Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, April 21, 1999

Date and Origins

Though there are versions in Syriac, Slavonic, Armenian, Latin and in middle English, probably translated from the Latin, a total of 80 manuscripts in all, Joseph and Aseneth is said to have been composed in Greek. But its assumed familiarity with the biblical setting and characters shows it was written for Jews or Christians and P Riessler had no doubt that it was originally written in Hebrew because of its strongly scriptural feel.

The Old Testament feel partly derives from the expressions used, which seem indebted to the Septuagint Greek Old Testament. This might be evidence it was written in Greek but, if it had been translated, it would have been translated by a Greek Christian who saw value in it as a devotional aid. Granted this purpose, the translator would not have given a free translation or left it as a simple verbatim translation. He will have used the Septuagint both to replace Aramaic phrases recognisably from the scriptures and to cast the work in a familiar form, so the dependence of the work on the Septuagint is no guarantee that book was originally Greek. It simply proves that the translator was not a dunce.

The earliest version of it is a Syriac (Christian) version of the mid sixth century AD. This version gives the title as The History of Joseph, the Just, and Aseneth his Wife, though really the focus of the tale is the wife rather than Joseph.

Joseph and Aseneth is of a form found in both Jewish and non-Jewish literature. Batiffol recognised in 1889 when he published the first critical edition of Joseph and Aseneth, that the characters in the story were symbolic, not natural people. He first thought it was a Christian work, dated in the 4th-5th centuries, but eight years later changed his mind writing that it was a first century Jewish work, redacted by Christians whose interpolations were plain to see. K Kohler in 1902 thought there was only one minor Christian interpolation, the work otherwise being typically Jewish.

Twentieth century scholars tended to concur and Gideon Bohak and Hagith Sivan go so far as to date it in the first century BC, but among others Ross Kraemer, recently reverted to the idea of a late date and Christian authorship. Yet, it is a strange Christian work that has no obvious saviour and indeed in which redemption is achieved voluntarily by the penitent herself, and where there is no intitiation of baptism and no mention of love, faith or church. Furthermore there is nothing in it suggestive of the use of the New Testament, despite its supposedly late date. It looks like more Christian log-rolling scholarship. Christian scholars can roll their logs indefinitely!

There seem to be two main recensions, a short recension and a long recension. Battifol thought the long recension was earlier than the short recension. C Burchard agrees that the longer version of Joseph and Aseneth is closer to the original one, and the shorter one is an abridgement. More accurately, he divided the 16 Greek manuscripts into four families labelled for convenience of reference a, b, c and d. He considered family b to be the oldest, though not the shortest, and family a comprised the longest and latest redactions. Both c and d were shorter than b but betrayed themselves as later by stylistic refinements that placed them alongside family a. The Syriac, Armenian and the two Latin texts match family b.

Marc Philonenko preferred the short version d as the original, and Kraemer agrees. Philonenko puts d as earlier than b, arguing that later versions are elaborations of d, yet his arguments fail because he has to concede that in places d is abbreviated and he has to look into b to find the omission. In scholarship you cannot eat your cookie and keep it also. If d in parts is plainly abbreviated from b, then d cannot have preceded b!

A translation of the Philonenko version d is available online, courtesy of Oxford University Press at Dr Mark Goodacre’s Birmingham University site. Since there seems to be no version of the longer manuscript online, this is the version discussed here, though reference will be made to the longer recension when commentators have cited it.

An Essene Work?

The use of the title, the Just, for Joseph might suggest an Essene origin. P Reissler long before the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered declared Joseph and Aseneth as Essene. Modern Christian scholars pooh-pooh the idea that the work is Essene because they are desperate to disassociate Christian origins from the Essenes who, to any objective observer, had so many affinities with the Nazarenes that a close link, even if not identity, can be safely supposed.

The point here is that, though Joseph and Aseneth is not Christian, Christians identified with it so much that they adopted it as their own. Yet the work was first century Jewish. If its source can be placed somewhere obviously not associated with Christianity or left as a mystery, then that is fine for the Christians, but to trace it to the Essenes adds credence to the link between Essenes and Christians in first century Judaea.

Aseneth’s prayer:

I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned. I have transgressed thy law and acted impiously, And I have spoken things evil before thee. My mouth, O Lord, has been defiled by things offered to idols… And do thou, O Lord, stretch forth thy hands over me, As a father that loves his children and is tenderly affectionate, And snatch me from the hand of my enemy,

is considered closely akin to the confession of the initiates in the Community Rule:

We have strayed. We Have transgressed. We and our fathers before us have sinned and been wicked in walking against the precepts of truth and righteousness. And for this reason God has judged both us and our fathers, but he has requited us with the lovingkindness of his mercy from eternity to eternity.

The similarity is marked, though not in itself in any way conclusive, but there are other links. The disclosure that there are heavenly secrets, the importance of white robes, praying at dawn to the rising sun, the exaltation of virginity and the repeated mention of the bread and cup, hinting at a sacred repast akin to the Christian Eucharist, all plainly suggest a link to the Essenes or some related organisation. The repetition of formulaic introductions such as ”it is not proper for a man who worships God to…” is typically Essene and so is what they lay down because they amount to rules of living.

G D Kilpatrick in 1952 saw in the repetition of the bread and cup in Joseph and Aseneth some sort of ritual meal, partaken of by first century Jews, other than the Seder. The references to the bread and cup could not have been Christian, unless the whole work was Christian, because they are so closely integrated into its fabric. Kilpatrick detected no Christian additions.

The fact that Joseph and Aseneth is unknown until the sixth century cannot be taken as anything other than the merest suggestion of a late authorship. If the work was peculiar to a group like the Essenes who were rejected by Rabbinism and died out, there is no compelling reason why it should have been mentioned. Nothing was known about the Damascus Rule of the Essenes until the end of the nineteenth century, yet it had obviously been in continuous use among the Qaraites for over a millennium. It is quite possible that the source of Joseph and Aseneth was the Qaraites who concentrated in Mesopotamia. More ought to be done on the Syriac and Armenian ones because they might be able to confirm a Qaraite vehicle of transmission, especially as the Syriac version was actually found in Mesopotamia.

It seems unlikely that the original has not been altered by overworking and interpolation, whether the redacters were Christians or Jews. Indeed, the second part looks to have been added. Joseph and Aseneth is regarded as a pseudepigraph but it does not appear in the material at Qumran, suggesting a later origin, although there is no guarantee that all the Qumran material is known. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, parts of which have now been identified in the Dead Sea Scrolls was already known in a form modified by Christians. Joseph and Aseneth might be similarly a Jewish work modified by Christian overworking.

Story Outline

The plot has all the hallmarks of a women’s romantic novel but is punctuated with prayers of a poetic form that could have been liturgies. Set during the seven years of plenty in Egypt before the seven years of famine (Gen 41), Joseph and Aseneth is the story of a beautiful heroine, Aseneth, vowed to chastity, who falls in love with a handsome governor, Joseph (son of the Jewish Patriarch, Jacob) when he visits her father on official duties. He cannot accept her because of the difference in their religions, he being an Hebrew and she being the Egyptian daughter of Pentephres (Potiphera), the priest of On. The romance seems to be an explanation of how Joseph came to marry a gentile.

