When Aseneth Met Joseph: A Late Antique Tale of the Biblical Patriarch and His Egyptian Wife, Reconsidered

385 Pages·1998·52.1 MB·English

by  Ross Shepard Kraemer

When Aseneth Met Joseph
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When Aseneth Met Joseph
A Late Antique Tale of the
Biblical Patriarch and
His Egyptian Wife, Reconsidered
ROSS SHEPARD KRAEMER
New York Oxford
OXFORD L• X I V F. RS IT Y PRESS
1998
Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1998 by Ross Shepard Kraemer
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Library of Congress Cata.loging-in• Publication Data
Kraemer, Ross Shepard, 1948
When Aseneth met Joseph : a late antique tale of the biblical
patriarch and his Egyptian wife, reconsidered / Ross Shepard
Kraemer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-511475-2
1. Joseph and Aseneth—Criticism, inteipretation. etc. 1. Title.
BS1830J62K75 1997
221 911.׳— dc21 97-20389
9 א 7 (> צ A יי I
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For John, διδάσκαλος
and for Bob, ώς διδάσκαλος
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Preface
Sometimes scholarship is serendipitous. Several years ago, I agreed, somewhat cav-
alierly, to write a relatively brief commentary on an anonymous ancient work con-
ventionally titled Joseph and Aseneth for an anthology of feminist commentaries on
ancient Jewish and Christian writings, including traditional canonical scripture,1
Composed in Greek, Aseneth (as 1 currently prefer to call it) narrates the transforma-
tion of the daughter of an Egyptian priest into an acceptable spouse for the biblical
Joseph. Although virtually unknown outside scholarly circles, this story is remarkable
not the least for its focus on a female character and its apparent relative absence of
any overt misogyny. Over a number of years. I had worked on it in a rather piecemeal
fashion. But when, in the summer of 1993, 1 finally sat down to write the commen-
tary in earnest, two seemingly fortuitous experiences transformed my life, at least my
life as a scholar.
A colleague at the University of Pennsylvania happened to have on his desk a copy
of James Ku gel's In Potiphar's House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts,2 It had
long been on my list of books to read sooner or later, and its focus on the traditions
of the biblical Joseph in the house of his Egyptian master Potiphar suddenly moved
it to the top. I therefore quickly borrowed it. In this ingenious and lovely book that
reads like an intellectual detective story, Kugel demonstrates the process by which
early Jewish "midrashic״ traditions were constructed out of anomalies and perplex-
ing questions perceived by ancient Jewish rabbinic exegetes to exist in Jewish scrip״
ture. Reading Kugel, \ suddenly realized that much of the story of Aseneth might well
have been constructed in an analogous manner. Chapter 2 of this book is primarily
devoted to working out the implications of that realization. An appendix considers
rabbinic traditions about the marriage of Joseph and Aseneth, traditions that I am con
vinced are antithetical to the Greek Asoicih and were probably unknown to our
authors (although perhaps not vice versa).
¥111 Preface
Soon thereafter, engaged in the kind of minute-scale scholarship that commentaries
require, I found myself one day working on references to honey, a substance that an
angelic being gives Aseneth to eat, effecting her transformation. For some reason, I
remembered a passage about honey in an obscure Jewish compilation known as
Sepher ha-Razim (The book of the mysteries), whose constituent elements were prob י
ably composed sometime in the Greco-Roman period. Sepher ha-Razim purports to
describe the seven firmaments, the angels who dwell in them, and the favors they will
do for humans if properly coerced.
Skimming rather quickly, I came almost immediately upon a passage concerning
the fourth firmament that describes the angels who pull the chariot of the Sun by day
and by night. Here I read the formulas by which one adjures the Sun to come down
and accurately foretell one's future, including a substantial prayer in Greek translit-
erated into Hebrew, addressed to Holy Helios (the Greek name for the sun and the
Sun God). Almost instantly, I saw that Aseneth's experience with the angelic being
was in many ways similar, if not identical, to the prescriptions in this text. Chapter 4
endeavors to set this central portion of Aseneth within the context of ancient adjura-
lions of divine beings, for both similar and different purposes.
Collectively, these two early insights compelled me to begin rethinking my earlier
judgments about Aseneth, a tale with a complex textual and cultural history. Revisit-
ing the questions of when, where, and by what sort of author Aseneth might have orig-
inally been composed and which of the two major textual reconstructions is likely to
be earlier, I found myself more and more persuaded that much of the previous schol-
arship on this text is seriously Hawed. Chapter 1 summarizes my current thinking on
these questions and brielly considers the specific problem of the so-called shorter and
longer texts. Chapter 3 compares the two reconstructions in considerable detail.
