Joseph “Was a Lad with”

In one of the rabbinic texts that underlies Ginzberg's paraphrase, Bereshit Rabbah 84:7, the rabbinic expositors turn to Genesis 37:2 (אֵלֶּה תֹּלְדוֹת יַעֲקֹב יוֹסֵף בֶּן־שְׁבַע־עֶשְׂרֵה שָׁנָה הָיָה רֹעֶה אֶת־אֶחָיו בַּצֹּאן וְהוּא נַעַר אֶת־בְּנֵי בִלְהָה וְאֶת־בְּנֵי זִלְפָּה נְשֵׁי אָבִיו, “These are the generations of Jacob: Joseph, a seventeen-year-old, would shepherd with his brothers among the flock and he was a lad with the sons of Bilhah and with the sons of Zilpah, the wives of his father”) and, in particular, the Bible's description that Joseph “was a lad with” his brothers. What, in the rabbinic estimation, might the Bible have meant by this phrase?Footnote ³

Bereshit Rabbah 87:3 incorporates virtually this identical description in a similar midrash, albeit not in the context of Joseph's behavior with his brothers but with respect to Mrs. Potiphar, behavior that attracts her to him. James Kugel considers this a midrashic doublet, the original interpretive context of which was not Genesis 37:2 but Genesis 39:7. This is, of course, possible, but Kugel's analysis is not unassailable.Footnote ¹⁰

In any case, the midrash presents Joseph's actions in an even more remarkable way than Ginzberg represents; indeed, his paraphrase seems almost muted in comparison. Let us focus on the enigmatic midrashic designation of Joseph's behavior as מעשה נערות; it is worthwhile to remember that midrashic texts, since they were first written down in the Middle Ages, were generally transmitted without vocalization. As we saw, Ginzberg preferred to read this as a reference to Joseph's “boyishness.”Footnote ¹¹ Instead, I translated it “deeds of girls” (though perhaps one might prefer, less literally, “feminine practices”). Others might prefer simply to read נערוּת as “deeds of youth.” But perhaps the point we should be considering is that this very linguistic (or textual) ambiguity points to gender ambiguity in Joseph's character, both in rabbinic literature and, as we shall see, in the Bible itself.

In contrast to any of the proposed alternatives, particularly considering the deeds that the midrash attributes to Joseph, I find the translation “deeds of girls” (or “feminine practices”) to be more appropriate to the rabbinic context.Footnote ¹² The rabbis would certainly not likely consider applying eye makeup, nor hairstyling, nor heel dangling to be specifically “boyish” or even “youthful” behavior, but rather things that women do.Footnote ¹³ Another rabbinic text, B. Yoma 9b,Footnote ¹⁴ disparages practices it considers characteristic of “the daughters of Zion” that are similar to those mentioned in the midrash about Joseph that we encountered earlier. This pericope, however, addresses a different topic:

While neither the biblical nor the rabbinic expressions in this text employ precisely the same idioms as the midrashic pericope,Footnote ¹⁸ the general picture is clear enough. The various practices described are all ascribed to women, not to “youth” in general; certainly the rabbis would not likely have considered them as “boyish.”Footnote ¹⁹

Some Methodological Considerations

Before proceeding with analysis of additional sources, it would be prudent to pause to consider the type of method that we would best employ in examining our question. Queer theory suggests itself, of course, as it has supplied us with new understandings of human behavior. Indeed, in the present essay I will consider the interpretations of a variety of queer readings both of biblical texts and, by extension, the rabbinic texts that have themselves endeavored to illuminate Scripture. Nonetheless, in assessing the rabbinic and biblical literature, I will, for the most part, first analyze texts within the scholarly disciplines with which I am most familiar—historical-critical scholarship and literary theory—which have long been the coin of my realm. I have chosen to proceed in this way not out of any disparagement of reader-response approaches but rather out of respect for what I consider to be a primary concern, articulated a generation ago by Krister Stendahl, to distinguish between the questions “What does the Bible mean?” (to us, its contemporary readers) and “What did the Bible mean?” (i.e., the meanings intended by its original writers and/or construed by its first audience).Footnote ²⁰ That is, while I respect the role readers and communities have in creating meaning,Footnote ²¹ I nonetheless believe in the prior need to endeavor to understand texts and traditions—both biblical and rabbinic—within the social and historical context of their original writers, compilers, receivers, redactors, and transmitters.Footnote ²² In the language of certain medieval rabbinic traditions, I remain committed to the need to distinguish between peshat (plain or original/contextual meaning) and derash (interpretive traditions that are “demanded” out of a text).Footnote ²³ However paramount the concern of the reader or exegete to offer a reading that is moral or otherwise compelling, that reader's interpretation is ultimately best served first by being firmly rooted in a historically and philologically accurate reading of whatever text is under consideration. While it is no doubt true that the reader completes the construction of meaning (without a reader, a text cannot “mean” and the voice of the author is therefore silenced), and it is also possible that reader-response methodologies may on occasion illuminate original readings, the first reading ought to show fidelity to the context in which the text (or artifact) was produced.

What, then, is the role of queer theory in my analysis of the biblical and rabbinic narratives that challenge us to question any preconceived notions we may have about Joseph's sexual orientation? Amy Kalmanofsky has offered an insightful way to consider our material: “The existence of these narratives suggests that the biblical authors thought about gender, and intentionally played with its norms. The fact that they sometimes portrayed masculine women and feminine men suggests that on some level the Bible's authors understood that gender was socially constructed, and that gendered characteristics and behaviors are not fixed.”Footnote ²⁴ Though the Bible invests deeply in this conventional gender dynamic, it allows its readers to see an alternative dynamic through these stories, and even more radically, I argue, it demands that they embrace this alternative dynamic on some level.Footnote ²⁵

My goal in this essay is, therefore, akin to Kalmanofsky's. While she focused exclusively on biblical texts, I will examine both biblical narratives about Joseph and rabbinic interpretations of those biblical texts that all “manifest,” as Kalmanofsky writes, “an unconventional gender dynamic.”Footnote ²⁶ Following a close reading of the texts I have selected, I will endeavor to draw conclusions with respect to the question of their purpose and meaning within the broader constructs of biblical and rabbinic literature.