The plot supposedly takes up from the point in the bible when Joseph has explained the Pharaoh’s dreams and been rewarded by being made Egyptian governor. At this point in Genesis, Aseneth is briefly introduced, being mentioned three times—in Genesis 41 and 46:

And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I am Pharaoh, and without thee shall no man lift up his hand or foot in all the land of Egypt. And Pharaoh called Joseph’s name Zaphnathpaaneah; and he gave him to wife Aseneth the daughter of Potipherah priest of On. And Joseph went out over all the land of Egypt. And Joseph was thirty years old when he stood before Pharaoh king of Egypt. And Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh, and went throughout all the land of Egypt.

And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls. And he gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. And Joseph gathered corn as the sand of the sea, very much, until he left numbering; for it was without number. And unto Joseph were born two sons before the years of famine came, which Aseneth the daughter of Potipherah priest of On bare unto him. And Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh: For God, said he, hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father’s house. And the name of the second called he Ephraim: For God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction.

And unto Joseph in the land of Egypt were born Manasseh and Ephraim, which Aseneth the daughter of Potipherah priest of On bare unto him.

The puzzle is that Joseph accepted the pagan woman as his wife when only a few verses earlier he had rather be jailed than liaise with another Potiphera’s wife. In fact, the double occurrence of the name Potiphera, once as Pharaoh’s executioner and then as the priest of On, each connected with a woman and sexual offerings to Joseph, is suspicious. It cries out that the original legend has been altered, most likely by the second temple priesthood when they re-wrote Israelite mythology to suit themselves. In this story, Aseneth takes Joseph to be an adulterer, and this was probably the original tradition.

The story is normally seen as an allegory of conversion to Judaism. Ostensibly, it is about Aseneth’s conversion from the worship of idols to the worship of the god of Joseph. The Egyptian woman so loves the man of her desires that she decides to convert to his religion so that he had no reason of religious difference to reject her as a bride. In her determination to be acceptable to him, she throws her idols out of the window, secludes herself in her tower and repents in sackcloth and ashes, confessing her sins and praying to the god of Joseph. A heavenly Joseph appears and announces to her that her prayer has been heard and that she is now a new creation. The divine being shares a meal with her, magically produces a honeycomb from which bees emerge and tells her about her heavenly self, Repentance. She renounces her past and is transformed into ”a city of refuge”. Aseneth, now a suitable bride for the godly Joseph, is united with him and he now accepts her. She marries him and they have two children, Ephraim and Manasseh.

Years later, still happily married, she becomes the victim of the plots of a spurned lover, Pharaoh’s son, who pursues Joseph and attempts to seize Aseneth as his wife, but Joseph’s brothers overcome him and the book ends with Joseph reigning as king over Egypt, with Aseneth at his side.

Pentephres

I. The first chapter continues from the brief biblical account, being set in the first of the years of plenty. The father of Aseneth is named as Pentephres, whereas the bible has the proper Egyptian, Potiphera. Pentephres is a name of Greek construction, and looks as if it is a clumsily Graecised version of the proper name. It is curious though that Pentephres is always depicted as a wonderful man and understanding father. Aseneth is his virgin daughter, more beautiful than any other virgin in the land, a fairy tale formula proving that the characters are symbolic. Pentephres is the priest of On, the City of the Sun or Heliopolis, the main centre of worship of the sun god, Ra, and since the whole work is aimed at denigrating idolatry, it seems curious that the priest of On should be so pleasantly depicted.

Furthermore he speaks and behaves as though he were a priest of Joseph’s god rather than of the idols of the Egyptians. The “pente” part of his name suggests five and therefore the Pentateuch or Torah. One might speculate that his name “Potiphera” has been punned into something like “Pentepharos”, or the light of the law, meaning a symbolic Moses who at a later date came out of Egypt. Since the authors were familiar with Egypt, they would have known of the famous lighthouse built on the Island of Pharos in 280 BC and which must have become a symbol of light and refuge. Light was a passionate interest of the Essenes and is in Joseph and Aseneth. So, we have the strange fact that the supposed gentile woman, Aseneth, has a father who is a symbolic Moses.

But, while her father is a symbolic Moses, Aseneth is also not allowed to be an Egyptian woman. She is declared a Hebrew from the start. She is described as having the beauty of a Hebrew girl and is equated with several Hebrew women:

And she was quite unlike the daughters of the Egyptians, but in every respect like the daughters of the Hebrews. And she was as tall as Sarah, and as beautiful as Rebecca, and as fair as Rachel.

A woman who is ”in every respect like the daughters of the Hebrews” is a daughter of the Hebrews. This can mean nothing less than that Aseneth was a Hebrew by race and an Egyptian only by religion. She even speaks of the ”gods of the Egyptians” as if she were not an Egyptian herself.

None of this should really be surprising because Rabbinic traditions say that Aseneth was the daughter of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter. Hitherto, nodding scholars have used this as proof that the work was not Jewish on the grounds that Aseneth here is an Egyptian woman, despite the author using every device he could to say she was Hebrew without saying so outright. The author’s point is that she is an idolater by apostasy but Hebrew by birth. At the beginning, her deliberate and angry rejection of Joseph who stands for Yehouah, knowing him to be an upright Hebrew is the author’s device for showing that Aseneth had rejected the Hebrew religion, not merely Joseph as a Jew. Thus, she does not convert to Judaism in the story but chooses to revert to her proper religion having repented and sought forgiveness.

Plainly this also defines the author as a Jew. At the time of this book’s supposed authorship and for centuries afterwards, Jews were despised, so it is unlikely that anyone other than a Jew in a general work could have described a non-Jewish woman as being as beautiful as a Jewish woman. H Koester in 1982 recognised that Aseneth represented Jews not gentile converts as almost everyone still seems to believe.

Pharaoh’s eldest son wanted to marry her. The Pharaoh was a god, the god Horus incarnated on earth, so the eldest son was his heir and the son of God! But, for this story, he is the wrong son of God! The proper wife for this wrong son of God is the daughter of a gentile, the king of Moab. Edom and Moab are scriptural euphemisms for non-Israelites or gentiles, as they came to be called. Plainly the Egyptians are lined up alongside other gentiles in opposition to the Hebrews and the apostate Hebrew, Aseneth.

Aseneth, the Queen of Heaven

II. In the first chapter we were told: ”The fame of her beauty spread throughout all the land even to its remotest corners, ” a property that only light and air could in reality be granted. The second chapter begins by saying that no man had set eyes on Aseneth because she lived in a tower and hated all men. The contradiction is a result of the allegorical nature of the story. The point about her never having been seen by a man is doubtless to emphasise her virginal purity but also her different nature from men, she is a goddess—Aseneth lives in the sky—but she is the Goddess, Israel, and Israel is desired by all men meaning all nations on earth.

She lives at the top of a high tower. There might be an allusion to the Essenes in this because the Essenes were the Watchers and watchers require a watch tower. The ruins at Qumran originally had a watch tower.

The top storey of Aseneth’s tower had ten rooms, seven for seven attendant virgins, one contained all the gifts of the earth, one contained all her treasure, jewels and adornments and the last was a chapel to all the idols of the Egyptians, the floor being purple and the ceiling gold. The seven virgins were all born on the same date as Aseneth and were almost equally beautiful, being like the stars in heaven. Perhaps they were the stars in heaven for we discover that Aseneth’s bedroom had windows facing north and south and east but none to the west. Her golden bed faced directly toward the east window! And the bed had a coverlet of purple woven with gold, embroidered with blue. Aseneth slept alone on this bed.

