Have We Canceled Aseneth?
Ok, ok ... I confess. The title is a bit much. On a week when so many people have stressed the importance of ensuring their kids can play with *gendered* potatoes and that they continue to see illustrations of racist stereotypes whenever they please, asking if we have canceled a little-known biblical character is, admittedly, low-hanging fruit. (It's also clickbait. And if you bit, welcome! Stick around and join the fun.)
I'm working on the assumption that whether or not her absence has been intentional, the result is … most people don't even know who Aseneth is. So let's start there.
She is a character in the biblical narrative. More specifically, she is Joseph's Egyptian wife, who is given to him by Pharaoh after Joseph had correctly interpreted his dreams and consequently ascended to second in command in the Egyptian empire. Aseneth is depicted as a woman of status—the daughter of Potiphera, the priest of On—and as such, a fitting selection for Pharaoh's #2 man.
The only other thing we know about her is, she and Joseph went on to have two children, Manasseh and Ephraim.
That's it.
This isn't too weird for a minor female character in the Bible, but I should also mention, she doesn't speak.
She doesn't really act either, at least not on her own volition.
We aren't informed about her mindset—her excitement (or lack thereof), her feelings, her love of Joseph.*
In fact, after the brief announcement of her marriage to Joseph, and her birthing two kids, Aseneth pretty much disappears from the story altogether.
As I mentioned in this week’s sermon, her absence is really noticeable in a couple of scenes.
First, after Joseph has been reconciled with his family (remember, his brothers sold him into slavery and convinced their dad he was dead), he brings the kids to Goshen to meet their granddad, Jacob.
Jacob says to Joseph, “God Almighty appeared to me ... in the land of Canaan, and there he blessed me and said to me, ‘I am going to make you fruitful and increase your numbers. I will make you a community of peoples, and I will give this land as an everlasting possession to your descendants after you.’"
So, in fulfillment of the divine promise, Jacob "adopts" or "claims" his Egyptian grandkids, Manasseh and Ephraim, as his own, saying,
Now then, your two sons born to you in Egypt before I came to you here will be reckoned as mine; Ephraim and Manasseh will be mine, just as Reuben and Simeon are mine. [Reuben and Simeon are Jacob's first and second born kids, so linking Joseph's and Aseneth's kids with them says a lot about their status.] Any children born to you after them will be yours [which is weird, because by this point, Joseph and Aseneth have been married for a while, but have had just the two kids]; in the territory they inherit they will be reckoned under the names of their brother.
In this story, the two sons of Joseph and Aseneth are grafted into this divinely promised "community of peoples." As such, they are granted an inheritance along with Joseph's brothers, and they become the heads of two tribes of Israel.
On one hand, this is good news.
**Honestly, I wonder what would have been (or what would be) the effects if we talked more about the African inclusion in the family of Israel? I wonder if this would this help curtail racism and white supremacy within the American church? Would white majority churches recognize their black and brown brothers and sisters as elders in the family of God? Would it help the church as a whole to celebrate the "the people of Israel, from Sarai and Abram of Ur to Ephraim and Manasseh, the sons of Aseneth," as "a product of a multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual melange" (Gafney, Womanist Midrash)?**
You'd think so, right?
The inclusion of Aseneth in the story as a matriarch of the family of Israel, and the inclusion of her and Joseph's two kids is a beautiful reminder of this reality.
But, I think, it's largely a lost one.
Before we hit the streets with the message, however, there are some other questions we should consider as well, questions that emerge from within the text (or maybe more accurately, out of the text's silence). These questions might even push back a little bit on the story as "good" news.
Womanist scholar, Wil Gafney (upon whom a lot of my thinking is dependent; go get her book!), points out,
How does Asenath feel about Joseph's family? How does she feel about Jacob's claim on her children? Does she see it as an attempt to erase her identity in her children?
We don't know.
And honestly, it's impossible to know.
In the story, Aseneth is either not present for her kids' introduction to (and subsequent claiming by) their grandfather or she is notably silent.
We do know when Joseph's brothers show up and Joseph is still hiding his identity, he doesn't eat with them because "Egyptians don't eat with Hebrews" (Genesis 43:32).
That's an interesting (and maybe telling) comment about the relationship between these people groups.
We also know that after Joseph has revealed himself to his brothers as the punk kid they threw in a cistern, he instructs them to identify themselves as shepherds to Pharaoh. We then learn the reason. Egyptians don't think too highly of shepherds (“every shepherd is abhorrent to Egypt,” Genesis 46:34), so they'll leave them alone in Goshen.
So what does Aseneth think of all this—Joseph's family, Joseph's lineage, Joseph's dad "claiming" their kids? Again, it's impossible to know. I wouldn't want to import all of the Egyptian biases above on to her, but it doesn't seem as though Joseph has made it his duty to hold fast to his familial roots. In fact, the name of their first child, Manasseh, represents God's allowing him to forget the abuses he suffered and also the family that brought it about.
Joseph, it seemed, moved on.
So it's conceivable that Aseneth was skeptical.
But if she was, it's no longer in the story.
Second, Aseneth's absence is felt as the book of Genesis ends.
Near its conclusion, Joseph states he is about to die. Before he does, he wants his brothers promise to take his bones from Egypt to the Promised Land.
That's fine.
Expected even.
But what about Aseneth's bones? We don't know anything about them. Seemingly, there is no plan for her burial in the Promised Land, which is odd.
With cancel culture being what it is, you could make a case (I'm not sure how good of a case, but you could make one) that the Bible itself cancels Aseneth.
She is given to Joseph by Pharaoh. She pops out some kids. Then she disappears from the story. Jacob claims her kids as his own, and their legacy is thus removed from the land of their birth. Joseph doesn't make any arrangements for Aseneth's bones. Ostensibly, they are left in Egypt.
Is she being erased?
Is the identity of her children being erased?
I know. You're sick of all of this talk about "cancelling." It's usually misunderstood or misplaced rage anyway.
Is that what's going on here? Am I just asking the typical hippy liberal questions of a patriarchal text?
Who knows.
It's very possible that I am making too much of a (very) minor character in the Old Testament not getting her due.
I’m asking simply because I've been thinking about Aseneth a lot recently.
I've been thinking about her lineage and her inclusion in the family line of the people of God. I've been thinking about Jacob holding his Egyptian grandkids. I've been thinking about what Aseneth's inclusion means ... and if it would make a difference if we talked about it more. I've been wrestling with my own biases as a reader — asking if I overlook certain characters (like, in this case, an Egyptian woman) just because her interests aren't on my radar.
I think Aseneth, though silent, has some things to say, and we would do well to listen.
Josh James (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is a commissioned Church Starter in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and one of the pastors of The Restoration Project. He has written a book about the ethics of the Psalms.
*EXTRA BONUS: If you are looking for some insight into how Jewish interpretive tradition handled Aseneth, check out "Joseph and Aseneth" in the Pseudepigrapha. You can find a PDF here.
