JOSEPH
AND HIS BROTHERS
Thomas
Mann 1933
PRELUDE
Descent
into Hell
Page
3
"
VERY deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it
bottomless? Bottomless indeed, if
-
and
perhaps only if -
the
past we mean is the past merely of the life of mankind, that
riddling essence of which our own normally unsatisfied and
quite abnormally wretched ex-istences form a part; whose
mystery, of course, includes our own and is the alpha and
omega of all our questions, lending burning immediacy to all
we say, and significance to all our striving. For the deeper
we sound, the further down into the lower world of the past
we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest
founda-tions of humanity, its history and culture reveal
themselvelves unfathomable. No matter to what hazardous
lengths we let out our line they still withdraw again, and
further, into the depths. Again and further are the right
words, for the unresearchable plays a kind of mocking game
with our researchable ardours; it offers ap-parent holds and
goals, behind which, when we have gained them, new reaches
of the past still open out -
as
happens to the coastwise voyager, who finds no end to his
journey, for behind each headland of clayey dune he
conquers, fresh headlands and new distances lure him on.
Thus there may exist provisional
origins, which practically and in fact form the first
beginnings of the particular tradition held by a given
community, folk or communion of faith; and memory, though
sufficiently instructed that the depths have not actually
been plumbed, yet nationally may find reassurance in some
primitive point of time and, personally and historically
speaking, come to rest there.
Young
Joseph, for instance son of Jacob and the lovely, too soon
departed Rachel; Joseph living when Kurigalzu the Cassite
reigned at Babel, Lord of the Four Regions, King of Sumeria
and Akkadia, greatly comfortable to the heart of Bel-Marduk,
a ruler both luxuri-ous and stern, the curls of whose beard
stood ranged in such perfect rows that they looked like a
division of well-furnished shield-bearers; while at Thebes,
in the land which Joseph was used to to call Mizraim, also
Kemt, the Black, His sanctity the good God, called
Amun-is-satisfied, third of this name, the sun's very son,
beamed on the horizon
Page
4 /
of
his palace and blinded the enraptured eyes of his dust-born
sub-jects; when Asshur increased by the might of its gods,
and on the great shore route from Gaza up to the passes of
the cedar mountains the Royal caravans went to and fro,
bearing gifts in lapis-lazuli and stamped gold, between the
court of the Land of the Rivers and Pharaoh's court; when in
the cities of the Amorites, at Beth Shan, Ajalon, Ta'anach,
Urushalim, they served Astarte, while at Shechem and
Beth-lahma the seven days' wailing went up for the true son,
the dismembered one, and at Gebal, the City of the Book, El
was adored who needed no temple or rite; Joseph, then living
in that district of the land of Canaan which in Egypt is
called the upper Retenu, in his father's tents at Hebron,
shaded by terebinths and evergreen oaks, a youth famed for
his charm and charming especially by right from his mother,
who had been sweet and lovely like to the moon when it is
full and like Ishtar's star when it swims mildly in the
clear sky; but also armed from the father's side with gifts
of the spirit and perhaps in a sense excelling even him;
Joseph, lastly and in conclusion (for the fifth and the
sixth time Iname his name, and with gratification, for there
is mystery in names, and I will have it that knowledge of
his confers power to invoke that once so living and
conversable personality, albeit now sunk so deep below the
marge of time) Joseph, for his part regarded a certain town
called Uru, in Southern Babylonia, which in his tongue he
called Ur Kashdim, Ur of the Chaldees, as the beginning of
all things -
that
is, of all that mattered to him.
