Christianity
Joseph and Aseneth—Summary and Discussion 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, April 21, 1999
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”.