Joseph's Beauty: A Rabbinic Perspective

Let us return to the midrashic take on Joseph and his personal conduct. Earlier, we noted that Kugel considered that the original midrash addressed not Genesis 37:2 but Genesis 39:7, the episode between Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, it might be argued that the practices in which Joseph engaged were regarded by the rabbinic sages as specifically Egyptian, and not Israelite, behaviors. To be clear, we are not speaking of “actual” ancient Egyptian practices, but rather, what the rabbis thought those customs to be as they read the Bible. Consider the rabbinic understanding of Joseph's hairstyling (מתקן בשערו). As Rivka Ulmer observes, “Joseph's elaborate hair-style was subjected to the hermeneutics of midrash and it became an Egyptian hair-style in the view of the rabbis. In opposition to Egyptian customs, applying make-up and curling one's hair was considered to render a male effeminate in rabbinic literature.”Footnote ²⁸ In any case, the ancient rabbinic perspective that Joseph was excessively concerned with his appearance apparently continued into the Middle Ages. In relying on a midrashic understanding of Joseph's practices, Rashi had no doubt about their ultimate purposes:

The explanation Rashi adds to the ancient midrash is telling: Joseph engaged in all these practices in order to “appear beautiful.”Footnote ³¹ Grooming oneself in the ways that these texts, both ancient and medieval, depict Joseph, has generally been taken as more characteristic of women than men.

Joseph: Intimate with Two of His Brothers?

We have looked at rabbinic texts that understood the Biblical Hebrew phrase והוא נער as a series of deeds that Joseph performed, which the ancient rabbinic sages may or may not have considered effeminate. The late medieval Midrash ha-gadol (fourteenth century)Footnote ³² looked not only at the anomalous phrase but at a longer series of words in the biblical verse, and interpreted accordingly:

It is not immediately clear why the midrash would treat the biblical narrative in this way, and its modern editor, Mordecai Margulies, states that whatever ancient precedent may have existed is unknown.Footnote ³⁴ And while we must admit that we do not know the precise social-historical circumstances in which this midrash was first proposed,Footnote ³⁵ and it is possible that it is more of medieval provenance than a recovery of an ancient source, it may well be that placing the midrash within the context of Hebrew and Arabic medieval homoerotic poetry may be the soundest explanation for this otherwise unknown interpretation.Footnote ³⁶ However, it is well known that Midrash ha-gadol often preserves versions of ancient midrashim that did not survive elsewhere.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, there may be one late ancient reverberation of such a midrash. In her work on the piyyutim of the seventh-century Palestinian Hebrew poet, Yannai, Laura Suzanne Lieber records a variant reading of one of Yannai's poems.Footnote ³⁸ In this piyyut, a kedushta for Genesis 37:1, the poet references Joseph interacting affectionately with the sons of the maidservants, and writes מנשקן לילדות, “he kissed them during (his) childhood.” In the context of this work, the poet considers the affection exchanged approvingly, as it was indicative (in the midrashic tradition that he followed) of Joseph's elevated status over that of his brothers.Footnote ³⁹

Moreover, lest one dismiss the midrashic expression מנשקין אותו ומגפפין אותו as reflecting “mere” (and permitted, nonsexual) boyish affection, let us consider its precise idiom in another rabbinic context. Midrash Eikhah Rabbah relates the sad tale of the children of Ẓadok, the high priest, who were taken captive by the Romans following the destruction of the Second Temple.Footnote ⁴⁰ The rabbinic narrative relates that these enslaved children, one male and one female, were placed by their eventual respective owners in the delicate circumstance of potential incestuous sexual union:

While the details of that narrative, in its various tradents and versions, do not interest us here, the precise expression, מנשקין… ומגפפין, that is used to describe the physical contact between Joseph and the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, is likewise found in the Eikhah Rabbah narrative: גפפין דין לדין, ונשקין דין לדין, “they embraced one another, they kissed one another.” In her discussion of this aggadah, Galit Hasan-Rokem is most convincing in claiming for the expression's erotic implications.Footnote ⁴²

Whether of medieval rabbinic provenance or of ancient ’Ereẓ Yisra'el poesy, the intent of both midrash and piyyut seems clear enough: from these perspectives, the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah would “use Joseph as a boy,” that is, engage with him in what would be, in the rabbinic estimation of the Bible, atypical expressions of physical contact or affection, one which would potentially lead to explicitly illicit sexual behaviors. Of course, the Bible often describes men embracing and/or kissing other men, particularly in moments fraught with emotion.Footnote ⁴³ From an ancient rabbinic perspective, however, it is likely that the kissing and caressing described in this midrash would have been thought of encompassing or leading to sexual practices that the Bible explicitly forbade.Footnote ⁴⁴ In any case, we shall return to a consideration of the biblical verse on its own merits, below.

Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar: Righteous Abstinence, or Near Consummation?

Let us consider an ancient rabbinic understanding of yet another episode in the biblical narrative, when the wife of Potiphar attempts to seduce Joseph, Genesis 39:11–12:Footnote ⁴⁵

It is somewhat telling that the biblical narrator, while consistently describing Joseph's character around this episode as unwavering in his devotion to remain steadfast,Footnote ⁴⁶ nonetheless does not choose to repeat a disclaimer about his moral rectitude precisely at this stage; following the general contours of biblical narrative poetics, the narrator chooses delightful ambiguity as a fundamental rule of discourse. Note what seems to be the lack of complete narrative disclosure in the individual phrases of these biblical verses: Mrs. Potiphar “grabbed hold of him by his garment”; she commanded him “lay with me”; and “he left his cloak in her hand” and fled outside.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus the biblical narrative itself suggests there may be more at play here than immediately meets the eye.

Some ambiguity may even be found in the phrase “to do his work” (לעשות מלאכתו); this “work” is otherwise unspecified. The combination in Biblical Hebrew of the verb עשׂה followed by the noun מלאכה is overwhelmingly found either in prescriptive or descriptive texts whose subject is the construction and/or maintenance of the tabernacle/temple; thus, its use here may be seen as exceptional and worthy of comment.Footnote ⁴⁸ One might assume that “the work” that drew Joseph into Potiphar's home was simply “his household chores.”Footnote ⁴⁹ However, according to one talmudic sugya, the phrase “to do his work” was a euphemism designed to disguise the more salacious intent both of Joseph as well as Mrs. Potiphar:

The ancient rabbinic exegetes were not satisfied with portraying Joseph as a one-dimensional character of unquestioned moral repute, but rather sought to present a more nuanced, and indeed (for an attractive young man) a more natural, approach. And just in case a reader misses the point, and does not quite understand to what “sinful matter” the midrash alludes, Rashi, the great medieval expositor, helpfully adds: “They [both] intended to have sex.”Footnote ⁵¹ In fact, Kugel cites other midrashic texts that situate Mrs. Potiphar's nearly successful seduction of Joseph not while she happened upon him doing his household chores—but in her bed!Footnote ⁵² Let us examine one of these midrashim:

Kugel has suggested that the term, בבגדו, generally translated to mean that Mrs. Potiphar seized Joseph “by (or in) his garment,” can equally mean “in his dealing faithlessly with her.” In fact, this is not such a midrashic stretch, as the Hebrew term means that very thing in such biblical verses as Exodus 21:8: אִם־רָעָה בְּעֵינֵי אֲדֹנֶיהָ אֲשֶׁר לוֹ יְעָדָהּ וְהֶפְדָּהּ לְעַם נָכְרִי לֹא־יִמְשֹׁל לְמָכְרָהּ בְּבִגְדוֹ־בָהּ, “If she is displeasing in the eyes of her master, who to himself he has designated, he shall have her redeemed; to a foreign people he shall have no right to sell her, on account of his betrayal of her.” Thus, in Kugel's heightened midrashic reading, by entering into Mrs. Potiphar's bed together with her, Joseph has essentially already betrayed his master.