Thence,
namely, in times long gone by -
Joseph
was never quite clear how far back they lay - a brooding and
inwardly
unquiet man, with his wife, whom probably out of tenderness
he would call his sister, together with other members of his
family, had departed, to do as the moon did, that was the
deity of Ur, to wander and to rove, because he found it most
right and fitting to his unsatisfied, doubting, yes
tormented state. His removal, which wore an undeniable
colour of contumacy, had been concerned with certain
structures which had impressed him as offensive, and which
Nimrod the Mighty, then ruling in Ur, had if not erected,
yet restored and exceedingly in-creased in height. It was
the private conviction of the man from Ur that Nimrod had
done this less in honour of the divine lights of the
firmament to which they were dedicated, then as a bar
against dis-persion and as a sky-soaring monument to his own
accumulated power. From that power the man from Ur had now
escaped, by dispersing himself, and with his dependents
taking to pilgrimages of indeterminate length. The tradition
handed down to Joseph varied somewhat as to which had more
particularly annoyed the objector: whether the great moon-
citadel of Ur the turreted temple of the god Sin, after whom
the whole land of Shinar was named, the same
word
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appearing
in his own region, as for instance in the mountain called
Sinai; or that towering house of the sun, E-saglila, the
temple of Mar-duk at Babel itself, whose summit Nimrod had
exalted to the hight of the heavens, and a precise
description of which Joseph had re-cieved by word of mouth.
There had clearly been much else at which the musing man had
taken offence, beginning with that very mighti-ness of
Nimrod and going on to certain customs and practices which
to others seemed hallowed and unailienable by long tradition
but more and more filled his own soul with doubts. And since
it is not good to sit still when one's soul smarts with
doubt, he had simply put himself in motion.
He
reached Harran, city of the way and moon-city of the north,
in the land of Naharain, where he dwelt many years and
gathered recruits, receiving them into close relationship
with his own. But it was a relationship which spelt unrest
and almost nothing else; a soul unrest which expressed
itself in an unrest of the body that had little to do with
ordinary light-hearted wanderlust and the adventurousn-ess
of the free-footed, but was rather the suffering of the
hunted and solitary man, whose blood already throbbed with
the dark beginnings of oncoming destiny; perhaps the burden
of its weight and scope stood in precise relation to his
torment and unrest. Thus Harran too, lying as it did within
Nimrod's sphere of control, proved but a "station on the
way" from which the moon-man eventually set forth again,
together with Sarah his sister-wife and all his kin and his
and their possessions, to continue as their guide and Mahdi
his hegira towards an unknown goal.
So
they had reached the west country and the Amurru who dwelt
in the land of Canaan, where once the Hittites had been
lords; had crossed the country by stages and
thrust deep, deep southwards under other suns, into the land
of mud, where the water flows the wrong way, unlike the
waters of the land of Naharina, and one travelled northwards
downstream where a people stiff with age worshipped its
dead, and where for the man of Ur and for his requirements
there would have been nothing to seek or to find. Backwards
he turned to the westland, the middle land, which lay
between Nimrod's do-mains and the land of mud; and in the
southern part, not far from the desert, in a mountainous
region, where there was little ploughland,
but plenty of grazing for his cattle, he aquired a kind of
superficial permanence and dwelt and dealt with the
inhabitants on friendly terms.
Tradition has it that his god
-
that
god upon whose image his spirit laboured, highest among all
the rest, whom alone to serve he was in pride and love
resolved, the God of the ages, for whom he sought a name and
found none sufficient, wherefore he gave him the plural ,
calling him, provisionally, Elohim, the Godhead
-
Elohim,
then had
/
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made
him promises as far-reaching as clearly defined, to the
effect not only that he the man from Ur, should become a
folk in numbers like the sands of the sea and a blessing
unto all peoples, but also that the land wherein he now
dwelt as a stranger, and whither Elohim had led him out of
Chaldaea, should be to him and his seed in ever-lasting
possessions in all its parts -
whereby
the God of gods had expressly specified the populations and
present inhabitants of the land, whose "gates" the seed of
the man from Ur should possess. In other words, God had
destined these populations to defeat and sub-jection in the
interest of the man from Ur and his seed. But all this must
be accepted with caution, or at least with understanding. We
are dealing with later interpolations deliberately
calculated to confirm as the earliest intentions of the
divine political situations which had first been established
by force. As a matter of fact the moon-wander-er's spirit
was by no means of a kind likely to receive or to elicit
prom-ises of a political nature. There is no evidence that
when he left home he had already thought of the Amurruland
as a theatre of his future activities; and the fact that his
wanderings also took him through the land of tombs and of
the blunt -nosed lion maid would seem to point to the
opposite conclusion. But when he left Nimrod's high and
mighty state in his rear, likewise avoiding the greatly
estimable kingdom of the double-crowned king of the oasis,
and turned westwards -
into
a region, that is whose shattered public life condemned it
into impotence and servitude -
his
conduct
Does not argue the possession of political vision or of a
taste for imperial greatness. What had set him in motion was
unrest of the spirit, a need of God, and if - as there can
be no doubt - dispensations were vouchsafed him, they had
reference to the irradiations of his personal experience of
God, which was of a new kind altogether; and his whole
concern from the beginning had been to win for it sympathy
and adherence. He suffered; and when he compared the measure
of his inward distress with that of the great majority, he
drew the conclusions that it was pregnant with the
future.