It is quite plain from this description that Aseneth is the goddess, the Queen of Heaven. She is an allegorical dawn sky. The sun god, Ra, as Horus rose in the east and illuminated the sky with his golden rays. The sky brightens from the eastern horizon and appears as a golden shade in the east fading into a Tyrian purple then a darkening blue to the west. The dawn sun’s rays never reach the western horizon which remains dark so the sky goddess had no window toward the west. Furthermore, it could be said that the dark night sky approaches the dawn sun from the west, so that the goddess came from the west and needed no western window.

The form of the name, Aseneth, has echoes of the Babylonian goddess, Astarte, the Phoenician goddess, Ashtaroth, the Canaanite goddess, Anath, and the Hebrew wife of Yehouah, Asherah. The attributes of goddesses freely passed from one to another and Isis, who became the typical goddess, finished up with the characteristics of most. Aseneth is a proper Egyptian name and means ”Belonging to the Goddess Neith”, or ”Sister of Neith”, clearly implying that she stood for Neith herself or an aspect of her. The Rabbis however read it as Hebrew and translate it as meaning that Aseneth was hidden under a thorn bush.

In the Egyptian pantheon, Neith became the goddess of the eastern sky! She is thought to have entered Egypt from Libya to the west and is considered to be the same goddess as the goddess of the Athenians, Pallas Athene, the change in consonantal order being typical of a change caused by the difficulties of pronouncing an unfamiliar foreign word. Neith was the goddess of the city of Sais in Egypt and one of her emblems was the constellation of the Great Bear which had seven stars. Aseneth is served by seven virgins and has rooms in her heavenly apartment especially for them. Athena, according to Philo, was linked with the number seven, and so, of course, were the Essenes and the early Christians!

Philonenko knew that Aseneth had all the characteristics of Neith. What Philonenko does not seem to have considered is that Aseneth stands for the goddess of the Jews, though he and H Priebatsch in 1937 saw Aseneth as Sophia preserved from error by Joseph acting as the Word of God. Curiously, V Aptowitzer in 1924 identified one of the dramatis personae as Israel but it was Joseph rather than Aseneth.

Many Christians and Jews will not accept that the Jews had a goddess because, in their mythology, the Chosen People of God were monotheistic from Abraham on, except for backsliders who were, of course, not proper Jews. Honest scholars now accept that the Jews did have goddesses and that their apparent permanent monotheism was an invention of the second temple priesthood. The Jewish god, Yehouah, was always associated with his Asherah, apparently his consort and the surviving traces of this appear in Jewish tradition in different forms, one of which was Sophia.

Another was the Shekinah of God and this became the Christian, Pneuma or Holy Ghost. Another one was the personification of the Land and People of Israel as the Goddess, Israel who appears several times in the scriptures. In one notorious passage, the Israelites living in Egypt(!) prefer the Queen of Heaven to Yehouah (Jer 44:15-19). They declare unequivocally that when their fathers burnt incense and poured libations to the Queen of Heaven they were much better off than they were making offerings to Yehouah!

The chapter finishes with a description of the great court that surrounds the tower, protected by an immensely high and impassable stone wall. It had four iron gates each protected by 18 warriors (72 in all, a Jewish magic number, five of which (Torah) comes to a full circle). Every kind of fruit tree grew in the garden watered by a perpetual spring which filled a huge cistern. Here we have a description close to a Garden of Eden and close to Ezekiel’s vision of a temple with a perpetual river flowing from the alter toward the east where it gave life to all things, even the Dead Sea! Allusions to the Garden of Eden could be Christian but allusions to the temple of Ezekiel are more likely to be Jewish.

Seeing Aseneth as Neith, the goddess of the sky or the eastern sky in particular and Queen of Heaven leads us to expect other allusions of a similar nature. Aseneth’s father is the priest of On, the City devoted to the worship of Ra in all his aspects and the ennead of gods that he led. In the Torah, God has plainly the attributes of a sun god and Moses, as his hierophant, also often has the same blazing attributes.

Joseph, a Sun God

III. Joseph approaches the City but sends twelve men before him. Were these twelve men an allusion to the twelve tribes of Israel? The tribes were notionally still in the future at the date of this story and the number of twelve has solar implications anyway, so we can take twelve to have the obvious meaning—the constellations in the zodiac, the path traversed by the sun in its chariot ride through the heavens. Noon is mentioned and the heat of the sun, suggesting Ra himself, the god of the sun at noon.

Pentephres is so glad at Joseph’s arrival he blesses the god of Joseph!? Even in a romance, the priest of On can hardly be expected to bless an alien god. The god of Joseph therefore must be Ra! Whatever form Yehouah has today, plainly at this time he was seen as a Jewish Ra. Nodding scholars ignore the many signs in the Hebrew scriptures that Yehouah was a sun god before his priests discovered how he could transcend nature and appear even more mysterious and powerful. It would not do to show that the infinite and unchanging God quite plainly evolved from a traditional sky and storm god into a sun god then into a transcendental god, a standard evolutionary path for gods of the genus Transcendentus.

Aseneth dresses in the blue and gold of the dawn sky to descend from her tower to greet her parents. Her jewels are inscribed with all the gods of Egypt. In the next chapter, Aseneth’s parents tell us that this is the garb of ”the bride of god”.

IV. The daughter is greeted by her parents with all the fruits of the earth signifying the produce of a nature goddess. The priest of On wants his daughter to marry Joseph, who he describes as a virgin, a man of God, a man who worships god and a man with the grace and spirit of God on him, not distinguishing his God from the Hebrew God in any way. The proposal is that the pair should be bride and bridegroom forever. But she is insulted knowing him to be a shepherd’s son from Canaan and “a man who had intercourse with his mistress” (contradicting Joseph’s innocence in the scripture!) Aseneth seems in no doubt that Joseph was rightfully jailed. She would marry none other than “the king of all the earth”, supposedly the son of Pharaoh and therefore the son of Ra. At the time the story was written, the kings of the earth were the Roman Emperors, so this is a plain assertion of Jewish collaboration with the conquerors.

V. The arrival of Joseph is announced and Aseneth has to run up to her tower where she looks from her east facing window and sees Joseph arriving. Joseph is therefore represented as arriving from the east like the sun. The whole of the retinue of the house go out to meet Joseph, just the sort of thing the priest of the sun god would do. And like the sun, Joseph enters through the east gate in a golden chariot, pulled by four white horses with golden accountrements. Joseph himself wore a white tunic with purple and gold robes, and a golden crown bearing twelve precious stones, each with a golden ray. He also carried a sceptre and an olive branch bearing many olives. All of this is plainly and obviously identifying Joseph with the sun god, even describing the plenty that he brings. The retinue of Pentephres, bow down to the ground before Joseph, and Aseneth is the only one who is not present. Everyone else are left outside the gates, suggesting that only the initiates were admitted.

Kraemer notes the resemblance between Joseph and the Greek sun god, Helios, on his chariot, though Helios never has an olive branch, nor twelve precious stones. The latter plainly allude again to the zodiac in this context.