Could Joseph “Perform as a Man”?

Following on the heels of this rabbinic interpretation, if the two of them, Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar, were already in bed, how would the midrashic perspective explain why the illicit intercourse did not occur? Of course, one could concur with interpretations that state that “at the last minute, although [Joseph] was prepared to sin, he conquered his inclination and did not sin.”Footnote ⁵⁴ But another view is provided by the midrash in Bereshit Rabbah 87:7:

This midrash adds to the parallel account in the Talmud several interpretations that account for the “chaste” outcome of the episode. Once again alluding to Joseph's undetermined sexuality, R. Samuel claims that Joseph “did not find himself to be a man.”Footnote ⁵⁷ According to this interpretation, Joseph could not or did not function sexually in the way that the rabbinic mind expected of a man when faced with an opportunity to so engage, in the privacy of an unoccupied home, and with a woman who had been propositioning him. A variant of the midrash on Genesis 39:11 adds yet another dimension to the reading:

In the crucial moment, it was not moral rectitude that spared Joseph from sin but rather his inability to consider himself a “man”—here defined by the ability to perform sexually with a woman (even if the propositioning party was legally and morally forbidden to him). R. Samuel found support for his understanding by his particular reading of Genesis 49:24, taken from Jacob's testamentary blessing of Joseph.

In the continuation of the midrash in Bereshit Rabbah 87:7, R. Isaac either adds to R. Samuel's reading, or offers another independent view of the narrative circumstances. According to his understanding, Joseph's “seed was scattered and exited via his fingernails,” a somewhat elusive idiom. While it might mean that R. Isaac felt that Joseph pleasured himself and that action enabled him to resist the blandishments of Mrs. Potiphar, the parallel account in the Babylonian Talmud offers this midrashic variant, “He stuck his hands in the ground so that his spilling-of-seed came out from between his finger-nails”; this second version may contain a different idiomatic reading, or may simply suggest another variant of what is essentially the same midrash.Footnote ⁵⁹ On the other hand, it may be an instance in which the aggadic characterization of Joseph has him follow rabbinic advice given to men who find themselves in circumstances that require the suppression of sexual urges. Joshua Levinson makes the case for this interpretation, for example, with respect to a statement in Talmud Yerushalmi Horayot 46d, found immediately before a rabbinic observation about Joseph's ability to withstand the blandishments of Mrs. Potiphar:

Of course, this statement is not identical with the idiom found in the aggadah we have cited above, so it may express a different idea.Footnote ⁶²

Finally, R. Huna cites an interpretation of R. Matana that Joseph's passion subsided in the presence of a vision of his father, Jacob.Footnote ⁶³ Where some interpreters of rabbinic literature might consider this iconic representation of his father a classic use of conscience in a narrative of seduction, it is also possible to read it as an insightful intuition of themes present in the actual (as opposed to midrashic) flow of biblical narrative; in short, it may well be a midrash that is close to the contextual meaning of Scripture.Footnote ⁶⁴

Joseph and the Women of Egypt

Ambiguity about Joseph's sexuality may also resound within a midrash that relates to a relatively early stage in the Joseph narrative. The midrash in question (Bereshit Rabbah 98:18) is actually taught about Genesis 49:22, but concerns the point in the narrative in Genesis 41:43 in which Pharaoh leads Joseph in a triumphal public chariot ride:

It is possible to read the narrative as testimony to Joseph's moral rectitude and chastity. However, in light of the rabbinic texts we have examined thus far, it is equally legitimate to read here an insight into a rabbinic view of Joseph's lack of interest in females. And while the Bible indisputably reports that Joseph fathered two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, with the wife given to him by Pharaoh (Genesis 41:45; 50–52), even here the Bible may allude to a curiosity with respect to Joseph's relationship with his wife. The text I have in mind is not the pericope in which the narrator offers name midrashim upon the birth of these two sons, but rather a text that has not received sufficient attention in either the gender identification readers (rabbis and moderns alike) assign to Joseph, or the ways in which his sexuality might be considered.Footnote ⁶⁶ I refer to the point in the narrative when Jacob formally adopts Ephraim and Manasseh as his own two (additional) sons, and then adds what looks like in context as a reassurance to Joseph that he will nonetheless found his own “nuclear family”: וּמוֹלַדְתְּךָ אֲשֶׁר־הוֹלַדְתָּ אַחֲרֵיהֶם לְךָ יִהְיוּ עַל שֵׁם אֲחֵיהֶם יִקָּרְאוּ בְּנַחֲלָתָם, “But your progeny to whom you shall give birth after them to you shall they be; over the name of their brothers shall they be called in their inheritance” (Genesis 48:6). Thus, Jacob promises to Joseph that Joseph's future sons will inherit directly from their father instead of Ephraim and Manasseh, who will already inherit directly from Jacob, their biological grandfather, but legally their father. Yet one late medieval midrash makes the following observation:

In fact, the midrash has hit upon an inescapable truth: following the birth of these two sons, Joseph never again fathers children.Footnote ⁶⁸ In contradistinction to his brothers, Joseph gave birth to only two sons.Footnote ⁶⁹ While the midrashic interpretation is itself not an indication that following the birth of Ephraim and Manasseh, Joseph abstained from sexual relations with his wife, nonetheless, it is undeniable that despite Jacob's expressed expectation in Genesis 48:6 that Joseph would bear additional children like all of his brothers, he in fact is never recorded as having done so.Footnote ⁷⁰

Joseph's and Dinah's Conceptions: A Switch of Genders?

