1. Ginzberg, Louis, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1920)Google Scholar, 2:5. It goes without saying that the approach Ginzberg takes is dated in many respects; cf. Hasan-Rokem, Galit and Gruenwald, Ithamar, Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews: Ancient Jewish Folk Literature Reconsidered (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. Despite the considerations presented in Hasan-Rokem's critique, the work remains a classic.

2. James L. Kugel extensively and brilliantly treated the postbiblical interpretive traditions and rabbinic expansive midrashim on Joseph: In Potiphar's House: The Interpretative Life of Biblical Texts (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1990), 13–155Google Scholar.

3. I will discuss the phrase as it is interpreted in rabbinic literature first, and return to a consideration of it in its biblical context, below.

4. In presenting both Hebrew exegetical texts and their translations, I prefer to put the incipit in bold-faced type; the exegesis itself in regular font; and any biblical texts that the source cites in support of its interpretation in italics. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Hebrew texts are my own.

5. See discussion below.

6. Theodor, J. and Albeck, Ch., Bereshit Rabba with a Critical Apparatus and Commentary (Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965), 1008Google Scholar. Theodor-Albeck offers a wide variety of variant readings, in particular with respect to the morpheme משמשם. This appears to be a hypercorrection for מסמסם, from the root סמם (Steven E. Fassberg, personal communication, May 2, 2016). Considering the midrashic context, it would appear that the rabbis intimate that Joseph ground up ingredients (as in preparing a mixture in a mortar and pestle) and “applied it” to his eyes. Alternatively, if one chose to read the variant ממשמש, one would understand that Joseph “touched up” his eyes. See below.

7. Or possibly “curl.” See Ulmer, Rivka, Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 248CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Joshua Levinson has suggested depilation as a possible midrashic reference, see “Cultural Androgyny in Rabbinic Literature,” in From Athens to Jerusalem: Medicine in Hellenized Jewish Lore and in Early Christian Literature, ed. Kottek, Samuel, Horstmanshoff, Manfred, Baader, Gerhard, and Ferngren, Gary (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2000), 136Google Scholar. If the latter is intended, one might have expected additional midrashim to focus on the episode of shaving Joseph's body hair in Genesis 41:14 as a source of rabbinic concern. However, it does not appear to be the case; see e.g., Bereshit Rabbah 89:9; Kasher, Menahem, Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation, a Millennial Anthology (Torah Shelemah) [in Hebrew] (New York: American Biblical Encyclopedia Society, 1938), 6:1539–40Google Scholar. In Bamidbar Rabbah 10:10 the shaving of Joseph is singled out as something done for beauty. The medievals seem to be divided with respect to precisely what hair Joseph shaved (Ibn Ezra, Bekhor Shor, Naḥmanides) but none appear to regard it with opprobrium. For a modern perspective, see Fried, Lisbeth S., “Why Did Joseph Shave?,” Biblical Archaeology Review 33, no. 4 (2007): 36–41Google Scholar, 74. I am grateful to Ms. Osi Drori for her stimulating questions about this particular episode, when she attended my presentation, אורינטציה מינית בתיאור דמותו של יוסף במקרא, בספרות הרבנית ופרשנות ימי הבינים, at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, August 10, 2017.

8. Or possibly, the midrash suggests that Joseph “swung his heel.”

9. Lori Lefkovitz, in an essay otherwise replete with insightful observations, states that Bereshit Rabbah employs this identical description (“apply make-up to his eyes, fix his hair and dangle his heel”) for Abel; see Lefkovitz, Lori, “Not a Man: Joseph and the Character of Masculinity in Judaism and Islam,” in Gender in Judaism and Islam: Common Lives, Uncommon Heritage, ed. Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh and Wenger, Beth S. (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 155–80Google Scholar. However, I cannot find any such reference to Abel; the closest thing is the observation of the midrash that when the “evil inclination” sees a person engaging in these behaviors, he states “that man is mine!” (Bereshit Rabbah 22:6 [Theodor-Albeck, 1:211–12]). Lefkovitz also treats this midrash in “Coats and Tales: Joseph Stories and Myths of Jewish Masculinity,” in A Mensch among Men: Explorations in Jewish Masculinity, ed. Brod, Harry (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1988), 21Google Scholar.

10. See Kugel, In Potiphar's House, 77–78. We shall return to this question below.

11. Kugel terms this “youthful foolishness”; see Kugel, James L., Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 441Google Scholar. In In Potiphar's House, Kugel labels this the behavior of a “dandy” (76).

