This is the first serious attempt in a century to examine the story of the Old Testament Patriarch Joseph in the early Syriac tradition.1 In this book, I begin the task by surveying the sources and analysing their treatment of Genesis 37 and 39.2 My focus on these two chapters acknowledges the division of the story in several of the sources. As I show in chapter 2, the story of Joseph was understood from the earliest recoverable period to be one of descent and ascent, foreshadowing the death and resurrection of Jesus. In fact, it is a story of a double descent, followed by an ascent: Joseph first descends from the favoured son to the status of slave, and then again from favoured slave to convict. It is from the depths of the prison that Joseph then begins an ascent that culminates in the fulfilment of his dreams and in his role as saviour of the house of Israel. This book explores the process and results of imagining and reimagining Joseph’s descent.
In the Introduction, I provide an orientation to the kinds of sources used in this study. Scholarship on the Bible in the Syriac tradition has tended to focus on major theological works and the commentary tradition.3 But other, and more pervasive, modes of engaging with the Bible involved imaginatively rewriting biblical narratives or preaching them in verse homilies. I focus first on the genres in which the Bible was rewritten in the early Syriac tradition, teasing out some of the distinctive features of each genre. This is the first attempt to systematically consider the genres in which the story of Joseph was retold in the early Syriac tradition. I then look at how these genres can be read, describing in the process the approach that I have taken and the critical idiom that I use in reading and analysing these sources.
This study is based on extensive manuscript research. This research has not only uncovered several new Joseph sources, but also identified additional manuscript witnesses to known sources. In chapter 1, I present a new systematic survey of the Syriac Joseph sources based on this research, describing each source, its genre, authorship, and dating, contents, and distinctive features. This survey is a meaningful first step in the task of reassessing the Syriac Joseph tradition.
Whereas I try to grasp the essence of each source in the first chapter, the remainder of the book is thematic, based on a close reading of how the sources construe Genesis 37 and 39. I aim to draw attention to those aspects of the sources that expose the processes, causes, and effects of the creation and recreation of the tradition. These elements will often be seen in the ways a source reconstructs the tradition, whether that be by the reworking or intertextual reading of the biblical text, or the creative use of a pre-existing motif. It is this use of the tradition, as Milman Parry has observed, that reveals the most about a given author and their work.4 Rather than comparing plots or tracking down motifs, I am trying to understand how each text construes the story of Joseph.5
The overarching theme in the Christian construal of Joseph is the way he typifies Christ (chapter 2). For early Syriac Christians, the story of Joseph was filled with the promise of Jesus and shadows of his betrayal, drawing upon the language of betrayal found in the New Testament. Chapter 2 examines the ways these two lives are bound together in the Syriac tradition. This is a pervasive theme in the sources, but also a dynamic one.
David Brown has observed that one consequence of making Joseph a type of Christ was to bring about a ‘halt’ to the effective use of the Joseph narrative as ‘a medium for moral reflection’.6 To be sure, the sources do wrestle with the construction of both Joseph and Jacob, striving to ensure that they are continually worthy of their status as exemplary types of Christ. Moreover, in so doing most of them are necessarily uninterested in any sense of moral growth in these characters—but not all. However, while Jacob and Joseph are held up as shining exemplary figures (chapter 3), the portrayal of the depravity of the brothers (chapter 4) and of Potiphar’s wife (chapters 6, 7, and 8) offers plenty of scope for the authors to engage in serious reflection on ‘moral growth and how that might occur’.7
Throughout this study I examine instances of the imaginative expansion of the Bible that characterizes these early sources. The narrative art of the sources is exposed through an analysis of how they view and construe these expanded episodes. It is in these moments, where little is at stake, either morally or theologically, that the authors of these narratives exhibit their capacity for living into scripture and artistically narrating what they see.8 This study is, then, an attempt to portray how the Joseph narrative was construed in the Syriac tradition, to expose the relationships between the texts, and to explain the transformations that occur in the tradition.
This is also a study of the history of Syriac literature. The history of a literature is not simply a recitation of its major authors and their works. Rather, it requires understanding individual texts in their generic and thematic context, recognizing relationships between texts, discerning the influence of historical context, and attending to the afterlives of texts—how they are transmitted, the influence they exert outside of their original context, and the ancient and modern scholarship that seeks to understand and control the sources.
This is not an exhaustive study of the Syriac Joseph tradition. Rather, this and my other work on these texts should be understood as an invitation to join in the pursuit of Joseph in the Syriac tradition. I have come to believe, with Potiphar’s wife, that Joseph cannot really be caught—he always escapes one’s grasp! Yet, I and others will continue to reach for him. And, with such rich materials, as Robert Murray observed in a different context, there is always more work ‘for another time and other seekers’.9
Näf, Syrische Josef-Gedichte was published in 1923. The Syriac Joseph tradition, though by far the richest in the patristic era, is often overlooked in the history of exegesis, as can be seen by two recent examples: Gregg, Shared Stories; and Förster, ‘Joseph (Son of Jacob)’.
In a forthcoming volume, I will treat Genesis 40–46 in the Syriac tradition.
As exemplified by Van Rompay, ‘Christian Syriac Tradition’.
‘As Milman Parry said in discussing another literature, one poet is “better than another not because he has by himself found a more striking way of expressing his own thoughts but because he has been better able to make use of the tradition”. Although there are obvious dangers and limitations to such an approach, it is undoubtedly valuable for sharpening our perspective as we try to evaluate our early poetry’ (Quirk, ‘Poetic Language’, 150).
‘The comparison of skeleton “plots” is simply not a critical literary process at all’. Tolkien, ‘Monsters and the Critics’, 256.
Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 260. Also, Yvonne Sherwood’s comment that in the Christian tradition Jonah ‘loses his own voice and script and outline and becomes a ventriloquist for Christ’ (Biblical Text and Its Afterlives, 17).
Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 260.
I draw the notion of ‘living into scripture’ from Farrer, End of Man, 12: ‘There is a traditional and quite simple form of prayer, or shall we say of private worship, which consists of taking gospel scenes, and living oneself into them. There is even a traditional and quite limited set of scenes: the joys of Christmas the sorrows of Holy Week, the glories of Easter into heaven itself’.
Murray, ‘Some Rhetorical Patterns’, 131.