Chapters 5 and 6 expand the work of chapter 4 to pursue further the range of ancient
cultural and religious contexts for Aseneth, from the mystical themes and cosmology
of Jewish hekhalot traditions to late antique veneration of Helios and the possible
relationship with Neoplatonic beliefs and theurgic practice. Chapters 8, 9, and 10
revisit questions of date, authorial religious identity and self-understanding, and geo-
graphic provenance. A final chapter pursues the ramifications of my strong sense that
Aseneth is a later antique work, composed initially in the late third or early fourth cen-
tury C.E. and subsequently revised, probably several times, by authors whose ethnic,
religious, and cultural identity continues to elude us.
As is by now apparent, what was to have been a relatively short feminist com-
mentary 011 Aseneth quickly took on a life of its own. The first draft of the commen-
tary was over 100 pages long. I reluctantly edited it down to a length the editors
agreed to publish and devoted more than two additional years to the book it has
become. Although I hope the sensitivity to issues of gender that led me to undertake
the commentary in the first place pervade the entire book, only in chapter 7 do 1
finally turn explicitly to questions of gender.
On a great many issues, this book challenges the prevailing scholarly consensus on
Aseneth. As my work on this book progressed, I found myself increasingly convinced
that previous scholarship has been wrong not only on questions of date, provenance,
identity, geographic origin, and textual relationships but also on many matters of
Preface ix
interpretation. Eventually, I found it unproductive to engage in the kinds of traditional
scholarly dialogue with most of the earlier literature. Readers interested in the com-
prehensive history of scholarship on Aseneth will need to turn elsewhere,3 although
inevitably discussion of date, origins, and textual issues do engage that scholarship
selectively. Further, while I disagree with both of them on many points, I am partie-
ularly dependent on the important work of Marc Philonenko and Christoph Burchard
in reconstructing Greek texts of Aseneth and bringing immense erudition to their dis-
eussions and notes to their respective, divergent texts.
Although readers should have no difficulty determining the nature of my disagree-
ments, I should signal here the central theses of this book, particularly those that
oppose both prior scholarship and what may be called the current scholarly consensus.
1. In general, the shorter text reconstructed by Philonenko antedates the longer text,
represented by Burchard's reconstruction.
2. The changes are usually intentional and reflect the concerns of one or more
redactors.
3. The current scholarly consensus as to the date, provenience, and identity of the
text(s) is largely untenable and based on interlocking assumptions that are, for the
most part, without foundation. Aseneth is not early (i.e., composed before 117 0.1;.);
rather, the shorter text is not likely to have been composed prior to the third century
c.n.. and the longer reconstruction is likely to date within a century of the shorter
(although this is harder to ascertain). Aseneth might have been but by no means needs
to have been composed in Egypt. It could easily have been composed almost any-
where Greek was written during the Roman period, and there are some intriguing rea-
sons for thinking that it might have been composed in Syria and/or its environs. The
arguments for its Jewishness are largely without foundation. Although it could be
Jewish, the totality of the evidence is not definitive, and several other identifications
of the author(s) of both the shorter and longer versions are plausible. In particular, a
strong case can be made for Christian composition and redaction.
4. Both the shorter and longer texts interweave ancient adjuration of powerful
divine beings with mystical interpretations of such experiences, overlaid on a narra-
tive frame generated out of the Joseph story (known to us now in Genesis) and fleshed
out with "traditional" elements known to us from biblical and related traditional Jew-
ish (although also Christian) sources. Although both versions may be constructed in
this manner, the longer version shows more interest in and more detailed similarities
with ancient portraits of mystical encounters with angels.
5. Aseneth's gender is significant and not coincidental to the story of Joseph, and
it requires explication within the context of late antique constructs of and concerns
about gender.
Pursuing the implications of these findings has evoked more than once the remem-
brance of a comment: made by a friend and colleague, Michael Stone, professor of
Armenian studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, during a Pseudepigrapha ses-
sion at the 1990 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. What, he asked,
do we do if we conclude that a particular text might in fact have been written much
later than our original assessments, so much so as to remove it from our particular
scholarly purview? Do we define ourselves as scholars with particular chronological,