12. Ulmer, Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash, 248 n. 8.

13. This argument may be considered fraught, of course, for how does one determine attitudes towards deeds or objects whose “gender” in antiquity might be completely other than what our own contemporary world assigns them? For example, consider Sara Elise Phang's discussion of whether so-called “feminine objects” found in Roman military archaeological sites necessarily indicate the presence of women in the camps, or whether the objects might belong as well to men. See The Marriage of Roman Soldiers (13 B.C.–A.D. 235): Law and Family in the Imperial Army (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 127–28Google Scholar, and in particular, nn. 42–25. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for pointing me towards this source.

14. See also B. Shabbat 62b.

15. Literally, “the uncovering of nakedness,” this is the standard rabbinic term for incest and other sexual practices that the Bible considers illicit.

16. Literally, “tall.”

17. The meaning of the idiom is not certain; literally, “they would walk, heel at the side of big toe.” A parallel text to B. Yoma 9b is found in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, Va-tomer Ẓiyon, pis. 17:6 to Isaiah 49:14 (ed. Mandelbaum, 1:288–289). While that pericope disparages other practices that the midrash considers “feminine,” it does not contain the specific expressions found with respect to Joseph that we are considering.

18. Even the expressions that reference the use of eye makeup are different, the midrash employing a Hebrew idiom whereas the Talmud uses an Aramaic expression.

19. See also Eikhah Rabbah 4:15, 18.

20. I paraphrase, of course; see Stendahl, Krister, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary,” in Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, ed. Buttrick, George A., Knox, John, May, Herbert G., and Terrien, Samuel (New York: Abingdon, 1962), 1:418–32Google Scholar; and Stendahl, , Meanings: The Bible as Document and as Guide (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984)Google Scholar.

21. Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

22. As the nineteenth-century rabbinic exegete R. Samuel David Luzzato cautioned, “The fourth principle [of biblical exegesis] … is the love of truth. It should be the purpose of our endeavor to discern the truth of the writers’ intentions. Nor should there be in the chambers of our hearts a desire to discover in the Holy Scriptures a sustenance and strengthening for faith and theology that have come to us from other sources, whether they be of philosophical logic or beliefs about the [Bible]”; Luzzato, Samuel David, introduction to Commentary on the Book of Isaiah [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1970), viiiGoogle Scholar.

23. See Rashbam's commentary on Genesis 37:2 for one articulation of this distinction; for a discussion of this text, see Harris, Robert A., “Concepts of Scripture in the School of Rashi,” in Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction, ed. Sommer, Benjamin D. (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 113–14Google Scholar.

24. Kalmanofsky, Amy, Gender-Play in the Hebrew Bible: The Ways the Bible Challenges Its Gender Norms (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 15Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., 16.

26. Ibid., 15.

27. Joshua Levinson has dealt with this episode in rabbinic literature in two extensive and well-argued articles: see “An-Other Woman: Joseph and Potiphar's Wife. Staging the Body Politic,” Jewish Quarterly Review 87, nos. 3–4 (1997): 269–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Cultural Androgyny in Rabbinic Literature,” 119–40. As I was unaware of these articles when I undertook my own study, my initial approach to the Joseph material was virtually exclusively historical-critical and diachronic; Levinson's interest in the material was quite different, therefore, from my own. As he explicitly states, his focus is the “use of gender discourse to establish cultural identity, that is, how discourses of gender were employed to produce and police discourses of identity in the social formation of rabbinic Judaism” (“An-Other Woman,” 274–75; “Cultural Androgyny,” 133–36). However, prodded by an anonymous reviewer, I have come to understand the importance of the kinds of questions Levinson (and others) have posed. I will return to these questions below.

28. Ulmer, Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash, 247.

29. Most common editions of Rashi's Torah commentary read ממשמש (which I have translated “touch up,” above), whereas I have transcribed the more authoritative reading of MS Leipzig 1 (the final mem is somewhat erased but is nonetheless legible). On the importance of this manuscript, see Grossman, Avraham, “Marginal Notes and the Addenda of R. Shemaiah and the Text of Rashi's Biblical Commentary” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 60, no. 1 (1990): 7–98Google Scholar.

30. On the motif of Joseph's great beauty in Islamic tradition, see Lowin, Shari, Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in Al-Andalus (New York: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar, Kindle edition, chapter 7, “The Cloak of Joseph: Ibn Hazm and the Therapeutic Power of Romantic Love.” See also Richter-Bernburg, Lutz, “Plato of Mind and Joseph of Countenance: The Notion of Love and the Ideal Beloved in Kay Ka'us B. Iskandear's Andarzname,” Oriens 36 (2001): 276–87Google Scholar.