VI. Aseneth is distraught that she has insulted the sun god, Joseph, “who sees everything”. Only the sun god from his high vantage point saw everything, the reason why the sun god got the attribute of judge. ”…the great light that is in him”, is also a plain description of the sun god. Just in case no one has yet got the drift, Aseneth declares, ”behold, the sun is come to us from heaven in his chariot”, or in some recensions ”like the sun he is come”. She adds that she did not know that Joseph was the son of God. Obviously the author is describing a god, not a human.

A Sacred Meal?

VII. Joseph is depicted as having taboos against eating with non-Jews, showing that the story probably originated in a strictly Jewish milieu. Joseph resumes his role as an Hebrew virgin who refuses the advances of all the Egyptian women, for he would not “sin against the god of Israel”. Joseph’s attraction to the Egyptian women perhaps reflects the attraction of the Jewish god for gentile women, but not gentile men, at that time. And, plainly here is a warning to Jewish men against consorting with gentile women, so how can this be a missionary or proselytising story, as the biblical experts tell us? The priest of On tells Joseph that Aseneth is his sister, and Joseph promises to love her as such! Joseph, the sun god, is about to marry the sky goddess and they are declared brother and sister, the tradition of the Pharaohs of Egypt.

VIII. Aseneth is brought down to Joseph but he refuses to kiss her as his sister because she is an idolater. Joseph speaks here of ”the blessed bread of life, and drinks the blessed cup of immortality, and is anointed with the blessed unction of incorruption” suggesting the Christian connexion but these three sacraments were almost certainly Jewish pre-Christian—bread and cup were elements of the Essenic messianic meal and unction was the Jewish way of appointing senior officials, though Essenes, according to Josephus disdained oil and the connexion between oil and incorruption is doubtful since the bread of life is the bread of eternal life and the cup is declared here to be the cup of immortality, so the unction looks like a possible elaboration whose purpose is simply to complete the triplet of contrasts.

Essene rejection of oil was in cosmetic use. They would not use it like the Egyptians for cleansing, as did some Rabbis, nor would they use it as perfumery. They could not have considered its use as a foodstuff or for burning in lamps as a defilement. Olive oil was a staple foodstuff that could hardly have been rejected. Anointing however would certainly have defiled an Essene. That is why the irregularity of the passages on the unction makes them look like interpolations. If this work is from an Essene pen, then there would have been no anointing in the original.

Joseph’s speech is clear that he eats these sacraments (implying continually) showing they are not merely one-off elements of an initiation ritual. They are a form of Eucharist. In Christian commentaries, one detects a degree of desperation arising because the Eucharist was formulated by the son of God on one particular occasion in history as a remembrance of him, yet here we have something astonishingly like it here in a virtually contemporary work.

Since Christians have God’s assurance on Eucharistic matters, they use their scholarship to declare that the meaning in the six places in the full recension where the repast is mentioned is really simply that of an ordinary Jewish family meal, which has a ritual flavour to them! Christian scholars nod to each other in satisfied agreement and go away untroubled. No one else could believe that six references in a plainly formulaic way in quite a short piece are simply references to coffee and cakes. ”And when you’ve converted, dear, we’ll all have lots of nice cups of coffee and cakes”. Nor is there any warning to the convert that they cannot carry on eating roast pig.

The emphasis placed on it and its formulaic description as “bread and cup” cries out that a cultic occasion is meant, and an important one to judge by its six times appearance. The bread is not just a crust but the bread of life and the cup is the cup of blessing or wisdom. The Jewish dinner table might have been frighteningly solemn and sacred but it was not because of the bread or wine but because of its purpose as a communal thanksgiving.

Part of the noddies’ defence against the linking of the Eucharist with the Qumran messianic meal is their similar claim that the Qumran meal was not sacred but simply a communal meal. Part of Christian ignorance, or arrogance, whichever you prefer, is that they cannot see anything sacred in any practices of any other cult or religion. But when the practice gets close to any Christian practice, it definitely cannot be sacred.

All of this was gone through 1800 years ago when pagan critics of Christianity pointed out certain home truths. Today, the situation is quite unaltered for any individual Christian, though there are far more of them. Even in those days the Christians were called idiotai and that too has not altered.

The Christians who deny that the Qumran meal is sacred will nevertheless agree that the Essene community considered themselves as a human temple. They were sacred as a whole. How then can the gathering of the human stones that build up into a human temple not itself be a sacred occasion? How could the participants be sacred, the occasion be treated as special, particular rules be formulated for it to preserve its solemn nature and it be identified with the anticipated heavenly banquet with the messiah and yet it not be sacred—just a common meal? Can you have just an ordinary meal with the messiah of God sitting in your midst? And all we know about what was served was bread and new wine! Other food was served because they partook of a “single food”, apprently distinct from the bread, so the Eucharistic part will certainly have preceded a normal repast. That does not mean that the ritual was any the less sacred. As far as we know, the Christian Eucharist used to precede a proper meal when Christians had no churches to meet in.

No serious scholar can disregard all this, but then Christians cannot be serious scholars because they are sure that the Eucharist had no precursor. God told them! It is quite impossible for anyone who has to invent pious lies to explain what he already knows from divine revelation to be called a scholar. Nodding scholars find comfort in mutual agreement about anything as long as it does not contradict their mythical revelations.

Joseph explains that he can only kiss those dedicated to the same god, the god of Israel. Then Joseph says this to Aseneth at 8:7:

So too it is not right for a woman who worships God to kiss a strange man, because this is an abomination in God’s eyes.

Yet this seems inappropriate if Aseneth is being spoken of because she is the idolater not Joseph. Taking Aseneth as Israel, the warning is clearer. It is inappropriate for Israel to kiss a strange man. In these metaphors, Israel had kissed the strange man and adopted idolatrous ways by accepting the rule of the strangers. Elsewhere, I have said that, at the time of Jesus, Israel was depicted as dead because that was the fate of a ravished girl. By accepting the rule of the Roman Prefects, God’s betrothed One, Israel, was considered ravished by the foreign intruder. The gospel resurrection of Jair’s daughter was the lifting of this crime from the head of Israel, returning her to life. So, Israel had kissed the strange man by accepting Roman overlordship.

In all this there is a curious emphasis implied in the repetition of kissing, suggestive of another element in some ritual. In the longer version Aseneth has three kisses which confer to her the same qualities as the honeycomb and the bread and cup; life, truth and wisdom. Kissing plays no particularly significant part in the gospels except in the act of betrayal of Judas, but that looks to be a gentile Christian interpolation. It might however have been an interpolation meant to echo, or even mock, an Essene custom. In the early church kissing was common and apparently became more than just a greeting.

Aseneth is distressed and Joseph prays for her in distinctly Essene terms using the contrasts of light and darkness, truth and error and life and death. This is the only act that Joseph, the son, does to save Aseneth! He calls upon his god called the Most High (a title which signifies the sun as the most high heavenly object) and the god that brought all things into the light from darkness, again an allusion to a sun god. He asks his god to renew and remould her. Here he asks god that ”she eat the bread of thy life, and drink the cup of thy blessing”, the unction being omitted tending to confirm it had earlier been added. He concludes with: ”And may she enter into thy rest, which thou has prepared for thine elect”, referring to God’s elect, a usage that was pre-eminently Essene though taken by the Christians. The final verse of the song asks god to ”number her with thy people which thou didst choose before all things came into being”, in one version, a reference which is plainly Jewish if not Essene.

