Christianity
Joseph and Aseneth—Summary and Discussion 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, April 21, 1999
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).