31. The trope of Joseph's beauty continued to be developed in other literary genres in the Middle Ages. Consider, for example, a homoerotic Hebrew poem by Isaac ibn Mar Saul that compares the beauty of a young boy to several beautiful male biblical characters, Joseph among them: צבי חשוק באספמיה / יצרו רב עלילה / והמשילו והשליטו / עלי…/ יפה תואר כיריח …/ כמו יוסף בצורתו… “Beloved gazelle in Spain, crafted by Divine Master / who has enabled him to rule and master / Me … / Beautiful of stature as the moon / like Joseph in his form”; see Schirmann, Jefim, Studies in the History of Hebrew Poetry and Drama [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1979), 145–46Google Scholar. This poem was translated elegantly, if less literally, by Scheindlin, Raymond P., Wine, Women, & Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1986), 87Google Scholar. For yet another translation and a discussion, see Lowin, Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in Al-Andalus, chapter 2: “‘He Has Slain Me Like Uriah’: Ibn Mar Shaul's Unexpected Love Triangle.”

32. See Strack, Hermann Leberecht and Stemberger, Günter, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. Bockmuehl, Marcus (Minneapolis, MN: T&T Clark; Fortress Press, 1996), 354–55Google Scholar.

33. Margulies, Mordecai, Midrash Haggadol on the Pentateuch: Genesis [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1975), 625Google Scholar. Note that Rabbinic Hebrew g-p-p, the root used here for “embracing,” is not found with a corresponding Biblical Hebrew verb. Assuming it is related to the root g-w-p, the closest Biblical Hebrew verb is found in Nehemiah 7:3.

34. Margulies notes in the apparatus, מקורו נעלם, “its source has disappeared.”

35. Of course, similar questions might be asked of most any midrash that explore semantic ranges of biblical words and posits multifaceted levels of interpretation. A potentially relevant example, for reasons I discuss below with respect to the meaning of מגפף ומנשק in traditional sources, might be midrashim on the word מצחק in Genesis 21:9, where ancient rabbinic sources suggest meanings that incorporate the three “cardinal sins” of rabbinic lore, idolatry, incest, and murder; see Rashi there, and Kasher, Torah shelemah, 3:847.

36. For background on the trope in medieval Hebrew poetry of the love expressed to young boys, see Schirmann, Jefim, “The Ephebe in Medieval Hebrew Poetry,” Sefarad 15 (1955): 55–68Google Scholar; Roth, Norman, “‘Deal Gently with the Young Man’: Love of Boys in Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Spain,” Speculum 57, no. 1 (1982): 20–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leneman, Helen, “Reclaiming Jewish History: Homo-erotic Poetry of the Middle Ages,” Changing Men 18 (Summer/Fall 1987): 22–28Google Scholar; I am grateful to Gwynn Kessler for referring me to this last article.

37. It should be recognized that “the feminine boy” is a motif that may be found already in pre-Quranic Arabic poetry, and may therefore be seen as correspondent with early midrashic interpretations. See Colville, Jim, Poems of Wine & Revelry: The Khamriyyat of Abu Nuwas (London: Kegan Paul, 2005)Google Scholar, vii and n. 2; I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer who pointed me towards this source.

38. Lieber, Laura Suzanne, Yannai on Genesis: An Invitation to Piyyut (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2010)Google Scholar, 659 n. 18.

39. See 1 Chronicles 5:1.

40. Salomon Buber, Midrash Eikhah Rabbah (Vilna: [s.n.], 1899 [offprint]), 83–84.

41. A similar rabbinic narrative, redolent of the גפפ/נשק language employed here, is found in Midrash Shir Ha-shirim 8:1: אמ״ר פנחס מעשה בשני אחים שהיה אחד במירון ואחד בגוש חלב נפלה דליקה בבית זה שהיה במרון ובאת אחותו מגוש חלב התחילה מגפפתו ומחבקתו ומנשקתו ואומרת לית דא מבדה לי דהוה אחי באננקי ונתפלט ממנה, “Said R. Pinḥas: It happened with two siblings, one of whom was in Meron and one of whom was in Gush Ḥalav. A fire befell the house in Meron and his sister came from Gush Ḥalav, and began to embrace him, hug him, and kiss him. She said to him ‘there is not one who can despise me, for he is, perforce, my brother.’ And he ran away from her.” Note that the brother here, at least, is concerned that the nature of the physical contact is inappropriate to siblings. I am grateful to Naama A. Weiss for bringing this midrash to my attention, and for our fruitful discussions about it.

