This is Not a Cup
Then he instructed his house steward as follows, “Fill the men’s bags with food, as much as they can carry, and put each one’s money in the mouth of his bag. Put my silver goblet in the mouth of the bag of the youngest one, together with his money for the rations.” And he did as Joseph told him. They had just left the city and had not gone far, when Joseph said to his steward, “Up, go after the men! And when you overtake them, say to them, ‘Why did you repay good with evil? It is the very one from which my master drinks and which he uses for divination. It was a wicked thing for you to do!’” . . .When Judah and his brothers reentered the house of Joseph, who was still there, they threw themselves on the ground before him. Joseph said to them, “What is this deed that you have done? Do you not know that a man like me practices divination?” (Gen. 44:1-5; 14-15)
Why does Joseph accuse his brother Benjamin of stealing his divination cup? Why not simply frame him for stealing money? Or drum up some more ethereal charge, like seditious speech? The specificity of the divination cup suggests Joseph is making a point he could make with no other object.
Most commentators overlook the question of why Joseph plants a divination cup on his long lost brother. Instead, they focus on the more general question of why Joseph frames Benjamin at all. Joseph needs to accuse Benjamin of some crime to see whether the brothers will come to his defense, goes the argument. If they do not, Joseph will know the brothers have not changed, and remain sectarian in their hatred of Rachel and her line. Chizkuni proposes that Joseph is skeptical that the man called “Benjamin” is really his brother at all, and not a hired actor. To test whether Benjamin is who they say he is, Joseph needs to see whether the brothers will stick up for him. If they do, it means the man really is Benjamin, since they would risk their lives for kin, but not for a hired hand. These explanations are contradictory. In one line of reasoning, Joseph assumes his brothers are disloyal until they prove otherwise. In the other, he assumes they are loyal until they prove otherwise. The differing possibilities suggest a great ambiguity at the heart of the dramatic scene: what exactly is Joseph trying to discern?
To ask what Joseph is trying to discern is to assume, though, that he is in the dark. But Joseph himself has been dreaming of this moment since he was a youth. His crowning characteristic is the ability to interpret dreams, to predict and plan for the future. Surely, the same Joseph who has risen from the pit of slavery to become the de facto leader of Egypt has the ability to scan his brothers’ hearts and minds without all the shenanigans? Is the test really one in which Joseph doesn’t know the answer? Or is it a test in the way that Nachmanides says God tests Abraham—an opportunity for the brothers to demonstrate what Joseph already knows—that they’ve done the work (and can now feel a sense of wholeness).
Of course, we can’t rule out the ironic possibility that Joseph is clear in some areas and cloudy in others. But a stronger possibility is that Joseph is staging a scene for dramatic purposes. The whole event is a ritual he has devised to bring about a kind of catharsis and reconciliation for himself and his brothers. Joseph recognizes his brothers, but they do not recognize him. If this is the case, Joseph is engineering a situation in which they might recognize him—and themselves—in return.
Joseph tells us explicitly that you can’t steal a divination cup from a diviner, because the diviner will know what you’ve done. But if this is the case, then what is the point of the cup to begin with? It’s just for show. Similarly, a magician doesn’t need the wand to do magic; rather, the wand is a kind of prop signifying, “Look, this is a magic show.” So there is an irony to stealing a diviner’s cup, a total misunderstanding of what divination is and where it comes from. Joseph is saying that you can’t take away his power. You can strip him of his props, but since his power is from a higher source, it won’t matter.
Concealed in this message is another one: just as depriving the diviner of his divination cup deprives him of nothing, so depriving Joseph of his normal life in Canaan deprives him of nothing. Joseph is the cup, a cup that cannot be stolen because it is a decoy to begin with. The brothers’ defense is, then, saturated with meaning. What use do we have for the cup?? Precisely. There is nothing for them to steal. The value of the cup is worth far less to those who do not practice divination. To them, it is just an ordinary object. So why should the brothers have sought to diminish their brother by selling him into slavery seeing as there was no upside to their treachery? What do they gain by taking away Joseph’s coat of many colors, seeing as no power is conferred through the transfer? To take the cup, to take their brother, is like cutting off the arm to spite the hand.
When they sell Joseph into slavery, the brothers exchange a human being for coins. The category error of reducing a person’s life to an exchange rate is repeated in the would-be crime of those who steal divination cups. It’s not just that the brothers envied and hated Joseph for being different, it’s that they were so conditioned by zero-sum thinking that they saw his gain as their loss, his promotion as their devaluation. But the fact that a non-diviner has little use for a divination cup shows the foolishness of such an orientation. If every brother had a divination cup equal in size, this would not be an equality of outcome—for the meaning of the cup is not to be found in its composition. To relate to the cup in such an externalized way is to relate to it as an “object” rather than a “thing,” to borrow Heidegger’s distinction.
Heidegger writes, “The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel.” Understood metaphorically, it is the “nothing” in us that differentiates us, a certain ungraspable dimension that gives our lives meaning and texture. When we fail to grasp the difference between object and thing, when we conflate ourselves with our measurable aspects rather than our essential mystery, we become the kind of people capable of stealing divination cups, we become the kind of people who would monetize those things we should find singular, unpriceable, and incommensurate. The sale of Joseph into slavery is no ordinary “human rights violation.” It is a category error that we make each day.
Joseph’s cup is silver. The word is the same as the generic word for money: kesef, since coins were made of silver. This is the word that appears most frequently throughout the Joseph cycle. Joseph is sold for kesef, and now he insists on putting kesef in his brothers’ bags; he is abundant with kesef. Joseph has become a kind of one man bank. Two of the letters in Joseph’s name are shared with the word kesef (samech and peh). But there is a world of difference between silver as something used to beatify and silver used as a financial instrument, a medium of exchange. Likewise, there is a world of difference between a person viewed as a person and a person viewed through a transactional lens.
Of course, as economic and political beings who belong to massively complex systems, we can’t but relate to ourselves and others transactionally and impersonally. Policy debates require us to weight the relative value of lives.
But depriving Joseph of his divination cup is a mistake. A better world will come to us when we take hold of those things in our lives whose value transcends what others can see and esteem, when we don’t trade ourselves down for inter-changeable coins. We need to put our egalitarian impulse toward ensuring that everyone can access a singular transcendence, an ownmost emptiness. The brothers do not win by taking away Joseph’s cup. They win when they appreciate that Joseph has been appointed to be Joseph, and learn from his guiding example how to be themselves.
But they didn’t take his cup! Exactly. And if they had known this in the first place, if they had known that genuine power and beauty can’t be taken away and redistributed, they never would have tried in the first place. But it worked out OK. Joseph saw it all coming. He recognized us. Now it’s our time to recognize Joseph.
Shabbat Shalom and Chanuka Sameach,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
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