Why do the three statements in the bread, cup formulature have the same result, namely everlasting life? Surely the bread of life, mentioned first would suffice for this. In fact the value of the cup varies and in three cases the unction is omitted and in some of the other recensions it is omitted elsewhere. The bread and cup are constant and the bread is constantly life but the cup varies. When Joseph gives opposites, the cup ought to be the cup of truth to contrast with the cup of deceit. The uncertainty about the unction shows it is an interpolation, which is not surprising if this is Essene because Essenes did not believe in anointing. In the next mention, the cup has become the cup of blessing and finally in the longer text, it becomes the cup of wisdom. Aseneth never actually partakes of these sacramental foods but does take the honeycomb given to her by the divine man as being equal to the bread and cup (in 16:14-16, not in the online version). Later the text says Joseph gave her the honeycomb, proving, if anyone doubted it, that the author considers Joseph and the divine man to be the same.

Aseneth Rejects her Idols

IX. Aseneth returns to her tower filled with joy and remorse and below Joseph declares that ”this is the day when God began his works” but he must depart to his duties in his chariot and would return in eight days, almost stating that he is god.

X. Aseneth discards her finery for a sombre black dress of mourning. She destroyed her idols of gold and silver and threw the pieces to the poor from her window. She put ashes on the floor and wrapped sackcloth round her waist instead of her golden girdle. She sprinkled herself with ashes and cried so much the ashes turned to mud. So she continued for seven days.

Christian scholars are confused by Aseneth’s apparent disposal of her wealth and then finding that she has not really disposed of it at all but remains wealthy. It is remarkable the extent to which Christians, even scholars, do not understand their own sacred texts. Jesus practised and recommended poverty. Christians were to give all they had to the poor, just as Essenes did and as Aseneth does here. They do not and here we find them confused because Aseneth is just like them! In fact, she is not. This is an allegory and the message about being poor in spirit is that one finds treasure in heaven. The finery that Aseneth has is spiritual finery.

XI. Only on the eighth day did she look up. It does not need deep scholarship for this seven days to represent death from its symbolism. Aseneth is resurrected on the eighth day, not the third as might be expected in a Christian allegory. Jewish number symbolism is a complicated matter but seven stood for perfection being the number which brought together heaven and earth (heaven is three and earth four). This is the reason, apparently, why it was revered by the Essenes who looked to the uniting of heaven and earth and saw themselves as the perfectly righteous, the only Jews doing what God expected them to do to help bring heaven and earth together.

Interestingly in later tradition, though not in the scriptures, the eighth day stood for the day of resurrection, as if God began work again after his rest day, but this time it was to revivify the righteous. In the scriptures the tradition was the third day, just as in the New Testament, was the day of resurrection. So, at some stage there were parallel traditions and here might be a hint at its source. Interestingly, there are seven weeks between Passover and Pentecost, the main festivals of Judaism and the Essenes respectively when God guided the Israelites from Egypt and into the promised land. The messianic banquet held en masse at the Essene festival of renewal (apparently the feeding of the five thousand of the gospels) stood for the meal held for the righteous in heaven, so the Renewal festival represented the renewal of the world at the End Time, not merely the renewal of the vows of the initiates.

The meaning of Aseneth’s ritual death is that she was dead as an apostate but receives immortality on being reunited with God on the eighth day. The symbolic method is the same as that of Saul being blinded on the road to Damascus. The blindness stands for his blindness in not seeing the truth. Symbolic of this he is supposedly rendered blind then has his sight restored when he converts. Few prelates tell their flocks that blindness was then, just as it is today, a common metaphor for ignorance or folly. Philo wrote that proselytes, though ”blind at first had recovered their sight and had come out of deep darkness to see the most radiant light”. This is the real meaning of Jesus’s miracles and all the Essene and Christian light and darkness imagery. Along with it went the life and death metaphor.

God Accepts Aseneth’s Repentance

XII. Aseneth looks to the heavens in the east and addresses god! This god in the eastern heavens gave life to all things and brought them into the light, making all things visible, as you would expect of a sun god. She prays in supplication to this god for forgiveness for her sins of worshipping the gods of the Egyptians. God is personified as a father to his children. She says she is pursued by a primeval lion who is the Devil. She says she has been abandoned by her parents for rejecting their gods though this act of abandonment has not been stated in this version. But as an orphan she appeals to the god of orphans, a further hint at the Essenes who took in waifs.

XIII. Aseneth concludes by pointing to all her sacrifices, even saying she has given her food to the dogs when she had given it earlier to the poor of Egypt, thus adopting the strongly Jewish insult that gentiles are dogs. Indeed, one recension calls them ”strange dogs” making the identification explicit, strangers being the Jewish word for gentiles, and proving this is no missionary document. She declares that she sinned against god in ignorance and spoke calumnies against Joseph, again virtually identifying Joseph as God, adding that she did not know he was God’s son. She also calls Joseph ”thine elect one” an Essene title used by Christians of Jesus.

XIV. Her prayer ends just as the morning star rose in the eastern sky. Though a commonplace event in reality, it is important to sun worshippers as the herald of the dawn and that is how Aseneth interprets it and as an acceptance of her plea. Since the morning star is a goddess, it will also signify her rise, having accepted god.

At that moment the heavens sundered and a huge light illuminated the sky. Plainly this, just after the rise of the morning star is sunrise. A man appears addressing her by name. She wonders who could call, since she was in a locked room in a high tower accessible only to the air and light. The voice says, ”I am the commander of the Lord’s house and chief captain of all the host of the Most High”. She looked up and saw a man ”like Joseph in every respect”. ”His face was like lightning, and his eyes were like the light of the sun, and the hairs of his head a flame of fire, and his hands and feet like iron from the fire. ” This is a description of the sun, the description often given to the archangel Michael, who is God’s heavenly commander of the angelic host in Essene legend, or the Metatron. He tells her to discard the sackcloth and ashes and dress again in her finery. She choses a ”brilliant” frock.

The divine figure repeatedly tells her of her heavenly equivalent called Repentance, daughter of the Most High who petitions god for penitents and has prepared a heavenly bridal chamber for those who love her. So, the divine figure tells her to dress in her bridal gown ready for Joseph’s arrival. She thanks him, ”Blessed be the Lord God that sent you out to deliver me from darkness and bring me into light”.

Aseneth, the Goddess Israel

This goddess is then the repentant Israel that the Essenes sought to bring home to unite with God. Having repented she becomes a place of refuge for upright and repentant Israelites. Christian texts regard Jesus and the Church as cities of refuge, but it is difficult to accept that the church would accept a woman in a role normally reserved, like all important saving roles, for Jesus.

The emphasis on heavenly equals to the earthly self, Aseneth having the heavenly equivalent, Repentance, and Joseph appearing as the archangel Michael, agrees with the early identification of Jesus and the archangel Michael. Michael is the leader of God’s hosts but Christians have passed the job over to Jesus at his Parousia. The reason is doubtless that the earthly messiah was seen by the Essenes as having the archangel Michael as a heavenly equal. In fact, Aseneth becomes Repentance and doubtless the Essene thought was that Jesus would become Michael, and so we arrive at the Christian belief in Jesus leading the heavenly hosts instead of their general, Michael.

