The Assembly of Ladies

A strange story circulated about one part of this week’s parashah, the story of Joseph’s encounter with Potiphar’s wife.

 

According to the Torah, the wife of Potiphar (otherwise nameless), is obsessed with Joseph, the handsome young slave whom her husband has bought. She keeps trying to seduce Joseph, but he keeps refusing. In the Torah’s version, this obsession is an entirely private matter, between her and him. By contrast, a number of midrashic texts recount that at one point she confessed her infatuation with Joseph to a group of her friends. “Yes,” she says, “I’m obsessed with him. But you would be too!”

 

To prove this, she gives each of them a knife and a tasty etrog (in rabbinic times the tasty strain of this citrus fruit was still around—alas, now no longer). Then she summons her servant Joseph into the room on some pretext. When her friends see how handsome Joseph is, they are so amazed that instead of cutting the etrogim, “they cut their hands. She said to them: If you do thus after just one moment, I, who see him all the time, am I not all the more so [justified in being smitten]?” (Midrash Tanḥuma)

 

Various different versions of this story appear in other midrashic collections; in fact, this same tale made its way into the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam (Sura XII, 30-32). There, when the women cut their hands, they cry out, “God protect us! This is no mortal, this is naught but a noble angel!”

 

But how did this story ever get started? As noted, in the Torah the infatuation of Potiphar’s wife is altogether a private matter. This “assembly of ladies” seems to contradict the Torah’s own account.

 

Like most midrashic elaborations, this story was originally designed to answer a specific question about the biblical text, in this case, the precise wording of Genesis 39:14. There, the Torah says that when Potiphar’s wife saw that Joseph had left his garment in her hands and fled outside, she cried out to the members of her household, “Look! This Hebrew man has come to us to take liberties with us. He came to me to lie with me, but I cried out with a loud voice.”

 

The question this verse raised was, first of all, who was she talking to? The Torah had said earlier that when Potiphar’s wife had tried to seduce Joseph that day, “no member of the household was there inside the house” (Gen 39:11). But if she and Joseph were alone, then who was she crying out to “with a loud voice”? Secondly, why was she using the “royal we” (rather rare in biblical Hebrew) when she say that Joseph “has come to us to take liberties with us?” Shouldn’t she have just said that Joseph “came to me to take liberties with me?”

 

From this, ancient interpreters concluded that when Joseph ran outside, leaving his garment behind, she at first did nothing. It was only after the other women of the house had come back from wherever they were (presumably at some sort of festival or public celebration)—only then did she summon them to her chambers and calmly tell them what had happened: she had seized Joseph’s garment and said, “Lie with me,” but he had fled the house, leaving the incriminating garment behind. “But if I tell my husband that Joseph had tried to rape me,” she says to her friends, “he won’t believe me. So you must help me and tell your husbands that he tried the same thing with you.” That’s why she says us instead of me.

 

This midrashic elaboration is reflected in a number of sources, including the writings of the Jewish philosopher and commentator Philo of Alexandria (early first century C.E.). In his retelling of the biblical story, Philo writes that Potiphar’s wife told her husband that he had made a big mistake in buying Joseph, since Joseph was “not satisfied to have availed himself merely of the women among his fellow slaves. Now he has become utterly lustful and has sought to lay his hands upon me.” In other words, Philo has heard of a midrashic tradition explaining that when Potiphar’s wife told her husband that Joseph “has come to us to take liberties with us” she was implying that she was not Joseph’s first victim.

 

Whatever else this story may say, it tells us something essential about midrash. Almost always, midrash is addressing a question about the precise wording of the biblical text, no matter how fanciful it may sometimes seem.

 

Shabbat shalom!