The previous examples have established a perspective rooted in ancient and medieval rabbinic literature that at the very least raised questions with respect to the confusion rabbinic expositors expressed regarding Joseph's gender identity. To add to the picture, at least one rabbinic tradent explicitly states that the conception and pregnancy that ultimately resulted in the birth of Joseph had originally been a female fetus.Footnote ⁷¹ Thus, we might say that according to this rabbinic tradition, “Joseph,” as it were, had been destined to be born a woman! The Genesis narrative that related the births of Jacob's sons to his several wives begins with the rapid births of Jacob's first four sons, by Leah (Genesis 29:31–35). The narrator then turns to the births by the maidservants (Genesis 30:1–13) that result in four additional sons. Subsequently, the narrator relates the episode of the mandrakes and its aftermath (Genesis 30:14–20), and two more sons are added to Leah's progeny. At this point in the narrative, to make it clear, Jacob has ten sons by three of his four wives, and none yet by his favorite wife, Rachel. In relating all of these births, the biblical narrator employs a variant of the formula, ותהר ותלד בן, “she conceived and bore a son,”Footnote ⁷² for example, וַתַּהַר לֵאָה וַתֵּלֶד בֵּן וַתִּקְרָא שְׁמוֹ רְאוּבֵן, “[Leah] conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben” (Genesis 29:32).Footnote ⁷³ Note that the narrator employs the typical Biblical Hebrew verbal form for relating events in narrative sequence, ויקטֹל (wyqtl), that is, a prefixed verb with vav-consecutive, used in the first position of a sentence or major clause.Footnote ⁷⁴ However, following this long narration, when describing the birth of Dinah the narrator alters the formula and, apparently to highlight the distinctive circumstances of this particular birth, chooses instead a suffixed-form verb (קטל, qtl), and places this verb, significantly, not in the first position of the clause: וְאַחַר יָלְדָה בַּת וַתִּקְרָא אֶת־שְׁמָהּ דִּינָה, “And afterwards [Leah] bore a daughter, and she called her name Dinah” (Genesis 30:21). In midrashic discourse, a shift such as this virtually cries out for interpretation.Footnote ⁷⁵ The significance of the shift is heightened when the Bible, in the account of Rachel's birth of Joseph, reverts to the previously used formula, וַתַּהַר וַתֵּלֶד בֵּן, “[Rachel] conceived and bore a son” (Genesis 30:23).Footnote ⁷⁶

Thus, the rabbinic mindset noted the disjunction in the biblical account of Dinah's birth, and focused on its peculiarities to learn some insightful truth. A number of texts in both the Babylonian Talmud and the Talmud of the Land of Israel, as well as several midrashic compositions, incorporate the tradition that Dinah had originally been intended as a male birth.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Yerushalmi's midrash is brief:

In this midrash, Rachel prays, presumably for a son, since earlier in the biblical account she had expressed great distress over not apparently being able to conceive.Footnote ⁷⁹ Note that while this midrash explicitly claims that, at the instance of Rachel's prayer, Leah's conception of what originally was a male fetus was changed into a female, it states nothing with respect to any fetus that Rachel might be carrying. Indeed, if the midrash were to follow the sequence of biblical narrative—not necessarily required or even expected, of course—Rachel only conceives a child after Dinah is born: “Afterwards, she bore a daughter, and called her name Dinah. Then, God remembered Rachel; God heeded her and opened her womb” (Genesis 30:21–22).

A more expansive version of this midrash is found in the Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 60a:

In this midrash, it is Leah who prays: working from the rabbinic perspective that Jacob is “destined” to father twelve sons, each of which is to become one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel,Footnote ⁸² Leah selflessly acts on behalf of her sister. Certain that her current pregnancy will yield another male birth, and realizing that this would prevent Rachel from even the possibility of giving birth to two sons (Jacob being midrashically limited to twelve sons, ten of whom are already accounted for), she prays that God change this fetus into a female; God grants this request, and this accounts for the birth of Dinah. Here, too, though, nothing is stated about any child that Rachel is currently carrying; this midrash easily accords with biblical narrative sequence, since Rachel conceives and bears Joseph immediately afterwards.

Thus, none of these midrashim mention that, corresponding with the switch of Leah's male fetus into a female (Dinah), Rachel's conception of Joseph had originally been female. However, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 30:21, while not making precisely this claim, comes astonishingly close to stating this:

The remarkable observation that “the fetuses of their wombs were exchanged, and Joseph was given into the womb of Rachel” appears to be a midrashic conclusion without precedent in the extant literature.Footnote ⁸⁴ Since it is nonetheless there we must consider what this tradition suggests—and what it does not suggest. It does, without question, expand the biblical account of the birth of Dinah with a version of a midrash that suggests that either Rachel or, in other accounts, Leah, prayed that Rachel not be denied at least the same number of male births as the two maidservants, Zilpah and Bilhah. To repeat, it is the presumption of the midrash that Jacob would be the progenitor of twelve sons, from whom would be descended the Twelve Tribes of Israel; Leah had already given birth to six, and each maidservant had given birth to two, making a total of ten. If Leah had given birth to one additional male child, reasons the midrash, then Rachel could not end up responsible for more than one, thus making her “of lesser status,” in the ancient estimation, than the maidservants. Thus, the motivation for the prayer: Leah's current pregnancy, destined to result in the birth of a male child, would be exchanged for that of Rachel, who was destined to give birth to a female. On the other hand, while the midrash in Yerushalmi Berakhot (and the others that follow and/or expand it) states explicitly that Leah's fetus had originally been male and was changed into a female, the Targum's midrash does not correspondingly state that Rachel originally carried a female fetus that was turned into a male (Joseph); what the Targum does state is ואתחלפו, that is, in some undisclosed way, their two respective fetuses were exchanged, Dinah going from Rachel's womb into Leah's, and Joseph going from Leah's womb into Rachel's. Thus, while it remains a bold midrash, the Targum does not quite enable us to consider Joseph as an originally female fetus; the most one can say is that the Targum states that he occupied the womb where a female fetus once dwelled. Thus far, the midrashic imagination. To go beyond this, as some would,Footnote ⁸⁵ and suggest that the rabbinic depiction of the origins of Joseph's conception and birth result in any “latent femininity” that may be associated with Joseph's character or self-image exceeds a fair reading of the targumic midrash.Footnote ⁸⁶

We have engaged with a series of rabbinic interpretations that, surprisingly, depict Joseph against gender type. What would lead these exegetes to present Joseph in this way? Midrashim do not generally interpret without some “textual provocation,” or what I like to call “grist for the midrashic mill.”Footnote ⁸⁷ What hints does the Bible itself provide that might have led the exegetes to interpret in the way that they did?Footnote ⁸⁸

Joseph's Coat: Gender Signifier?

In Genesis 37:3 Jacob gives Joseph the so-called “coat of many colors”:Footnote ⁸⁹ וְיִשְׂרָאֵל אָהַב אֶת־יוֹסֵף מִכָּל־בָּנָיו כִּי־בֶן־זְקֻנִים הוּא לוֹ וְעָשָׂה לוֹ כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים, “Israel loved Joseph more than all of his sons, for a son of old age was he to him, and he made for him a ketonet passim.” I have deliberately transliterated the term instead of offering a conjectural translation. Although some would speculate about the appearance of the garment itselfFootnote ⁹⁰ or the significance of the gift, the question that seems to me of primary importance for our present considerations is, who wore this kind of garment? While the garment is featured a handful of times in the Joseph narrative,Footnote ⁹¹ the Bible only mentions it on one other occasion, in the narrative that relates Amnon's rape of his half-sister, Tamar: וְעָלֶיהָ כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים כִּי כֵן תִּלְבַּשְׁןָ בְנוֹת־הַמֶּלֶךְ הַבְּתוּלֹת מְעִילִים, “Upon her was a ketonet passim, for so would the daughters of the king, marriage-aged, wear cloaks” (2 Samuel 13:18–19).Footnote ⁹² Whatever else this tragic narrative may tell us, it clearly resolves at least one matter: the cloak that Jacob gave his favorite son was one specifically designed to be worn by (high-born) women!