The scene concludes with Aseneth obeying Joseph’s instruction to wash herself. The Qumran Essenes were particularly keen on the life-giving effects of pure water and bathed through full body immersion at least twice a day. Village Essenes were likely to have been free of such a strict demand but they would nevertheless have been stricter about ablutions even than the Pharisees. Later in the drama, Aseneth apparently merely looks into a bowl of water and gets a radiant face. Once again, it is surely fatuous to pretend that this washing is purely practical because she was covered in tears and ashes. She was, of course, but these represented spiritual death and pollution. Equally, washing them away represented the act of cleansing the spirit of this desecration. In some of the versions the water here is called living water!

Effectively in Joseph the god, Joseph the son and Aseneth, Israel, we have the original trinity. Joseph the sun God and Joseph the son are hardly distinguished in this work, indeed sometimes they are equated, perhaps giving the basis for the Christian identification of God and the Son. The goddess was identified as the Holy Ghost either by the Essenes themselves or by the first Christians.

Virginity

XV. The obsession in this work with virginity is perhaps one reason why it is taken to be a Christian work, extolling the virtues of chastity, especially for women, but here we get Aseneth being a virgin and therefore having ”a head like a young man’s”. Aseneth is a metaphor for Israel, a reformed version of Gomer/Israel of Hosea. Jezreel, the child of Hosea, which means Israel, also curiously changes sex, so this allusion is a subtle hint that Aseneth is Israel. Is it also a hint that men were expected to be virginal? This was true of the Essenes. Aseneth was also served by seven virgins, not the planets, the stars of the Great Bear, and the Essenes revered seven as a sacred number.

K G Kuhn identifed Joseph and Aseneth as Essene based on the references to the bread and cup but warned that only men partook of the Essene meal. Now, Josephus and the Damascus Rule clearly tell us that not all Essenes were celibate monks living in isolation from women. Yet Christian ”scholars” often tell us that some practice is not Essene because it is not identical to that of the monkish men of Qumran. It is like saying that only trappist monks are Catholics. If the professional Essenes of Qumran held a particular form of table fellowship as sacred, are we to presume that the village Essenes had no such sacred repast. And, since there were explicit rules for women, some women were members of the sect. Doubtless they were not in permanent residence at Qumran—though female skeletons have been found there—but married to ”lay Essenes”, if that is what the village Essenes were, or were their daughters. Hagith Sivan takes Joseph and Aseneth as a product of the late second or early first century BC, the very time when the Essenes were founding their community at Qumran.

No doubt exists that females actually lived the life of solitary contemplation in the order of the Therapeutae, described by Philo, and no one contests that they were related to the Essenes, if not a branch of them. These Therapeut women joined in the sacred repast of their order—the food of immortality, just as it is in Joseph and Aseneth and for Christians. M Delcor in 1962 attributed the work to the Therapeutae of Egypt. Egypt is generally agreed as its provenance, because of its setting, but Philo does not describe the Therapeuts as constantly immersing themselves as the Qumran Essenes did, and one of the arguments against Essene origins is the lack of lustration in Joseph and Aseneth. There are, though, two references to washing water.

Therapeut women were described by Philo as mainly aged virgins who had remained chaste in their pursuance of wisdom. Yet, if ”most” were old, some were young. Doubtless there were virgins of all ages amongst them but few women felt cut out for such a life, just as few today become nuns. Those who did will have stayed members for the rest of their lives, and since the Essene regime had the effect of conferring long life, there would have been a disproportionate number of old virgins.

The point is that they placed an emphasis on virginity just as the author of this work does. But despite it, most Essenes lived lives in society as man and wife. It is easy to get a false impression from the strict regimes of the devout, but marriage was the norm for Essenes despite the celibate lives of their monastic leaders.

Aseneth is promised renewal and immortality, her name being written in the book of life forever and to confirm it she is also promised the triplet of bread, cup and unction again, though as might be suspected, if unction is an addition, some recensions do not include it. Only the righteous are written in the book of life, so Aseneth’s confession and repentance are sufficient to put her among the righteous. The message is exactly that of the start of the gospels. Sincere repentance of a lifetime of idolatry is as good as a lifetime of devotion. Several important parables were spoken on this theme but Christian ”scholars” have forgotten them.

In the second part of the story, forgiveness is only extended to the ”brothers… who worship God”. Again we are not talking about forgiving gentiles—quite the opposite—only Jews are to be forgiven. Here though God has promised that Joseph would be her bridegroom and she his bride. She is renamed ”City of Refuge” instead of Aseneth, because many nations and peoples would find shelter within her walls. Her new name in Greek, ”Menos”, means strength but apparently considered to mean a House of Refuge. K Kohler in the Jewish Encyclopedia sees the punned name in Aramaic as a pun on the old, being a reversal of the “n” and “s”, “nasat” meaning “she has fled”, because she had fled from the Egyptian idols to a refuge in the god of the Hebrews who gives her refuge. It faithfully preserves all three consonants but seems a bit tortuous.

A better connexion is to the word nasah which is related to Nazarene in several punning ways. The pun on Aseneth here might be intended to lead back to nasah, the meaning of which fits the context because it embodies the solar qualities of light and durability. Its Arabic cognate means both pure and reliable. “Nasah” essentially is brilliance and therefore means glory, strength (hence ”Menos” in Greek), endurance, eternity, victory. If a city is strong or eternal, it seems safe to assume it is a city of refuge.

Nevertheless, a still better origin of the name change is a more obvious pun. The root ”os” is a place of refuge and is the origin of the cry of the Jews as Jesus entered Jerusalem apparently as a saviour king, ”Osannah!” meaning ”Free us!” or ”Save us!” The Essenes could not have missed the pun between Osannah and Aseneth.

Cities of refuge in the Hebrew scriptures appear in Numbers 35, where they are allocated to the Levites as places of asylum for manslaughterers, a strange association, if it is meant. The context there though is the taking of the Promised Land, so has a connexion with the ambitions of the Essenes who saw the entry of the righteous into the kingdom of God as the equivalent of the Israelites crossing the Jordan.

Aseneth Receives Eternal Life

XVI. The Joseph-like figure commands Aseneth to fetch a honeycomb which he tells her she will find in an inner room. She finds it and it is pure white and smells of myrrh, the breath of life. He places it on her head like a crown (nezer) and declares her blessed, that god had revealed hidden things or mysteries (nasar) to her and that those who give allegiance to God in penitence will eat of the honeycomb. It is, he says, the product of the bees of paradise (the Garden of Eden) and is the food of angels that confers immortality. He then takes some and gives some to Aseneth and either makes the sign daleth or the sign of the cross, which shows up blood red, by placing his finger against the edges of the honeycomb facing east and north. If this signifies that the making of the mark of the cross was a part of the ritual, then the command of Jesus in the gospels to his disciples before his crucifixion to take up their crosses, might be explained.

Perfectly white bees with blue, purple and gold wings emerge from the cells. The bees had golden diadems and they circled around Aseneth from her feet to her head. At a command from the god-like visitor they drop on the floor dead. At another command they revived and departed to Aseneth’s enclosed garden, suggesting that it was intended to denote the Garden of Eden. This seems intended as a demonstration of resurrection. The resurrected bees depart for the Garden of Eden, which is the same as paradise or heaven. They are therefore resurrected into heaven and the bees stand for the saints or the perfectly righteous ones.

