Story of Potiphar's Wife

Potiphar’s wife has no name. This is a way of dehumanizing her, or making her seem less than a real person. Her point of view and her version of what happened are ignored by the story-tellers, since they do not serve the narrator's purpose.
Potiphar or Potiphera is an Egyptian name meaning 'he whom the god Ra has given' Joseph means 'God increases or adds to'

The story of Potiphar’s wife draws attention to the different ways that Hebrew and Egyptian women behaved, and the inherent difference between the two cultures. 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 the Egyptian woman.
The time period is uncertain, but the story seems to be set during the Middle Kingdom,

somewhere between 2030BC to 1640BC. Potiphar may have been 'Ptahwer', an officer of Pharaoh Ahmenemhet III (pictured at right), but there is no real evidence either way. The story happens during a period of economic prosperity.
The story unfolds in the household of a rich man, Potiphar, who owns many slaves. One of these is the Hebrew Joseph, a man of unusual ability who has been placed in control of Potiphar's large estate and household. (See end of page for historical background and information about the lives of women.)

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.

There is nothing wrong with enjoyment of food, but the implication of the text is that Potiphar had no interest in any of the other normal pleasures of life, including sex with his wife. The Hebrew text uses the word 'saris' to describe him. This can mean 'courtier', 'someone who belongs to the king', but elsewhere in the Old Testament 'saris' is used to describe a eunuch. Potiphar was married and therefore cannot have been a eunuch, but there may be a sly suggestion that Potiphar's sexual prowess was not all it should have been.

THE WIFE’S ATTEMPTED SEDUCTION OF JOSEPH
(Genesis 39:7-12)
‘Now Joseph was handsome and good-looking. And after a time his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said “Lie with me”.’

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 Exodus21:9-11), as were boy slaves, though of course sex with boys was forbidden by the Israelite moral code. 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.

‘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.

He 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.

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 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.

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.

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).

A young man to his beloved:
    Behold her... shining, precious, white of skin, lovely of eyes when gazing
    Long of neck, white of breast, her hair true lapis lazuli
    Her arms surpass gold, her fingers like lotuses
    Rounded her bottom, narrow her waist, her thighs carry her beauty
    Lovely her walk when she strides on the ground, she has captured my heart
    She makes the head of all men turn when they see her
    Lucky the one who embraces her....

A young woman describes her heart, the Ka, as it leaves her body to join her beloved, leaving her emotionally adrift and confused:
   My heart leaves my body when I think of your love, it leaps out of its place towards you
   I cannot act like a normal person, don my clothes, wear my cloak
   I cannot apply my make-up or anoint myself with oil
   O my heart, stop making me foolish
   Be still, calm down, wait for your lover to come to you

(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'
Be firm when you think of him, be still my heart

A young woman tells her lover to hurry as he comes to her:
    If only you would come swiftly, like a gazelle bounding over the desert
    Racing because there is fear in your heart
    A hunting dog pursues you but can't even see your dust
    Before you can kiss your hand four times you arrive safely at my cave
    he Golden One (Hathor, goddess of love) has decreed that we be together

Some of the poems are quite explicit; a young woman describes the reward awaiting a lover:
    When you bring it to her and push it into her cave/opening
    Her gate will be opened, and she, the lady of the house, will demolish it
    Give her song and dance, and wine and beer
    So that you intoxicate her senses and complete her in the night
    And she'll say 'Embrace me, and stay with me until dawn'.

A young man describes how helpless he is in the toils of love:
    How skilful she is at casting the lasso, though it's not cattle she draws in
    With her hair she lassos me, with her eyes she pulls me in
    With her thighs she binds me to her, with her seal she brands me as her own.