There is something haunting about the fact that Joseph gets a name while she remains “Potiphar’s wife.” Joseph will eventually receive a new identity in Egypt, but she remains attached to someone else's name.
That makes her an intriguing counterpoint to Joseph and perhaps even to Sarai, whose identity eventually changes to Sarah. She shows how we, as humans, struggle to see each other as beloved children of God.
Genesis repeatedly asks who gets to name us, who gets to tell our story, and whether the identity imposed on us is the identity we finally inhabit. Zuleika is the traditional name given her in later Islamic and Persian literature, but she is also unnamed in the Qur'an.
We can ask about perspective: who is telling her story? Before we reduce someone to the role they were told they played in a particular tale, perhaps we should remember that they were living a story of their own.
Joseph is carried away from his family and becomes a stranger in Egypt. He does not choose his displacement. Yet Genesis repeatedly tells us that “the LORD was with Joseph.” That phrase becomes almost startling when Joseph is falsely accused and imprisoned. Given the importance of names, the capitalization means God's proper name Yahweh is being used in this passage.
If God's presence is measured by comfort or success, Joseph's circumstances would seem to suggest that God has disappeared. But Genesis tells us precisely the opposite. God is with Joseph in the prison as surely as God was with Joseph in Potiphar's house.
Matthew's Jesus takes this even further: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” Jesus does not promise that faithfulness will protect us from rejection or misunderstanding. He seems to know that sometimes the consequence of remaining faithful is becoming an outsider.
Ishmaelites are referenced. The biblical Ishmael is an outsider: Abraham's son, but not Sarah's; part of the family, yet eventually sent away. His story is about survival, wilderness, and displacement. Yet Genesis does not portray God as indifferent. God hears the boy crying in the wilderness. Hagar discovers a God who sees. The outsider is not invisible to God. Once again the question comes: who finally tells his particular story and its details?
That makes Melville's choice of the name Ishmael for the narrator of Moby-Dick especially poignant. Ishmael begins as a wanderer who goes to sea because he feels alienated from ordinary life. He becomes an observer among outsiders, Queequeg, Pip, Tashtego, Daggoo, Fedallah, and others occupy different places at the edges of conventional society. And when the Pequod is destroyed, Ishmael survives.
He becomes the one who remains to tell the story. That gives us another way of hearing the Joseph and Zuleika story. Joseph does not know, while sitting in prison, how this story will end. He cannot see the larger pattern. He only knows the circumstances immediately around him. He has been faithful, yet he has been misunderstood. He has done what is right, yet he has suffered for it.
Ishmael likewise does not know that he will survive the Pequod's destruction. He cannot know, as the ship goes down, that he will someday be the voice telling us what happened.
Perhaps this is one of the great spiritual lessons hidden in these stories: We do not have to know the ending in order to live faithfully in the middle. That is particularly difficult when we feel displaced, misunderstood, or separated from the life we once knew. We naturally want an explanation. We want to know why this happened, where it is going, and when it will end.
But Joseph's story doesn't give Joseph that knowledge in the prison. Jesus doesn't promise his disciples that persecution will make sense immediately.Ishmael doesn't know he is the survivor while he is fighting to stay alive. They simply keep going.
And perhaps that is where the word “blessed' in Matthew becomes more mysterious. Blessed does not necessarily mean comfortable. It doesn't mean everything is going well. It may mean that even when circumstances tell us we are abandoned,
Joseph's gift is real. His faithfulness is real. But notice that his extraordinary ability to serve those in power is itself part of the story. He doesn't merely survive Egypt; he becomes remarkably effective within its structures of power. So when we read: “The LORD was with Joseph” we shouldn't reduce that to Joseph was morally perfect and therefore God rewarded him.
The biblical story is stranger than that. We are not abandoned. The outsider can still be held. The falsely accused can still possess integrity. The person in the wilderness can still be seen. The survivor can still tell the story.
Ishmael's identity is also liberating. He doesn't begin the novel by explaining himself. He says simply, “Call me Ishmael.” He gives us a name without fully explaining who he is.
Perhaps we can learn something from that, too. There are seasons when we cannot explain ourselves completely. We may be changing. We may be discovering something about ourselves that we didn't understand before. We may be walking through circumstances that have disrupted the story we thought we were living.
We don't have to have the whole explanation. We can simply say: This is where I am. This is who I am becoming. This is the road I am walking. And perhaps God meets us there.
Joseph's prison, Ishmael's wilderness, and Jesus' persecuted disciples all remind us that the margins are not places where God ceases to work. Sometimes they become the very places where we discover God's presence most profoundly. Joseph remains faithful in the prison and Ishmael survives the wreck.
Jesus tells his disciples to “rejoice and be glad.” Not because suffering is good. Not because rejection doesn't hurt. Not because the future is guaranteed to unfold as we wish. Rather, suffering, exclusion, misunderstanding, and even apparent defeat do not necessarily have the final word.
We may not get to choose whether we become outsiders. We may not get to choose the wilderness. We may not get to choose the storm. But we can choose how we inhabit those places.
We can remain open, keep listening for the voice of God, and we can keep walking even when we cannot yet see where the road leads. Sometimes faith is not knowing that we will survive. Sometimes faith is simply continuing to live faithfully enough that, if we do survive, we will still have a story worth telling.
The group relishes Wednesday discussions because we imagine Biblical characters as human, not as set-apart moral heroes. We can glimpse Genesis's larger patterns.
ReplyDeleteI see the Joseph story growing out of the earlier stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, and Jacob's sons. The recurring wound is the desire for the father's blessing and the resentment that someone else possesses it.
In our discussion of the wife's grabbing Joseph's cloak, this outer garment resonates with the coat of many colors. Joseph's coat makes that preference visible, so that Joseph literally carries his father's favoritism with him into danger.
This makes Genesis 39 much more poignant with the refrain "The LORD was with Joseph." The striking thing is that God's blessing has not meant getting Joseph out of trouble.It means God's presence accompanies him through trouble. This is John Lewis's "good trouble, necessary trouble" : to challenge injustice, stand up for others, and push society toward greater justice, even when doing so creates discomfort or opposition.
I really understood Melville's "Call me Ishmael" opening. Ishmael is the son who is sent away. Joseph is the son who is sold away. Both become figures whose lives are shaped by God, and both encounter God in circumstances in which ordinary measures of blessing would say they have been abandoned.
“God remains at work among people who have been displaced, diminished, sold, expelled, or overlooked.”
Melville begins his enormous novel with a simple line: “Call me Ishmael.” That is an extraordinary opening. The narrator doesn't tell us who he really is. He gives us a name, one that immediately places him in relation to the biblical Ishmael. Melville's Ishmael is also an outsider.
He is wandering. He is dissatisfied with ordinary society. He goes to sea. He finds himself among people radically unlike himself. He enters a world where categories of race, nationality, religion, class, and identity are constantly unsettled.
And, most importantly, he survives to tell the story.
The discussion pushed the blog's suggestion into new territory..