His Father’s Countenance

 

In this week’s reading, Jacob, near death, assembles his sons to give them his final words. These are commonly known as “Jacob’s blessings,” but in fact Jacob has some harsh things to say to some of his sons. He reminds Reuben of his great sin with Bilhah—he will not, Jacob says, receive the usual perquisites due to a firstborn son—and Jacob further reproves Simeon and Levi for their violent tempers. But two other sons are singled out for special praise: Judah, whose descendants, starting with King David, will be granted the hereditary kingship, and Joseph. What did Joseph do that was so good?

 

The Torah had earlier related how, when Joseph was a slave in Egypt, he had resisted the temptations of his master’s wife. She kept trying to wheedle him into bed, but Joseph resisted, saying that to do so would be “a sin against God.” Nevertheless, on one particular day when the house was empty, she tried to force him to cooperate, seizing his garment (presumably, a toga-like outer vestment) and commanding, “Lie with me!” Joseph, in a panic, left his garment in her hand and ran outside.

 

While Joseph’s refusal to cooperate in this adultery was certainly laudable, it was also hard to explain. After all, the wife of someone like Potiphar (Joseph’s master) must have had numerous slaves at her beck and call; normally, she could order them to do whatever she wanted. Moreover, Joseph was a young man, in the prime of life; how could he say no?

 

Various midrashic sources maintain that Joseph was indeed tempted to obey, but that, just at the crucial moment, he had a sudden vision of his father’s face. “He saw his father’s countenance,” Genesis Rabba reports in the name of Rabbi  Matna, “and his desire departed.” The Jerusalem Talmud similarly reports, “He stared intently and saw the countenance of his father and thereby cooled his passion.”

 

Normally, midrashic explanations are rooted in a particular verse or phrase in the biblical text. In the case of Joseph seeing Jacob’s countenance, the verse in question comes in this week’s Torah reading. Jacob, having praised the conduct of his son Joseph, somewhat mysteriously adds the words, “thence the shepherd, the rock of Israel” (Gen 49:24). If anything, this sounds like a reference to God. But wait!

 

The word for shepherd in Hebrew is ro‘eh. The second syllable of this word starts with the letter ‘ayin, but in rabbinic times (as nowadays), that letter is easily mispronounced as an aleph. If so, the Torah could sound as if it were saying not “thence the shepherd,” but “thence he sees” or “he saw.”

 

As to what Joseph saw, it is noteworthy that in the midrashic sources, it was not just his father’s face that Joseph saw, but a somewhat fancier term, his father’s countenance. The Mishnaic Hebrew word for countenance is iqonin (or the variant, diaqon[in]) a loan-word going back to the Greek eikōn. This is our word “icon,” and in Greek it originally meant a likeness or portrait—frequently, a stone carving of the head and shoulders of some important person. Thus, in the midrashic explanation, what Joseph saw—apparently in some sort of vision—was an icon-like portrait of Jacob etched in stone, “the rock of Israel” (Israel being Jacob’s other name).

 

Taking the Torah’s words literally, it might seem that Jacob was referring in some way to God, “the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel.” But the midrashic reading offers a somewhat more down-to-earth (one might say: a more concrete) explanation: Joseph caught a sudden, visionary glimpse of his father’s stony countenance and, recalling all that Jacob had taught him, left his garment and ran outside.

 

Shabbat shalom!