot and head of the deathbed allows us to distinguish very clearly one arresting figure out there: a gaunt matron in black, standing between two strikingly broad-shouldered men, her gray hair covered by a veil. Without a doubt it was Tamar, that resolute woman, with her manly sons.

Tamar is waiting to hear if “Jacob’s dying words might also happen to mention Judah’s sin with her.” Do they? Jacob first elevates Judah over his brothers—including, pointedly, the firstborn Reuben, who, by sleeping with his father’s concubine, made claim to the patriarch’s authority many years earlier (Genesis 35:22)—and compares Judah to a lion. The next part of the blessing (Genesis 49:10) is a bit cryptic. Below is the original Hebrew followed by Robert Alter’s translation and then a different translation given in the Artscroll Sapirstein edition of the Torah with Rashi’s commentary:

 לֹא-יָסוּר שֵׁבֶט מִיהוּדָה, וּמְחֹקֵק מִבֵּין רַגְלָיו, עַד כִּי-יָבֹא שִׁילֹה, וְלוֹ יִקְּהַת עַמִּים

The scepter shall not pass from Judah,
nor the mace from between his legs,
that tribute to him may come
and to him the submission of peoples.

The rod shall not depart from Judah nor a lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh arrives and his will be an assemblage of nations.

What’s going on here? Alter explains that the italicized words can be interpreted in different ways: “The Masoretic Text [the authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible] seems to read ‘until he comes to Shiloh,’ a dark phrase that has inspired much messianic interpretation.” Rashi, citing the authority of Targum Onkelos (a Jewish translation of the Torah into Aramaic from the early second century of the Common Era), explains that Shiloh does not refer here to the biblical city but is instead a title or name for the moshiach (messiah). But Alter’s translation follows an alternative exegetical tradition that “goes back to the Middle Ages, which breaks up the word ‘Shiloh’ [שילה] and vocalizes it differently as shai lo [tribute to him, שי לו].”

Mann clearly opts for Rashi’s interpretation. Jacob “heaped blame on those [Shimeon and Levi] he chose not to bless for their attachment to instruments of violence” (cf. Genesis 49:5–7). How peculiar then that he would praise Judah as a lion, a bloodthirsty beast of prey. “And yet in blessing Judah,” Mann insists, “Jacob intended no such brutal heroics.” Mann suggests that Shiloh, not Judah, is the real “hero” at whom Jacob’s blessing is aimed. In Mann’s retelling, this “name of promise” was “something totally new” to Judah and came as a “surprise to the entire assembly.” “Only one person among them all already knew of it and had been waiting eagerly to hear it. We cannot help casting a glance outside [Jacob’s tent] to the outline of her shadow—there she stood very erect, in darkling pride, as Jacob proclaimed this woman’s seed.” This woman is, of course, Tamar. Christians see Shiloh as a reference to Jesus, and Mann hints at this interpretation. From Judah, he writes, “would come the one to whom all peoples would be obedient, the bringer of peace, the man of the star.”

Jacob’s blessing for Judah continues. Here again is Robert Alter’s translation of the biblical text:

He binds to the vine his ass,
to the grape-bough his ass’s foal.
He washes in wine his garment,
in the blood of the grape his cloak.
O eyes that are darker than wine,
and teeth that are whiter than milk!
(Genesis 49:11)

Abraham ibn Ezra explains that the yield of Judah’s vineyards will be “so abundant that his ass can turn aside to the vine and he won’t care if it eats the grapes.” Alter adds: “This explanation jibes nicely with the next image of washing garments in wine—the wine will be so plentiful that it can be treated as water.” Mann picks up on this imagery and does something clever and surprising with it. Judah, or rather his tribe, was so “blended and merged” in Jacob’s blessing with “the figure of Shiloh” that “when it came to the vision of the fullness of blessing and grace to which Jacob now devoted himself, no one could say whether his words concerned Judah or this man of promise.”

It all swam in wine—sparkling wine turned everything red before the listeners’ eyes. It was a land, this king’s kingdom, a land where someone bound his animal to the vine and his ass’s colt to the choice vine. Were these vineyards of Hebron, the wine-clad hills of Engedi? Into his city “he” rode on an ass and upon the foal of a she-ass, a beast of burden. There was nothing but the drunken delight of red wine at the sight of him, and he himself was like a drunken god of wine stomping in the winepress, holding skirts high in exultation—the blood of the wine drenched his apron and the red juice of the grape his garments. How beautiful he was wading there, dancing the dance of the winepress—more beautiful and than any other man, white as snow, red as blood, black as ebony…

Mann’s reference to the “someone” who rides an ass into his city may bring to mind Jesus entering Jerusalem, but he instead identifies Judah/Shiloh with Dionysius, the “drunken god of wine.” So, if Mann gives Jacob’s blessing for Judah a Christian interpretation, it is not exclusively Christian. In addition to Mann’s identification of Judah with the astrological sign Leo, the last part of Jacob’s blessing allows Mann to invoke another element of pagan mythology. In Mann’s retelling, Judah and his messianic seed appear as a confused amalgam, all swimming in wine, of Christian and pagan mythology alike.