Not in vain, so he heard from the
newly beheld God, shall have been thy torment and thine
unrest; for it shall fructify many souls and make proselytes
in numbers like to the sands of the seas; and it shall give
impulse to great expansions of life
Hidden in it as in a seed; and in one word, thou shalt be a
blessing. A blessing? It is unlikely that the word gives the
true meaning of that which happened to him in his vision and
which corresponded to his temperament and to his experience
of himself. For the word "blessing" carries with it an idea
which but ill describes men of his sort: men that is of
roving spirit and discomfortable mind, whose novel
conception of the deity is destined to make its mark upon
the future. The life of men with whom new histories begin
can seldom or never be a sheer unclouded blessing; not this
it is which their consciousness of self whispers
in
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their
ears. "And thou shalt be a destiny": such is the purer and
more precise meaning of the promise, in whatever language it
may have been spoken. And whether that destiny might or
might not be a blessing is a question the twofold nature of
which is apparent from the fact that it can always and
without exception be answered in dif-ferent ways - though of
course it was always answered in the affirma-tive by the
community -
continually
waxing in numbers and in grace - of those who recognized the
true Baal and Adad of the pan-theon in the God who had
brought out of Chaldaea the man from Ur; that community to
the existence of which young Joseph traced back his own
spiritual and physical well being.
2
SOMETIMES,
indeed , he thought of the moon-wanderer as his own great
grandfather -
though
such an idea is to be sternly excluded from the realms of
the possible. He himself was perfectly aware, on the ground
of much and varied instruction, that the position was one of
far wider bearings. Not so wide, however that that mighty
man of the earth whose boundary stones, adorned with
representations of the signs of the zodiac, the man from Ur
had put behind him, had actually been Nimrod, the first king
on earth, who had begotten Bel of Shinar. No, for according
to the tablets, this had been Hammurabi, the Lawgiver,
restorer of those citadels of the sun and moon; and when
young Joseph put him on a level with that prehistoric Nimrod
it was by a play of thought which most charmingly becomes
his spirit but which would be unbecoming and hence forbidden
to ours. The same is true of his occasional confusion of the
man from Ur with his father's ancestor and his, who had
borne the same or a similar name. Between the boy Joseph and
the pilgrimage of his ancestor in the spirit and the flesh
there lay, according to the system of chronology which his
age and sphere rejoiced in, fully twenty generations, or,
roughly speaking, six hundred Babylonian years, a period as
long as from our time back into the Gothic Middle Ages
-
as
long, and yet not so long either.
True, we have received our
mathematical sidereal time handed down to us from ages long
before the man from Ur ever set out on his wanderings, and,
in like manner, shall we hand it on to our furthest
descendants. But even so, the meaning, weight and fullness
of earthly time is not everywhere one and the same. Time has
uneven measure, despite all the objectivity of the Chaldaean
chronology. Six hundred years at that time and under that
sky did not mean what they mean in our western history. They
were a more level, silent, speechless reach; time was less
effective, her power to bring about change was both weaker
and more restricted in its range - though certainly
in
/
Page 8
those
twenty generations she had produced changes and revolutions,
even changes in the earth's surface in Joseph's immediate
circle, as we know and he knew too. For where in his
day, were Gomorrah and Sodom, the dwelling place
of Lot of Harran, who had been received into the spiritual
community of the man from Ur; where were those voluptuous
cities? Lo, the leaden alkaline lake lay there where their
unchastity had flourished, for the whole region had been
swept with a burning fiery flood of pitch and sulphur, so
frightful and apparently so destructive of all life that
lot's daughters, timely escaped with their father, though he
would have given them up for the lust of the Sodomites
instead of certain important guests whom he harboured, went
and lay with their father being under the delusion that save
themselves there were none left upon the earth, and out of
womanly careful ness for the con-tinuance of the race.