Assuming that to at least some degree there is a legitimate connection between the garment that Jacob gave to Joseph in Genesis 37 and the one Tamar wore (and tore) in 2 Samuel 13, why would Jacob give Joseph women's clothing to wear? Was it not enough to endanger Joseph that Jacob loved him the best? As we have already seen in earlier biblical narratives, favoritism alone leads to serious family discord. What circumstances would have led Jacob to make his son even more vulnerable to the ill feelings of his brothers?Footnote ⁹³ While the Bible does not state explicitly the circumstances through which Jacob gave his favorite son a special garment, I believe that it does give us one significant clue, which may be precisely the kind of “grist” that led the midrashic exegetes to paint the picture of Joseph with which we began this study. The first fruition of that clue actually occurs much earlier in the biblical narrative, when, in the midst of the burgeoning love story between Jacob and Rachel (Genesis 29:2–9),Footnote ⁹⁴ the narrator steps in to describe both Rachel and her sister, Leah: וְעֵינֵי לֵאָה רַכּוֹת וְרָחֵל הָיְתָה יְפַת־תֹּאַר וִיפַת מַרְאֶה, “The eyes of Leah were weak,Footnote ⁹⁵ but Rachel was beautiful of stature and beautiful of appearance” (Genesis 29:17).Footnote ⁹⁶ As far as folk narratives go, this one seems to follow a usual pattern, “there's a pretty sister and, well, a not-so-pretty sister.”Footnote ⁹⁷ However, upon closer reflection the verse turns out to be much more unusually formulated: the biblical narrator has not just chosen a typical phrase to describe Rachel's beauty, but a phrase that occurs (albeit in masculine form) only in one other place in Scripture—not coincidentally, it would seem, it is a phrase used to describe Joseph's stature and beauty!Footnote ⁹⁸ In the midst of the build-up to the scene in which Mrs. Potiphar attempts to seduce Joseph, the biblical narrator relates: וַיַּעֲזֹב כָּל־אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ בְּיַד־יוֹסֵף וְלֹא־יָדַע אִתּוֹ מְאוּמָה כִּי אִם־הַלֶּחֶם אֲשֶׁר־הוּא אוֹכֵל וַיְהִי יוֹסֵף יְפֵה־תֹאַר וִיפֵה מַרְאֶה, “[Potiphar] left all that he had into the hand of Joseph and he knew with respect to him nothing except the food that he ate. Now Joseph was beautiful of stature and beautiful of appearance” (Genesis 39:6). Again, while there are several similar biblical descriptions of beauty that use one or more parts of this description,Footnote ⁹⁹ only Rachel and Joseph share the complete and precise formulation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Joseph “Was a Lad with” (Redux)

Let us return to one of the biblical texts we examined earlier through the prism of rabbinic midrash, Genesis 37:2. We looked at a rabbinic interpretation of what the Bible might have meant when it stated that Joseph “was a lad with” the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah (וְהוּא נַעַר אֶת־בְּנֵי בִלְהָה וְאֶת־בְּנֵי זִלְפָּה נְשֵׁי אָבִיו). Recent biblical studies have raised a number of possibilities for the full connotations of the term נער (lad).Footnote ¹⁰¹ Our concerns are more particularly focused on its use in Genesis 37:2: historical-critical Bible scholars have long sought to understand the peculiarities of the phrasing, which in the entire Bible occurs only here.Footnote ¹⁰² It seems that standard commentaries do not quite do justice to the phrase. E. A. Speiser, for example, translates that Joseph “was assisting the sons of his father's wives Bilhah and Zilpah,” and notes the (inexact) correspondence of נער in Exodus 33:11.Footnote ¹⁰³ A century ago, John Skinner observed, “The clause והוא נער is difficult. As a parenthesis … it is superfluous after the definite statement of Joseph's age [earlier in the verse], and leaves us with a wrong identification of the sons of the concubines with the previous אחיו. If it be joined to what follows, Gunkel has rightly seen that we want a word expressing something that Joseph was or did in relation to the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Skinner's conclusion that “Joseph, while shepherding with [all] his brethren, fell out with the four sons of the concubines,”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ although possible, is by no means certain. Nonetheless, his (or Hermann Gunkel's) observation that an interpretation of the morpheme נער in this context requires “a word expressing something that Joseph was or did in relation to the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah” is sound, as the phrase seems less nominal than verbal. Unfortunately, the other meanings of the root n-ʿ-r in Biblical Hebrew, “to roar” or “to shake,” do not appear to be particularly helpful.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Eliezer Ben Yehuda offers what might be an interesting and linguistically precise approach to the difficulties of this verse. He notes that elsewhere in the PentateuchFootnote ¹⁰⁷ the morpheme נער can be vocalized either as masculine or feminine (אפשר שנער משמש לזכר גם לנקבה), and references both Greek and Arabic equivalents.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ One may also consider that the plural נערים may include both males and females.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ At a minimum, one might propose that this orthographic ambiguity—we can think of it as “sight-play”Footnote ¹¹⁰—may have provided a basis for the rabbinic midrash we explored earlier; at the same time, it may also offer us a more nuanced understanding of what lies under the surface of Genesis 37:2.

In his book Making Men: The Male Coming-of-Age Theme in the Hebrew Bible, Stephan Wilson proposes other layers of meaning associated with the term נער, some of which may inform our discussion of Joseph.Footnote ¹¹¹ First, Wilson points to the general powerlessness of characters whom Scripture designates by this term:Footnote ¹¹² “Turning to the specific characteristics ascribed to individuals referred to as נערים with respect to their youth reveals that the most frequently attested attribute is a lack of power. Biblical נערים are those acted upon, not the actors. Often this impotence is understood as an absence of physical strength.… Joseph … lacks the strength to put up any resistance to the malicious actions of his brothers.”Footnote ¹¹³ Additionally, Wilson notes that “a less prominent, but recognizable, facet of the biblical portrayal of youths identified by the term נער is that they are held up as an aesthetic ideal for the male body.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Wilson points out that “two of the three male characters referred to in the Bible as beautiful … are explicitly identified as נערים.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Finally, he references a number of occasions when נערים display a “predilection for rash and violent action”; one instance of particular significance for our consideration is Ruth 2:9, where Boaz endeavors to keep Ruth safe and cautions his נערים not to physically or sexually abuse her.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Thus, any and all of these meanings may be understood with regard to the character of Joseph and his designation as a נער “with the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah” in the biblical narrative of Genesis 37:2. Indeed, we may even imagine the ambiguity in this phrase (נער את) to indicate that Joseph engaged in some degree of willing and mutual sexual liaisons with the sons of the concubines,Footnote ¹¹⁷ and that this contributed to the hatred his other brothers had for him.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Jacob and His Children: Consequences of Narcissistic Parenting?

