Joseph, he’s so hot right now.

The Bible describes Joseph, innocuously enough, as "well-built and handsome." 

This is a rare description of a man in the Bible, though interestingly (but unsurprisingly), it is the same description used to describe his mom's attractiveness as well. They were both "comely in features and comely to look at" (Alter) or "attractive/handsome in body and in look" (Goldingay).

Now, I fell down a pretty deep rabbit hole exploring Joseph's physical qualities in the midst of my sermon prep, and as is often the case, there are a lot of fun Jewish interpretive traditions about Joseph's good looks. 

As it appears in Genesis 39, the description is clearly used as a literary device to justify Potiphar's wife's reaction.

"After a while his master’s wife took notice of Joseph and said, 'Come to bed with me!' (שִׁכְבָה עִמִּי)"

Her command is just two words in the Hebrew text. In fact, these are the first two words that she speaks to Joseph in the story.

Robert Alter writes, "The extraordinary bluntness of this sexual imperative ... makes it one of the most striking instances of revelatory initial dialogue in the Bible." (The Five Books of Moses, 150) 

And it's all because Joseph was so hot. 

Potiphar's wife couldn't handle it. 

A later Jewish interpreter, Philo of Alexandria said, she was "driven mad" by his handsomeness. 

If at this point, you, too, are channeling the pent up frustration of Squints Palledorous from The Sandlot, I think you're on the right track.

"I've been coming here every summer of my adult life, and every summer there she is oiling and lotioning, lotioning and oiling... I can't take it anymore!"

Neither could Potiphar's wife. 

Other Jewish traditions extend the scope of the devastating effects of Joseph's good looks by including other women as well. 

One text, which is a (much) later retelling of Joseph's life, says, "All the wives and daughters of noblemen and satraps of the whole land of Egypt ... when they saw Joseph, [they] suffered badly because of his beauty." (Joseph and Aseneth 7:3–4)

Another line of interpretation claims that Joseph was so ridiculously good looking that young women were climbing walls just to get a glimpse of him. 

As is often the case in Jewish interpretation, this is not some piece of fictive imagination, but rather, it is a line of thought derived from a close reading the biblical text. In Genesis 49:22, Joseph is likened to a "son of fruitfulness upon a spring" — which, admittedly, is kinda weird. In your English Bible, it interprets the line to mean something like, "Joseph is a fruitful vine planted beside some water, the offshoots/branches/vines of which climb over a wall." But some Jewish interpreters preferred to take this poetic line a bit more woodenly. Joseph is a "son of fruitfulness." It's not a comparison with a plant. It's about Joseph standing in line with his dad, Jacob — he is fruitful. The reference to vines was built on the inference that Joseph was being likened to a well-watered plant, but with that gone, we are left with a more literal reading of the second half of the line too. It says, "daughters climbed a wall." Daughters climbing walls. Why? Because Joseph is so hot, they wanted to look at him. (If you want to read more about this tradition, check out James L. Kugel's extraordinary work, Traditions of the Bible.)

One more, just because I find this re-reading hilarious.

It's from the Quran.

It retells the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, and it's notably different, but this detail about Joseph's extreme attractiveness remains. 

In fact, in the Quran's version, the women of the town are informed that Potiphar's wife is trying to sleep with Joseph, so she invites them over for a banquet. After everyone is seated, she tells Joseph to come out.

“And when they saw him, they marveled at him ... [and] They said, “Good God, this is not a human, this must be a precious angel.”

You can almost envision her saying, "SEE?! Blame me. Look at HIM! Go ahead. Blame. Me."

The biblical version of the story is much more terse, which is what commonly leads to all of the fun reading-in. You can't just say, Joseph was "well-built and handsome," without somebody wondering ... "Oh yeah? How well-built and handsome was he?" 

I bet you're wondering right now.

(I polled the people of TRP, and the comparative responses ranged from a young George Clooney to an older, more sophisticated George Clooney. The women of TRP, it seems, love George Clooney.)

Here's what the story, as told in Genesis, wants us to know — he was hot enough that Potiphar's wife, apparently, couldn't handle it.

We tend to read a line like this and jump to the conclusion that "Potiphar's wife was into it." 

But that's probably an over-sexualized Western take on an ancient story. 

John Goldingay reminds us, in the ancient world, "sex for sex's sake" wasn't always on the table, nor was it always the goal. (It was sometimes. See the Song of Songs for an example!) We should remember, however, they had no birth control back then, which upped the ante. Perhaps, Potiphar's wife's real desire was "tied up with having a baby." This suggestion is made all the more intriguing when we note how Potiphar is introduced in the story. He is a סְרִיס (saris), which is rightly translated here as an "official" of Pharaoh. But the word can also mean "eunuch." For later readers, this may have caused them to crack a wry smile: "Oh. Maybe that's why Potiphar's wife was all over this guy." (See Goldingay, Genesis, 598–599)

However we understand her (constant) indecent proposal, Joseph declines. 

Which is also surprising. 

In the story, he's 19? Maybe 20? 

His raging hormones would be a problem, but also, Potiphar's wife is in the seat of power here, which makes his denial a bit dangerous.

As you might imagine, some interpreters thought his refusal was a little too unrealistic, which led to this re-reading:

Joseph wasn’t as chaste as we think. He actually wanted to sleep with Potiphar's wife, and in fact, he almost did.

Again, this is based on details in the text. Jewish interpreters don't tend to make stuff up (well, I mean, they do, but not out of nowhere). They seem to create interesting readings based on ambiguities in the text. Ambiguities that are begging for our attention.

This one is based on the line that says, one day Joseph went into the house to "do his work." Apparently, some readers took this as "work" of a different sort.

In the resulting reading, Joseph *almost* gave in to his sexual desires, but at the last moment, an image of his dad popped into his head. 

Ok, I'll be honest, when I first read this, it reminded me of the following scene from Austin Powers. (Be blessed.)

Why am I telling you all this? 

Well, (1) these interpretations are all pretty funny. (Come on, that line from the Quran is hilarious.) 

(2) I doubt you've heard most of these interpretations before, though I bet you, too, have wondered how hot the people in the Bible were. (Right?!)

But more substantively, (3) there's something to learn in all of this about reading the Bible. 

Christians do NOT read the Bible this way.

This might be the wrong way of phrasing it, but I *think* some would say it's because we have too much "respect" for the Bible. (Note the scare quotes.) But what ends up happening is, we “respect it” to the point of not wanting to engage it or question it. When I say question, I don't mean skeptically (though we don't do that either). I mean pausing to ask, "what's this mean?" Or "why is this stated like this?" Or "what’s this detail about?" 

We usually just read … because that’s the goal. Reading.

And when we read, we are usually guided by this rule of thumb: "This is all God's Word. Don't ask questions, just absorb. Find what’s relevant. How does this apply."

We don’t stop to consider how hot Joseph was (which, admittedly, is a strange example) or what Potiphar’s wife was so excited about or if Joseph struggled to turn her down.

As a result, I think we miss out on a lot. 

The way the Bible was/is respected in Jewish interpretive circles is to pour over it, to ask questions of what was missing in the text (or what was there!), to disagree with it and with one another, to present ideas that go beyond the text.

I wonder what our communities would look like if that's how we read (and preached) the Bible.