Abstract
This paper critically examines practices that follow violence in the Bible and early Jewish literature. It focuses on the story of Joseph, often read in different faith communities and in scholarship as a narrative of forgiveness. I analyze the story as it is told in the Hebrew Bible and in one of its late antique reinterpretations, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. These texts illustrate different ways of interrupting the cycle of violence. In contrast with modern conceptions, interpersonal forgiveness and reconciliation are absent (also Konstan, Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea, Cambridge University Press, 2010; Morgan, Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness in Ancient Judaism. In Ancient Forgiveness, ed. Charles L. Griswold and David Konstan, 137–157, Cambridge University Press, 2012). Instead, the texts describe other kinds of techniques, such as a complex set of role plays or reenactments in the Hebrew Bible and an inner softening of the self in the Testaments.
Thank you to Jennifer Quincey for carefully copyediting this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The role plays also compel the brothers to give successive accounts of their experiences; see Grossman, Story of Joseph’s Brothers.
- 3.
See Exod 15:15; the verb (nivhal) also indicates that the subject perceives imminent danger or death (Judg 20:41; 1 Sam 28:21; 2 Sam 4:1; Jer 51:32).
- 4.
The verb “to be pained” (‘atsav, Niphal or Hitpael) specifically describes the grief felt after a vulnerable relative or beloved has been wronged (e.g., 1 Sam 20:34; 2 Sam 19:3); it connotes powerlessness at preventing the beloved’s humiliation or death.
- 5.
Morgan 2012; Konstan 2010, 105–106. The rhetorical question “Am I in the place of God?” repeats Jacob’s rebuke to Rachel, complaining about her lack of children, well before Joseph’s birth (Gen 30:2). In both cases, the main character denies his responsibility, arguing that the task at hand falls within the deity’s remit.
- 6.
Joseph’s escalating weeping should not be interpreted necessarily as an expression of his internal states. On the role of tears in recognition scenes, see Bosworth 2015.
- 7.
Hollander and de Jonge 1985, 90.
- 8.
For example, Josephus uses the verb malakizomai in scenes where men are feminized; see Ant. 13:232 (cf. War 1:59); Ant. 19:29; War 6:211.
- 9.
Also Philo, Joseph 237, 246–248; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 2:163.
- 10.
The verb is used in LXX Gen 50:15; see also Jewish Antiquities 2:162.
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Mirguet, F. (2022). Interrupting the Cycle of Violence Without Forgiveness? The Story of Joseph in the Bible and Early Jewish Literature. In: Lotter, MS., Fischer, S. (eds) Guilt, Forgiveness, and Moral Repair. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84610-7_4
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