Thus, we may claim that Scripture has subtly painted a picture of Joseph with a certain degree of confused or transgendered sexual identity. Consequences arising from this question of sexual identity may have been accentuated both by Jacob's parental abuse of his ostensibly favorite son, and by certain traumatic youthful experiences to which this favoritism may have led. Indeed, this portraiture fits in well with other aspects of the Bible's characterization of these two figures.

Two incidents in the biblical depiction of Jacob help portray him as one of the most egocentric characters in the Bible.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In Genesis 34, the narrative that describes Schechem's rape and abduction of Dinah, Jacob distinguishes himself in the main by … doing nothing. He expresses nary a thought nor emotion upon learning that his daughter has been raped and is effectively being held captive in the home of her attacker.Footnote ¹²⁰ In contradistinction to his outpouring of grief upon (mistakenly) learning that Joseph has been killed by a wild beast,Footnote ¹²¹ when confronted by the news of the attack on his daughter, Dinah, Jacob neither weeps nor tears his garments, nor becomes angry, nor plans vengeance. When early on the narrator points out וְהֶחֱרִשׁ יַעֲקֹב, that “Jacob had remained silent,” one might have thought that this reluctance to act was only temporary. However, Jacob's quiescence continues throughout the story, and his sons therefore step into the breach, for good and for ill. In fact, Jacob only speaks towards the very end of the narrative, when he condemns the behavior of Simon and Levi after they have rescued “their sister” (and not, pointedly, when his other sons had looted and despoiled the town, presumably enriching his household): וַיֹּאמֶר יַעֲקֹב אֶל־שִׁמְעוֹן וְאֶל־לֵוִי עֲכַרְתֶּם אֹתִי לְהַבְאִישֵׁנִי בְּיֹשֵׁב הָאָרֶץ בַּכְּנַעֲנִי וּבַפְּרִזִּי וַאֲנִי מְתֵי מִסְפָּר וְנֶאֶסְפוּ עָלַי וְהִכּוּנִי וְנִשְׁמַדְתִּי אֲנִי וּבֵיתִי, “Jacob said to Simon and to Levi, ‘you have troubled me, to make me odious among the dwellers of the land, among the Canaanite and Perizzite, whereas I am of small number, and they shall gather against me and strike me, and I will be destroyed, I and my house’” (Genesis 34:30). It is telling that in the Hebrew text, the verse contains no fewer than eight self-references; when Jacob finally speaks, there is no mistaking who is the center of his universe.Footnote ¹²² As with any narcissist, Jacob's children serve primarily to sustain him; the catastrophe that befalls his daughter functions in his eyes only as a threat to his well-being, and nowhere in the biblical narrative does he express a concern for her.

The narrator also points to Jacob's utter lack of sentiment for his children's sensitivities in a scene in which he himself is off-stage. In the denouement of the Joseph narrative, when Judah approaches the Egyptian viceroy, unaware that he is speaking to his long-lost brother, Judah recounts a speech that Jacob had spoken to him while they were yet in the Land of Canaan, negotiating with Judah about giving permission for Benjamin to accompany his other sons as they returned to Egypt: וַיֹּאמֶר עַבְדְּךָ אָבִי אֵלֵינוּ אַתֶּם יְדַעְתֶּם כִּי שְׁנַיִם יָלְדָה־לִּי אִשְׁתִּי, “He said [did] your servant, my father, to us, ‘you know that two has she born me, [has] my wife’” (Genesis 44:27). As Judah recounts these words to Joseph one can only imagine the pain and sense of continued rejection that they must bring Judah; indeed, it may be this very sense of rejection that helps Judah in his journey from oppressing one brother (Joseph) to standing surety for another (Benjamin). Jacob, after all, had four wives, and these women had born him twelve sons (and at least two or, more likely, many daughters).Footnote ¹²³ And yet Jacob, in expressing the sentiment, seems utterly unaware of how the words “two has she born me, my wife” would likely be received by the son whom he is addressing.

In both of these cases, as in many others in the Genesis narrative, Jacob acts in an exclusively egocentric manner, apparently unconcerned with the repercussions his actions and statements have on others; from his behavior in utero and continuing after his death, Jacob, the heel grabber, acts first and foremost on his own behalf. Therefore, even with respect to the gift of the celebrated “coat of many colors” to his ostensibly favorite son, we must reevaluate the degree to which such actions and other behaviors created danger for his son and, to one degree or another, added to the risks that transgender human beings, or those with evolving sexual orientation, may experience in any society. In this context, Michael Carden's comment in The Queer Bible Commentary comes to mind: “Not only in the family, Jacob can also be read here as representative of those authority figures in classroom, workplace, neighborhood or barracks who, awkwardly embarrassed in their homophobia, turn a blind eye to the harassment and blatant violence that confronts a person publicly, flamboyantly, defiantly in breach of the gender and sexual norms.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Indeed, Jacob more than turns a blind eye; rather, his actions and inactions lead family members into grave danger.

Some might wish to make an opposing argument with respect to Jacob's gift of the “coat of many colors,” seeing such a gift as positive testimony to Jacob's attention to his son's evolving self-image, and arguing that Jacob, sensitive to Joseph's evolving understanding of his own sexual orientation, or even his aspiration to transgender identity, offered him the gift of this coat to support Joseph's evolution. Although such an argument might resound in current reader-response theory, first, it does not comport with a historically and literarily contextual interpretation. The Bible does not elsewhere relate any action of Jacob that sympathetically responds to the existential needs of any other character with whom he comes into contact. On the contrary, as demonstrated above, Jacob acts exclusively in support of his own interests.Footnote ¹²⁵ Jacob even conditions his devotional loyalty to God on the degree to which God supports him materially (Genesis 28:20–21).Footnote ¹²⁶ Second, in any event, the gift of the coat resulted in making Joseph even more vulnerable to his brothers’ enmity and exploitation and, as a result, further endangered Jacob's ostensibly favorite child. Thus, at best, even if it were an acknowledgment of Joseph's wish to be transgender, Jacob's gift was a clumsy and short-sighted act that spoke more about the needs of the giver than those of the recipient.

Some Methodological Conclusions: The Intersection of Queer Theory and Historical-Critical Approaches

In a daring poem, “She Is Joseph,” the contemporary Israeli poet Nurit Zarhi presents the biblical character of Joseph as a girl. The poem, in part, reads as follows:

Zarhi is alert to some of the same nuances shared by the biblical narrator, and deftly develops them to a degree that neither ancient nor medieval rabbis dared.Footnote ¹²⁸ With this poem in mind, I return to the methodological question I raised towards the beginning of this essay: To what degree might queer readings of the Bible help make contemporary readers aware of some of the narrative's dimensions that either escaped ancient readers or only emerged in disparate and unintegrated readings?

Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone have defined queer reading as follows: “To queer is to complicate, to disrupt, to disturb all kinds of orthodoxies, including at least, these two … those that take our current sex/gender regime as natural and God-given and those that posit ‘the Bible’ as a flat, transparent window into the divine mind.”Footnote ¹²⁹ With respect to the intersect between the type of historical-critical scholarship that I have followed herein, on the one hand, and queer reading, on the other, S. Tamar Kamionkowski writes in a vein that I think is most appropriate for our purposes, “I believe that queer readings will have an impact and will speak to a greater audience if they are framed as a reading strategy that adds new layers to our appreciation of the Bible. This will require queer theorists to allow themselves to land for even a moment in the world of meaning making and, perhaps more challenging, it will require more traditional biblicists to heed the voice of Jewish textual tradition that ‘these and these are the word of the living God’ (B. ‘Eruvin 34a).”Footnote ¹³⁰

Throughout this essay, I have claimed that the biblical and rabbinic texts that I have analyzed themselves raised the issues concerning Joseph's sexual orientation; ancient biblical writers and the rabbinic communities who first received, developed, and transmitted these narratives considered the unconventional gender dynamics that ran contrary to the normative ideational, and behaviorally prescriptive, traditions presented by the main body of biblical and rabbinic texts.

An Iron-Age Context for Gender Bending?

We are therefore impelled to inquire about the circumstances that led to the creation and the development of the narratives and the interpretive traditions they engender. To what degree, for example, might they have reflected the multivalent (solely Greco-Roman?) cultural constructions of gender identity?Footnote ¹³¹ Or, how might the Hellenist cultural world in which the rabbis first expressed their interpretive traditions have informed the rabbinic construction? Indeed, among those scholars who have explored the social constructs that might lay behind the rabbinic texts in particular, Greco-Roman cultural contexts have seemed primary. However, having begun our own line of inquiry, we should not be so limited in scope. To the extent that I have correctly identified and noted the latent biblical dimensions of uncertain sexual orientation in the Bible's presentation of Joseph's character in the narrative settings in which it placed him, the rabbinic interpretations should be seen to a degree as an authentic reflection and not an artificial scaffolding upon which to place the rabbis’ own cultural concerns. It is the biblical narrator—refracting what it is in all probability an Iron-Age, not Hellenist, sensibility—who creates or conveys the character of Joseph in the following ways: (a) Joseph was beautiful, and the narrator describes him in precisely the same two expressions as that narrator had chosen to describe Joseph's mother, Rachel—the only two instances in the entire Bible in which those precise terms are employed together; (b) Joseph received and wore a cloak typically worn only by high-born women; (c) Joseph engaged in some not-completely-disclosed (and possibly intimate) relationship with two of his brothers; (d) Joseph did not consummate a sexual relationship with a temptress, despite having opportunity to do so; and (e) although admittedly not as conclusive as the foregoing, Joseph did not father more than two children, despite the narrator's explicit expectation (placed in the mouth of his father, Jacob) that he will, in fact, do so. Thus, questions of cultural constructs that are asked of rabbinic texts might be asked of the biblical narratives themselves in their own contexts.Footnote ¹³²

Why might traditions originating in the Iron Age question Joseph's sexual orientation even as they pair him with brothers, and especially with Judah, whose sexual orientation was unquestioned? The Iron-Age background points to a precious irony: during most of this period, it was the kingdom represented by Joseph (especially through his son, Ephraim), that is, northern Israel, that was by far the more powerful of the two biblical kingdoms, and Judah's domain, the backward and far less populatedFootnote ¹³³ southern Kingdom of Judah, that was the weaker.Footnote ¹³⁴ But this may be precisely the point: following the destruction of the Israelite kingdom in the eighth century BCE, it was the Kingdom of Judah in the south that assumed the status of “all Israel” and was afforded the opportunity to refract all of the older traditions in its own preferred image. One might therefore well understand the desire of Judah's transmitters of already ancient narrative traditions to re-image its own eponymous ancestor as the strong and heroic leader of the remaining brothers, and to develop a narrative arc that encompasses an unquestioned—if morally questionable—heterosexual orientation (in Genesis 38) as well as true character growth (culminating in the long and heroic speech of Genesis 44:18–34).Footnote ¹³⁵

Joseph within Rabbinic Settings

In this article I have mostly focused on the character of Joseph as presented by ancient rabbinic exegesis. Twentieth-century scholarship has firmly placed rabbinic traditions and cultural attitudes within the Hellenistic world, and it is therefore only right to assess those traditions and attitudes within that context, interrogating the cultural factors that may have been at play in the rabbinic world for the sages to have developed and presented interpretive gender-bending narratives about the character of Joseph. Those narratives are indeed remarkable when considered among the postbiblical interpretive traditions that lay outside the rabbinic world. As Joshua Levinson has observed with respect to the range of the nonrabbinic, postbiblical interpretive narratives about Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar, “one dominant theme [prevails]: the dichotomy of promiscuity versus self-control, staged as a gendered opposition … the overriding concern of this corpus is to present Joseph as an ethical model of temperance and chastity.”Footnote ¹³⁶ As we have already seen, while Joseph's ethical behavior and chastity characterized certain rabbinic traditions, those qualities by no means described his character in others.

As Levinson understands it, whereas the nonrabbinic interpretations highlight the distinction between the female temptress (Mrs. Potiphar) and the virtuous male (the righteous Joseph), in midrashim that expand the narrative of Genesis 39:7–20, “Potiphar's wife functions not only as Joseph's sexual other but as his cultural other as well, whose unruly body becomes a symptom of a threatened national culture.”Footnote ¹³⁷ But, taken as a whole, does the entire corpus of rabbinic narratives about Joseph we have presented here constitute a mapping of “ethnic difference upon a gendered dichotomy,” as Levinson argues?Footnote ¹³⁸

Daniel Boyarin has written about this subject in a similar vein. In considering a series of rabbinic narratives, not about Joseph but about rabbis themselves, Boyarin observes, “Christian and Jewish images of gender-crossing, and particularly of the feminization of the male, have in common that they are forms of resistance to a culture that equated power and dominance with maleness and maleness with the ‘husband's natural position’ in coitus. Where Roman culture despised the submissive male, both early Christian and early Jewish cultures valorized him. Both early rabbinic Jews and early Christians performed resistance to the Roman imperial power-structure through ‘gender-bending,’ thereby marking their own understanding that gender itself is implicated in the maintenance of political power.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Later, he concludes, “Ultimately the point that needs to be emphasized is that this is not a discussion of ‘real’ differences between Roman/ce and Jewish male behavior but about different cultural models signified in large part in specular, mutually confirming stereotypes.” What is surprising here is not merely what Boyarin terms the rabbinic “valorization” of the submissive male—after all, Joseph remains the rabbinic “Joseph the Righteous” even after the various midrashic readings we have examined that have portrayed him in a way that runs counter to the generally accepted biblical and rabbinic ideas of ideal behavior—but that the rabbis so thoroughly do so with the character of Joseph and not a host of other biblical characters.