Thus time in its course had left
behind it even visible alterations. There had been times of
blessing and times of curse, times of fullness and times of
dearth, wars and campaigns, changing overlords and new gods.
Yet on the whole time then had been more conservatively
minded than time now, the frame of Joseph's life, his ways
and habits of thought were far more like his ancestors' than
ours are like the crusaders'. Memory resting on oral
tradition from generation to generation, was more
direct and confiding, it flowed freer, time was a more
unified and thus a briefer vista; young Joseph cannot be
blamed for vaguely foreshortening it, for sometimes
in a dreamy mood, per-haps by night and
moonlight, taking the man from Ur for his
father's grandfather - or even worse. For it must be stated
here that in all probability this man from Ur. Probably
- even to young Joseph, in a preciser hour, and
by broad daylight - this man from Ur had never seen the moon
citadel of Uru;
It had been his father who had gone thence
north-wards, towards Harran in the land of Naharain. And
thus it was only from Harran that this falsely so-called man
from Ur, having received the command from the Lord God, had
set out towards the country of the Amorites, together with
that Lot, later settled in Sodom, whom the tradition of the
community vaguely stated to be the son of the brother of the
man from Ur, on the ground, indeed, that he was the "son of
Harran."
Now Lot of Sodom was certainly a son of Harran, since he as
well as the Ur-man came from there. But to
turn Harran, the "city of the way," into a
brother of the man from Ur, and thus to make a nephew out of
his proselyte Lot, was a kind of dreamy toying with ideas
which, while scarcely permissible in broad daylight, yet
makes it easier to understand why young Joseph fell
naturally into the same kind of game.
He did so in the same good faith as
governed, for instance, the
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star-worshippers
and astrologers at Shinar, in their prognostications
according to the principle of stellar representation, and
exchanged one planet with another, for instance the sun,
when it had set with Ninurta the planet of war and state, or
the planet Marduk with Scorpio thereafter blithely calling
Scorpio Marduk and Ninurta the sun. He did so, that is, on
practical grounds, for his desire to set a beginning to the
chain of events to which he belonged encountered the same
difficulty that it always does: the fact that everybody has
a father, that nothing comes first and of itself, its own
cause, but that everybody is begotten and points backwards,
deeper down into the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and
the abysses of the well of the past. Joseph knew of course,
that the father of the Ur-man, that is to say the real man
from Uru, must have had a father, who must thus have really
been the beginning of his own personal history, and so on,
back to Abel, son of Adam, the ancestor of those who dwell
in tents and keep sheep. Thus the exodus from Shinar
afforded him only one particular and conditioned beginning
; he was well instructed by song and saga, how it
went on further and further into the general, through many
histories, back to Adapa or Adama, the first man, who,
indeed, according to a lying Babylonian saga, which Joseph
more or less knew by heart, had been the son of Ea, god of
wisdom and the water depths, and had served the gods as
baker and cup-bearer - but of whom Joseph had better and
more inspired knowledge; back to the garden in the East
wherein had stood the two trees, the tree of life and the
unchaste treeof death; back to the beginning the origin of
the world and the heavens and the earthly universe out of
con-fusion and chaos, by the might of the word, which moved
about the face of the deep and was God. But this, too, was
it not only a con-ditioned and particular beginning of
things? For there had already
Been forms of existence which looked up to the Creator in
admiration and amaze: sons of God, angels of the starry
firmament, about whom Joseph himself knew some odd and even
funny stories, and also re-bellious demons. These must have
their origin tn some past aeon of the world, which had grown
old and sunk and become raw ma-terial - and had even this
been the very first beginning ?