Bees were always associated with sun gods and certain goddesses. Thus Samson, the Hebrew Hercules, an obvious sun god, was associated with bees. In some recensions, note, that hidden things are expressly mentioned here, the very expression used by the Essenes of God’s secrets. The Essenes themselves at Ephesus were even called the Bees. Honey is associated with immortality—the nectar of the gods—which is why the angels and other immortals like the Elect in heaven lived on it.

The bee was sacred at Ephesus and some have suggested that the shape of the Goddess Diana is that of a bee. Priests and priestesses were called the Goddess’s bees. The High Priest was called the “Essen”, the name of the breast plate of the High Priest at Jerusalem, an important symbol of priestly office. Eunuch priests were called “Megabyzae”, a Persian word derived from a Persian word for God, “Baga”. The priestesses were “Melissae”. The temple at Ephesus, like the one at Jerusalem, was also a bank, and became a famous one.

XVII.The man destroys the comb with his finger and it emits a sweet scent. Then Aseneth asks that her seven virgins be blessed. She calls them and he blesses them and makes them the seven pillars of the City of Refuge forever. It seems Essenes were interested in pillars and Paul describes certain apostles as pillars. The man asks Aseneth to move a table and while her attention is distracted he vanishes but she sees what seems to be a chariot of fire being taken up into heaven towards the east, the sun continuing to rise above the horizon.

XVIII. One of Joseph’s twelve young men tells Aseneth that he is due to return. Aseneth dons a robe that shone like lightning, another allusion to her as the sky. She wears a golden crown, golden girdles and golden bracelets and precious stones. She commands her maid to bring pure water and she puts it in basin on a cockle shell from which she lifts her face and it looks like the sun, and her eyes like the rising morning star. The reference to a cockle shell is apparently meaningless, perhaps indicative of such a severe editing that the meaning has gone, but cockle shells are associated with virgin goddesses and the Marionite pilgrims in the Middle Ages used to wear them in their hats, a habit brought back from the Middle East at the time of the crusades. The morning star is Venus.

God Marries Israel

XIX. Joseph knows from heaven about Aseneth’s conversion and embraces her.

XX. Like Jesus in John and the unknown woman in Luke’s gospel, Aseneth washes Joseph’s feet, possible a Christian insertion, but no one seems to have considered it as a ritual of the Essenes or sun-worshippers in general. Pentephres and his wife return and Aseneth is dressed as a bride in a bright wedding gown so they all rejoice. Again, why should the priest of On rejoice that his daughter was to marry a worshipper of a foreign god? Pentephres knows she is marrying the sun. Pentephres wants to tell all the nobles of Egypt of the wedding but Joseph first wants to tell Pharaoh ”because he is my father”.

R T Beckwith thinks the calendar implied in the romance is a solar one similar but not identical to that used by the Essenes and described in the Book of Jubilees. The Essenes considered that the central day in the week, Wednesday, was particularly important because it was the day when time began (when the sun was made!) and so calendars properly run from Wednesday to Wednesday. Beckwith sees this displaced by a day to Thursday, an apparently unlikely change, but which he thinks might have been necessitated to avoid violations of the sabbath that would otherwise be implied. Taking Beckwith’s hypothesis suggests that the completion of the wedding ceremony would have been the Essene Festival of the First Fruits of the Vine. In John’s gospel is a famous wedding associated with wine, the mysterious wedding at Cana. I have previously suggested that the Essenes had a ritual wedding of Israel to Yehouah in which water was blessed and turned into ritual wine. The reason is that Essenes were Nazarites as well as Nazarenes and could not touch the fruit of the vine, so they blessed water and called it new wine. Perhaps the most appropriate time of year for this to happen was when the fruits of the vine were being gathered.

Pharaoh is oddly always depicted sympathetically. It is his son who is the oppressor. In logic, the only real being the Pharaoh could represent in the first century is the Roman Emperor. It seems impossible, but might not be. The Emperors had shown amazing tolerance toward the Jews and had given them many religious concessions. The local governors of Judaea, however, the Prefects from 6 AD and later the Procurators were all professional gold diggers and treated the Jews cruelly in lining their own pockets at their expense. Thus, the Emperor in this drama is ahown as kind but the Emperor’s son, meaning the Prefect, is shown as desiring Israel. In the second act, the battles are with Pharaoh’s son and his soldiers and the opportunist Hebrew brothers, Dan and Gad, who side with him. Plainly the expectation and the warning was of a civil war in which the righteous with God’s help would defeat the oppressors and Israel (Aseneth) would be saved.

D Sänger, who dates the work at 38 AD, correctly notes that Dan and Gad stand for opportunistic Jews ready to work for the oppressor against Israel. They represent the publicans of the gospels.

XXI.Pharaoh blesses the pair and gives them golden crowns declaring that Joseph is the first born son of God and Aseneth will be called daughter of the Most High. They celebrated the wedding with a banquet which lasted seven days, a possible reference to the Essene messianic banquet that gets mentioned only incidentally in the gospels in this form at the wedding at Cana, probably a ritual wedding of God to Israel. All the nobles of the world attend.

There is no mistaking here the eschatolgical implications. God and Israel are reunited when heaven joins earth and the world is renewed as a perfect incorruptible world that only the righteous and the repentant can enter. The Jews become the elect of the world and all nations come to Jerusalem in supplication.

The marriage is shown as an equal partnership, unlike any early Christian concept of marriage, as expounded by Jerome, Chrysostom and even the Acts of Thomas, or any rabbinic Jewish concept of marriage, so far as we know As Hagith Sivan says:

In a context of marital inquiry, Roman-Christian and Jewish attitudes to adultery are particularly illuminating, as they invariably emphasize the role of a woman as a transgressor of the marital male code.

The marriage is not a real Jewish or Christian marriage but a metaphorical one. It matches the nature of permanent, apparently equal marriage described by Jesus and by some Essene texts. The fact that actual marriage was not equal, is immaterial here because Jesus and perhaps the Essenes too were describing the metaphorical marriage of God and Israel as a personification of the Covenant, a contract that must, necessarily, be equal on both sides.

The biblical outcome of the marriage was the children of Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim and with this connexion to the bible, the first part of the tale ends.

Gentile Conversion or Jewish Return from Apostasy?

The Essene argument was that Israel had broken her part of the contract in disobeying the laws of God, turning to the gods of the Greeks and accepting foreign rule, metaphorically adultery. The conversion of Aseneth is an allegory of the conversion of Israel from idolatry, the worship of the gods of the Greeks, back to the god of Israel. Joseph and Aseneth assumes familiarity with the scriptural setting and characters, showing it was written for Jews and not for pagans who did not know the Hebrew scriptures and would have been baffled by the characters and setting.

The omission of any mention of food taboos, other than the refusal of Jews to share a table with gentiles, or other requirements of the law of Moses denotes that the work cannot be aimed at gentile conversion. These requirements would have had to be central to any effort to persuade gentiles to come to the Jewish god. There were also other requirements of acceptance into Judaism.

For men the main one was circumcision and Paul the apostle was caught trying to avoid this requirement. In Joseph and Aseneth the supposed convert is a woman and female circumcision was never a requirement of Judaism so far as we know. Other needs though were the need to be baptised and the need to sprinkle the blood of sacrifice.

There is no mention of either of these in Joseph and Aseneth. It is argued that the need to sacrifice was only a requirement of converts able to do it, in other words those who had access to the temple, but Jews in the diaspora imposed no such requirement, a sacramental repast being sufficient. If this book were composed in the diaspora then perhaps that applied but if composed in Palestine, it did not.

