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Bible Study Resource: Women of the Old
Testament
POTIPHAR’S WIFE |
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BIBLE
ART: POTIPHAR'S WIFE |
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New material on
Potiphar's Wife at BIBLE TOP TEN:
BAD WOMEN
The story of Potiphar’s wife draws attention to the
inherent difference between Israel and Egypt. Egyptian culture always posed a danger to the integrity of Israelite culture, and
the Israelites led by Moses would eventually flee from it, just as Joseph
fled from an Egyptian woman.
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ON THIS PAGE: The Attempted Seduction of Joseph
Migration and Settlement in
Egypt The Cultural Setting for this Story
Activities and Focus Questions
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1 Background details for what happens (Genesis 39:1-6). 2 The wife’s attempted seduction of Joseph (Genesis 39:7-12). 3 The wife’s accusation (Genesis 39:13-20)
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THE CONTEXT OF THE STORY Joseph
was the first son of the Hebrew heroine, Rachel. He had every God-given advantage except
personal freedom: he was handsome, intelligent, shrewd - a born leader. He
also had God's special favor. But he was a slave, albeit one of
the high-ranking and influential servants who exercised power
in ancient households and court circles. After being kidnapped and sold into slavery, Joseph found himself in the household of the second man in the story, a wealthy officer in Pharaoh's service, Potiphar, who became Joseph's master. By dint of hard work and his own native intelligence, Joseph rose through the ranks of the household slaves, eventually becoming overseer of Potiphar's household and estates. Under Joseph's supervision, everything ran smoothly, and Potiphar was left free of responsibility, able to devote himself to his one great passion, food. ‘…he
had no concern for anything but the food that he ate.’ |
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Read Genesis 39:1-6. |
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For a while, nothing happened. But during this period, the third person in the story, Potiphar's Egyptian wife, noticed Joseph, inadvertently assuming the role of Mrs Robinson in 'The Graduate' (1967). Since Joseph ran the household, Potiphar's wife was in constant contact with him. She seems to have been a lonely, bored woman thrown into the company of an unusually handsome, attractive man, a Brad Pitt of the ancient world. She realized that what she'd wanted out of life, and what she'd got, were two quite different things. The result was a foregone conclusion. In Israelite and Egyptian culture, a slave girl was automatically assumed to be sexually available to her master (see Exodus 21:9-11), as were boy slaves, though of course sex with boys was forbidden by the Israelite moral code. See BIBLE TOP TEN: SLAVERY for information about slavery in the ancient world. Potiphar's wife seems to have decided that what was good for the gander was good for the goose - a male slave should be available to her if she wished, as a female slave was available to her husband. But the biblical narrator does not share that idea: according to the Hebrew way of thinking, a woman was the exclusive sexual property of her husband. The Egyptian wife did not sees things like this. Neglected as she was by her husband, she lost her head. She made some kind of sexual approach to Joseph, which the text rather baldly sums up as 'Lie with me'. As far as the narrator was concerned, this was a straightforward attempt by a woman to use her sexual and social power to dominate a man, and as such it was definitely A Bad Thing. Joseph was in a delicate situation. He had to either offend the wife or betray her husband. He judged that the former was less dangerous, and repulsed the woman. The wife was now in the grip of uncontrollable infatuation. She again begged Joseph to respond to her desire with the urgent 'Lie with me", but he avoided all possible contact with her, as far as he was able. One day when they were alone in the house she again begged for his love. In the physical tussle that followed, she pulled off the linen kalasiris that was the normal clothing of an Egyptian male. Naked, Joseph ran out of the room and then out of the house altogether, leaving his clothing behind. Read Genesis 39:7-12. |
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‘When she saw that he had left his garment in her
hand and had fled outside, she called out to the members of her household
and said to them “See, my husband has brought among us a Hebrew to
insult us! He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud
voice; and when he heard me raise my voice and cry out, he left his
garment beside me, and fled outside”.’ Suddenly, the passion she had felt for Joseph was transformed into hysterical rage. She had been humiliated by a slave, and she knew it. What was more, she knew that she had no-one to blame but herself. In her escalating fury she lashed out at Joseph. She called out to the members of the household (but weren't we just told there was no-one in the house?) that she has been attacked by Joseph, who had tried to rape her. She held up Joseph's loin-cloth to prove her point, suggesting that only her screams had prevented him abusing her. She waited until her husband came into the house, and told him the same story, blaming him for bringing trouble to their house in the form of this foreign slave. This lascivious incident has been popular with
artists. Her husband was enraged - at Joseph? at her? The text leaves this question unanswered. The husband too was faced with a dilemma: should he discredit and divorce his wife and retain a valuable servant, one who has made his life much more comfortable, or should he believe his wife, punish the servant and thus lose the comfort and order he valued more than anything? He (probably reluctantly) chose the latter course of action, impelled by the fact that the incident was now common knowledge and that he would, as a cuckold, become the object of ridicule. He charged Joseph with the attempted rape of his wife, and put him in prison. Of the wife, we hear no more. Read Genesis 39:13-20 |