Here young Joseph's brain began to
reel, just as ours does when we lean over the edge of the
well; and despite some small inexacti-tudes which his pretty
and well-favoured little head permitted itself but which are
unsuitable for us, we may feel close to him and almost
contemporary, in respect to those deep backwards and abysms
of time into which so long ago he already gazed. He was a
human being like ourselves, thus he must appear to us, and
despite his earlyness in time just as remote as we
mathematically speaking, from the begin-nings of humanity (
not to speak of the beginnings of things in general ), for
they do in actual fact lie deep down in the darkness at
the
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bottom
of the abyss, and we, in our researches, must either stop at
the conditioned and apparent beginnings, confusing them with
the real beginning, in the same way that Joseph confused the
man from Ur on the one hand with his father, and on the
other with Joseph's own great-grand father; or else we must
keep on being lured from one time-coulisse to the next,
backwards and backwards into the im-measurable.
Hold thy hand a moment scribe said ZedAliz .Read this,
and then with understanding of this and that,
intercede, and seed the seed within.
Reight wah Alizzed said the scribe, as long as that thread
of threads be not lost.
Worry not az to that thread far yonder scribe, said the Zed
Aliz, twill all come out in the wish.
HOLY
BIBLE
Scofield
references
GENESIS Chapter
5 B.C. 4004
Page
12
"This is the book of the genera-tions of Adam. In the day
that God created man, in the likeness of God made he
him;
2 Male and female created he them;
and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day
when they were created .
3 And Adam lived an hundred and
thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness,
after his image and called his name
Seth;
4 And the days of Adam after he had
begotten Seth were eight hun-dred years: and he begat sons
and daughters:
5
And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and
thirty years: and he
died.
The
Family of Seth
6 And Seth lived an
hundred and five years and begat Enos:
7 And Seth lived after he
begat Enos eight hundred and seven years and begat sons and
daugh-ters:
8 And
all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and
he died.
9 And
Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan:
10 And Enos lived after he begat
Cainan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons and
daugh-ters:
11 And
all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years: and
he died.
12 And
Cainan lived seventy years and begat Mahalaleel
13 And Cainan lived after he be-gat
Mahalaleel eight hundred and forty years, and begat sons and
daughters:
14 And
all the days of Cainan were nine hundred and ten years: and
he died.
15 And
Mahaleel lived sixty and five years, and begat Jared:
16 And Mahaleel lived after he begat
Jared eight hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and
daughters:
17 And
all the days of Mahalaleel were eight hundred ninety and
five years: and he died.
18 And
Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat
Enoch:
19 And Jared lived after he begat
Enoch eight hundred years, and be-gat sons and
daughters:
20 And
all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years:
and he died.
21 And
Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah:
22 And Enoch walked with God after he
begat Methuselah: three hundred years, and begat sons and
daughters:
23 And
all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five
years:
24 And
Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.
25 And Methuselah lived an hundred
eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech:
26 And Methusalah lived after he
begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat
sons and daughters:
27 And
all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine
years: and he died.
28 And
Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years, and begat a
son:
29 And he called his name Noah,
saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our
work and toil of our hands, because
of the ground which the LORD hath cursed.
30 And Lamech lived after he be-gat
Noah five hundred ninety and five years, and begat sons and
daughters:
31 And all the days of Lamech were
seven
hundred
seventy
and
seven
years:
and he died.
32 And Noah was five hundred years
old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham and Japheth.
Page 17
Chapter
9
B.C.
2348
28 And
Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty
years.
29 And
all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and
he died..
Now then dear scribe said Zed Aliz, and for the love of
it all, transcribe those aforementioned vintage years to our
advantage.
For the sake of continuity, include verses 28 and 29 of
chapter 9 bearing in mind that there is a difference of 100
years in the calculated
time spans stated for Noah
Page
13
Chapter
5
verse
32 " And Noah was five hundred years old: and
Noah begat Shem, Ham and Japheth"
Page
17
Chapter
9
28
"And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty
years."
29 " And all the days of Noah were nine hundred
and fifty years: and he
died.
Alizzed and the scribe waved goodbye to the swiftly
turned returning glances watching until they disappeared
into the not too distant past
|