Thus, both Levinson and Boyarin, each in his own way, bid us to understand the narrative expansions in rabbinic texts about Joseph to indicate a complex weaving of relationships the rabbis sought to express via the biblical narratives, not only about gender bending per se but most particularly about rabbinic perspectives concerning the ethnic interrelationship between vulnerable Jews and the temptations of the Roman world. It is a powerful and insightful argument. However, might something else altogether also be at play here? In a recent study, “Redemptive Readings: Grappling with Rabbinic Homophobia,”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Marjorie Lehman notes Levinson's trenchant analysis of rabbinic texts with appreciation: “Joshua Levinson, in his analysis of this narrative, exhorts us to push the element of sexual seduction into the background of this story so as to see Potiphar's wife as Joseph's ‘cultural other.’ Through Joseph, he argues, the rabbis bring the challenges of being a slave in ‘a foreign and hostile environment’ to the fore in an attempt to denigrate foreign culture and to dramatize the transgression of cultural boundaries. For Levinson, this is an example of where gender discourse is ‘employed [by the rabbis] to produce and police discourses of identity in the social formation of rabbinic Judaism.’”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Nevertheless, I think she is alert to the dangers of arguing towards only one type of analysis. “Unfortunately, arguments focused on bringing identity politics to the fore in the case of Joseph can overshadow midrashic readings … that labor to expose the complexity of male and female sexuality, arresting the potential for further inquiry.” By way of example, Lehman turns to an interpretive tradition that we considered only briefly above, Potiphar's sexual attraction for Joseph, as midrashically imagined in Bereshit Rabbah 86:3 and B. Sotah 13b. Rabbinic midrash accounted for the apparent multiple spellings of Joseph's master's name, Potiphar and Potiphera (Genesis 39:1 vs. Genesis 41:45) by relating that to shield Joseph from his master's unwanted advances, the angel Gabriel castrated Potiphar.Footnote ¹⁴² Lehman writes about her students’ difficulties in seeing this midrash as anything other than a homophobic text. “Despite their familiarity with the Joseph narrative in Genesis, they did not recognize that Potiphar's attraction was to the one male character in Genesis who exhibits characteristics that cross gender lines. Joseph is ‘destabilizing’; he mixes up categories.” After considering many of the same texts I have presented above, Lehman points out that, with respect to the rabbinic treatment of Joseph, Potiphar, Mrs. Potiphar (and the angel Gabriel, for that matter), “In the end, the rabbis use all [these] biblical figures to test the male/female binary, and in so doing, the definition of sexuality as well.”

Ishay Rosen-Zvi makes similar arguments in his essay “The Rise and Fall of Rabbinic Masculinity.”Footnote ¹⁴³ In seeking to “reexamine this narrative of the birth of a unique rabbinic counter-masculinity,” Rosen-Zvi writes, “first, I will survey the image of the rabbinic beit midrash as a quasi-feminine space, then analyze the concept of the ‘feminized male’ itself. Finally, I wish to question the dichotomy presented by Boyarin between rabbinic culture and its gentile (Roman, Christian, or Sasanian) surroundings.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ By way of example, Rosen-Zvi presents a profound text that describes the violent contours of a rabbinic debate:Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Thus, Rosen-Zvi argues that his analyses of rabbinic texts “disrupt this neat picture,” that is, the dichotomy between Boyarin's “ideal Jewish masculinity … as a direct opposition to a prevailing non-Jewish one.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸

My purpose here is not specifically to debate Levinson's analysis of the rabbinic reading of the Joseph-Mrs. Potiphar episode as a vehicle for the rabbis to explore “the theme of a cultural seduction,”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ and argue in favor of Lehman's choice to explore the rabbinic texts’ confusion concerning sexual attraction. As Levinson himself argues in another essay, “Joseph is portrayed … as a cultural androgynos—one whose ambiguous cultural identity is coded with a gendered semiotics.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ I do wish to argue that we might prefer to recognize with some humility that the rabbinic texts are themselves multivalent, and the world they present—whether that of the midrashically interpreted biblical world or their own place within Greco-Roman (or Sassanid) society—might be difficult to capture in a univocal perspective.

Even as the rabbis drew such dichotomies among biblical characters as the “Jewish” ideal of Jacob, dweller in tents and mild, smooth-skinned student in the beit midrash, vs. Esau the “gentile” hunter, hairy, brutish, and uncouth, it was to Joseph that they turned to fully express the potential range of what was for them an unusually gendered biblical character, one whose sexual orientation did not fit the prescriptive and expected behavior they more “normatively” (that word!) established in both halakhic and aggadic contexts. I believe the reason that they performed those interpretive expansions with respect to Joseph's character was precisely because the biblical narrative itself made that performance possible with him and not nearly as much with other characters.Footnote ¹⁵¹

A Postscript

Having reflected on ancient rabbinic attitudes about Joseph's character and the cultural analysis that modern scholars have conducted in order to expand our understanding of the multivalent possibilities on sexuality presented in rabbinic texts, we may ask how the unconventional narratives and interpretive traditions about Joseph might inform our own sensibilities and behaviors. In what circumstances might peshat—for now, the original, contextual meanings of texts, biblical and rabbinic alike, insofar as we are able to ascertain these—inform derash, even our own contemporary efforts to derive and to demand significance from ancient traditions of signifying? In other words, to what extent do we wish to ask of ancient and medieval texts to offer guides to evolving attitudes (religious, social, political)? I am reminded of the commentary of R. Joseph Kara, an eleventh-century northern French exegete, in which he teases out the ramifications of the distinction between peshat and derash that he had been attempting to describe:

Thus, R. Joseph Kara asserts that even peshat scholarship, not normally concerned with creating normative religious behavior, ought to inform our attitudes.Footnote ¹⁵³ As one who humbly considers himself an ally of those who seek to change attitudes towards those whose gender identities and/or sexual orientations run counter to so-called “traditional values” of earlier religious and social constructs, I would like to suggest that the more queer reading intersects with historical-critical scholarship, and seeks to begin its disruption—whether of biblical literature or of its rabbinic, Christian, or Quranic interpretive traditions—with attempts to recognize the meaning of texts to their authors and first communities, and does not read primarily or exclusively with reader-response criticism, the more those disruptions will take hold as valid readings of ancient texts within the academic community.