Baptism is controversial also. Immersion, according to the Talmud, was a necessity for converts even in the first century BC when Rabbis Hillel and Shammai disagreed about everything, but the Rabbis had a habit of extending their rules backward in time just as their predecessors, the second temple priesthood had. Philo and Josephus tell us nothing about proselyte baptism, so conceivably it was a later requirement, though it seems unlikely that the Rabbis would introduce a Christian practice, but not at all unlikely that Christians would continue a prevailing Jewish practice.

Conversion from idolatry in Ezekiel 36:25 requires only a sprinkling of water:

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.

And this defilement by idolatry is earlier compared with the uncleanness of a woman:

Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way and by their doings: their way was before me as the uncleanness of a removed woman.

The washing in Aseneth might therefore be meant to be this symbolic cleansing. Aseneth’s only sin is her idolatry. Though she is depicted as a haughty woman, there is no implied criticism of her for lack of humility. The author makes it plain that the problem was nothing to do with moral standards but entirely one of religious and cultural preference—loyalty to the true God. Aseneth’s sin is to have worshipped idols.

There is an important lesson here for those considering the baptisms of John and Jesus. Their aim was to receive Jewish apostates back into Judaism. Like Aseneth in this piece their main sin was to have collaborated with the enemy and to have adopted their gods and customs. The baptisms were Ezekiel’s sprinklings, no doubt interpreted on the basis that if a sprinkling is effective then a dousing must be twice as effective. If God might act at any moment to bring in his renewal, then there was no time for elaborate initiations. The lengthy three year novitate of the Essenes was out of the question and the answer was right there in Ezekiel. When the Day of God’s Vengeance was imminent, simply accept repentant Jews back into God’s fold by baptism. This is the key point missed by all these ”scholars”. The initiation procedures of the Essenes were irrelevant because these people were not being initiated as Essenes but welcomed back to their original religion. Yet noddies discard the idea of Essene authorship because Aseneth does not rise up out of a cistern of sacred water cleansed of her sins like Venus rising from the surf.

Aseneth actually makes a meal of her rejection of the idols showing that the author is hammering home idolatry as the real point. She repeats it at 22:4-5; 12;12 ; 13;11. There is little reason why a Jew should be concerned at the idolatry of gentiles—it is only to be expected of gentiles. The idolatry that concerns Jews is apostasy. None of this points to any desire by Jews to convert gentiles, but to convert apostate Jews back to the religion of their fathers. It is a moot point whether Jews were ever unduly concerned with proselytising and it is hard to believe that any Jew was as concerned for the salvation of gentile souls as this author would have had to be, if Aseneth was meant to be a gentile. On the other hand any Jew would have been concerned that a fellow Jew had turned apostate.

Idols were commonly associated with gentiles although there was an important point in Jewish history when idolatry was rejected because the scriptures are clear that Jews often worshipped idols and even kept images of family gods. Since the priests who returned from Exile wrote the Hebrew scriptures and yet allowed these references to pass their censors, they must have been highlighting idolatry as a sin. After the conquest of Persia by Alexander, the priests must have banned idols because it was strongly associated with the new conquerors and their policy of cultural imperialism. Jews who collaborated with the imperialists and adopted their ways were the concern of traditional Jews, not any desire to convert the conquerors.

The fact that the references here are to Egyptian gods rather than Greek gods is not surprising. The Essenes never said what they meant, probably because they considered it a hostage to fortune. All the events of their day were re-interpreted in terms of past events, usually biblical events, and the Dead Sea Scrolls contain new or revised episodes and romances, not included in our present bibles. Joseph and Aseneth could fall into the same category.

Much of the rhetoric is about creation and renewal of life, matching the goddess’s rebirth into Judaism. At the New Year and the Day of Atonement, God promises to see Israel as a newly created being but, in this context, the imagery is to the eschatological renewal of the world, or its creation as a united kingdom of heaven and earth.

For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.

Isa 65:17

A necessary requirement of it is the return of Israel from apostasy.

In Joseph and Aseneth, it is Aseneth herself who choses repentance and rejection of idols. Aseneth/Israel converts through love of god and a desire to consumate a proper marriage. The emphasis on a marriage to God is strong, yet in the bible it is weak. What we do not know is how strongly some Jewish sects like the Essenes held it. The various allusions in the gospels to marriage, like this one in Joseph and Aseneth, are always taken by nodding scholars to mean actual marriage. Little has been done to determine whether some Jews took the marriage of God and Israel hinted at in the scriptures so seriously that it formed part of their rituals.

The Result: God saves Israel from her Enemies

Any reader will note, having gone through the story, that it has an unmistakeable join at this point after the marriage of Joseph and Aseneth. Until then the tale is manifestly and undoubtedly allegorical but thereafter it becomes a gung-ho tale of kidnap and swashbuckling adventure, which though apparently no less allegorical is in quite a different, more earthly and less otherworldly style. The change in style and language is quite unequivocal. Whatever the source of the second part, it was not written by the same author as the first part. It was written presumably to derive a practical point from the earlier supernatural part.

In the famine years the family go to Goshen where Jacob and the rest of Joseph’s brothers have settled. Levi reads the heavens for Aseneth, having the ability to reveal all things. Pharaoh’s son is jealous of Joseph and desirous of Aseneth and he calls upon Levi and Simeon, the brothers of Joseph, to help overcome him. Simeon is incensed and considers killing the son of Pharaoh but Levi knows this through his prophetic abilities and stops him, but warns Pharaoh’s son not to tempt them on pain of the same fate as the ravagers of Dinah.

Pharaoh’s son instead recruits Dan and Gad and, pretending that Joseph has been plotting against them, gets them to agree to join his own plot. Pharaoh’s son is unable to get access to his father to kill him as he intended and Naphtali and Asher try to persuade Dan and Gad not to continue with their plot because Joseph is obviously blessed by God.

Aseneth goes on a trip to her country estate and Joseph continues distributing corn to the famished. Aseneth is ambushed and flees in her chariot. Levi sees this in a vision and calls upon Joseph’s brothers to help Aseneth, but she is met by Pharaoh’s son. Benjamin, in Aseneth’s chariot, hurls a stone at and injures Pharaoh’s son then hurls fifty more to kill the men accompanying him. Lots more people get killed and the two plotters Dan and Gad are disarmed by God hearing Aseneth’s prayer.

The two villains beg Aseneth for mercy. Aseneth is merciful and advises them to hide while she mollifies their brothers. She begs the other brothers tearfully to spare them because God has disarmed them. At first they refuse then agree to her plea that evil must not repay evil.

Meanwhile Pharaoh’s son regains consciousness and is about to be murdered by Benjamin but is stopped by Levi, again giving the formula that evil must not repay evil but to be merciful. The Egyptian prince dies three days later anyway. The old man reigned until he was 109 then left his kingdom to Joseph, who reigned 49 years.

This second part describes the cleansing of Israel of the foreign occupiers represented by Pharaoh’s son. Aseneth as Israel is shown to be in danger from the plots of Pharaoh’s soldiers and the collaborating Jews but the upright Jews save her after god, by a miracle, disarms the assailants. This is precisely the miracle that Jesus expected, but which never came after he and his Nazarenes had taken Jerusalem to show that upright Jews still were willing to save Israel (See The Hidden Jesus).

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History