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Reconstruction of Egyptian bed and chair |
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This story explores the moral vacuum in the heart of a rich, bored woman. She has power over other people's lives, but none over her own. She lacks the children she had a right to expect, and she lacks the love of her husband. In short, she has no purpose. As the story unfolds, we realize that Joseph the slave was able to exercise more control over circumstances than she was. In an apparently vulnerable position, Joseph was able to resist the allure of a foreign woman and a foreign culture. Both tried to entice him, but he stayed true to the Israelite moral code, which had a different understanding of the rights of men and women. 'In the Joseph story, good things happen to bad people, bad things turn out to be good things by misadventure. It is no coincidence that just after the sale of Joseph into slavery, Judah enters into ambiguous sexual relations with a Canaanite daughter-in-law, Tamar. This is a comment on events in Samuel, transposed into the Joseph story, but indirectly. In fact, these very stories may be the springboard for the Shakespearean worldview: scum at the bottom, scum at the top.' (Quoted from David's Secret Demons, Baruch Halpern, p.360)
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Older and wiser (John Singer Sargant's Egyptian Woman with Earrings) |
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MIGRATION
AND SETTLEMENT IN EGYPT In about 1650BCE, a dark age settled over Mesopotamia. The great cities were destroyed in war, and society fragmented into small groups. In the period of confusion and destruction that followed, many people were on the move. They left their homes and searched for a secure place to live, or simply tried to escape the social upheaval - much as migrants and refugees do today. At first, the migrants lived
in small, mobile clans that followed their flocks wherever pasture was best. They traveled
into territory already occupied by people called the Canaanites, a
relatively advanced group who lived a settled life in city-states and had
an economy based on agriculture and trade. As they prospered, the settler groups grew larger and began to split into offshoot clans. Eventually, following a famine in Canaan, a large number migrated to Egypt, where they became workers on the state projects of the Pharaohs. Even though they were living in the sophisticated cultural atmosphere of Egypt, these people held on to their own separate identity as Hebrews. The focus of their difference was worship of Jahweh, a deity who combined the power of all the gods of other tribes, but had a special relationship with them. Because of its power and its proximity, Egypt has been a strong presence in the biblical history of Israel.
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THE CULTURAL SETTING FOR THIS STORY
The laws of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, codified several centuries before the events in this story, provide insights into attitudes towards women in this period. There were laws to
It was probably in this period that women enjoyed greatest freedom and prestige. The stories in Genesis and Exodus show them as independent and strong, smart and tough. They displayed leadership and initiative. They almost always got their way when they wanted something.
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The love poems and lullabies of this period are another source of information. Some of the material in the Song of Songs may have been drawn from Egyptian love songs, and there was certainly cross-fertilization between these two sources. Potiphar's wife would have known, and been influenced by, the rich sensuality of these songs, which describe the joys, pain, desire, confusion and hope of young love - or old, for that matter. The song-poems capture the essence of private and personal feelings. They are about sexual, not romantic love. People in the ancient world were more comfortable with their sexuality than later Western civilization See the influence of Platonic dualism in 'Ideas About Women at That Time' in any of the chapters about New Testament women on this website, for example at WOMEN IN THE BIBLE: THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY. Some examples of Egyptian love-songs follow: A young man to his beloved: A young woman describes her heart, the Ka, as it
leaves her body to join her beloved, leaving her emotionally adrift and
confused: (Poems adapted from material in 'The Song of Songs and the ancient Egyptian love songs', Michael V. Fox, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)
Don't have people say 'This woman has gone to pieces with love' A young woman tells her lover to hurry as he comes
to her: Some of the poems are quite explicit; a young woman
describes the reward awaiting a lover: A young man describes how helpless he is in the
toils of love: For additional information on the lives of women in the Bible, see the links to
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________________________________________________ Slaves and the Law Empathizing
with the character in the story
Debate:
That wage slavery in the modern world is the same as slavery in past ages Focus Questions ____________________________________________________ INTERESTING SITES - stories, pictures, reconstructions POTIPHAR'S
WIFE AS ONE OF THE BAD WOMEN OF THE BIBLE THE
STORY OF JOSEPH: YOU CAN'T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN SLAVERY
IN THE BIBLE, WITH A CASE STUDY OF JOSEPH FAMOUS
PAINTINGS OF THE SEDUCTION SCENE EGYPTIAN
JEWELRY _____________________________________________________
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Young women at a banquet, Tomb of Nakht, mid-15th century BC
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The
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