42. Hasan-Rokem, Galit, The Web of Life: Folklore in Rabbinic Literature. The Palestinian Aggadic Midrash Eikha Rabba [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 1996), 29–36Google Scholar. For a contrary perspective, cf. Fraenkel, Yonah, Sipur ha-’agadah, ’aḥdut shel tokhen ṿe-ẓurah: Koveẓ meḥkarim (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 2001), 236–52Google Scholar, especially p. 247 n. 50. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for pointing me to this contemporary discussion. To be sure, the verbs גפפ and נשק are often found together in rabbinic literature, and not always with erotic connotation. For example, with respect to the question asked of R. Eliezer by a “wise woman” (B. Yoma 66b), about the inconsistency of divine punishment of Israel following the incident of the Golden Calf, the Talmud observes איתמר רב ולוי חד אמר זיבח וקיטר בסייף גפף ונישק במיתה, “It was said by Rav and Levi: one said, ‘He who sacrificed and burned incense, [his punishment is] by sword; he who embraced and kissed [the calf, his punishment is by divine] execution.’” Similarly, in Shir Ha-shirim Rabbah 5:16:3, it is reported that the heavenly angels attempted a kind of resuscitation on the Children of Israel upon seeing them swoon (lit. “die”) following God's opening speech at Mount Sinai, כך כשדיבר הקב'ה עם ישראל אנכי ה’ מיד פרחה נשמתן. כיון שמתו התחילו המלאכים מגפפין ומנשקין אותם, “So it was when the Holy One spoke with Israel, ‘I am the Lord …,’ immediately their souls flew off. Since they had died, they [the angels] embraced them and kissed them.” Nonetheless, particularly with regard to the pathos of this aggadic narrative, it seems to me that Hasan-Rokem makes the better case.

43. See, e.g., Genesis 29:13, 33:4, 45:15; 1 Samuel 20:41.

44. See Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, and the ways these verses have almost universally been interpreted in rabbinic literature (e.g., B. Sanhedrin 54ab; B. Yevamot 83b). An analogous rabbinic aversion was typically expressed also with respect to otherwise licit heterosexual touching that might lead to love-making (דרך חיבה ותאוה, “the way of affection and desire”) that is forbidden at specific times, e.g., during a woman's menstrual cycle. The sources on the subject are numerous; see, e.g., B. Shabbat 13a, and Rashi there: even ostensibly innocuous activities, such as eating together, let alone kissing and caressing, are forbidden מפני שמתוך שמתיחדין יבא לבעול, “because they are alone together, he may come to have intercourse [with her].”

45. In the rabbinic imagination, Mrs. Potiphar's interest in Joseph was preceded by that of her husband. See B. Sotah 13b where, wondering why the Bible calls Potiphar סריס פרעה, often translated as “a courtier of Pharaoh” but which also could be understood as “a eunuch,” the Talmud reports this wordplay-based interpretation: ויקנהו פוטיפר סריס פרעה: אמר רב שקנאו לעצמו. בא גבריאל ופירעו. מעיקרא כתיב פוטיפר, ולבסוף פוטיפרע, “And Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh's bought him [Genesis 39:1]: Rav said: He bought him for himself, but Gabriel came and mutilated him. Originally his name was written ‘Potiphar’ [i.e., here in Genesis 39:1] but afterwards ‘Potiphera’ [Genesis 41:45].” In other words, playing on Rabbinic Hebrew פרע, “to destroy, mutilate,” “Potiphar” was mutilated, “Potiphera,” thus becoming a eunuch. See also Bereshit Rabbah 86:3.

46. See what is for the Bible a lengthy description, Genesis 39:8–10, in particular Joseph's statement, “You are [my master's] wife. How then could I do this most wicked thing, and sin before God?” For ancient interpretations that describe Joseph's exemplary moral character in this episode, see Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 442–43. One text Kugel presents there emphasizes this dimension in particular (4 Maccabees 2:2–4): “It is for this reason, certainly, that the temperate Joseph is praised, because by mental effort he overcame sexual desire. For when he was young and in his prime, by his reason he nullified the frenzy of his passions. Not only is reason proved to rule over the frenzied urge of sexual desire, but also over every desire.”

47. Indeed, it seems that she functioned as with magician's stagecraft: with one sweep of her hand she whisked Joseph's cloak off his body like the magician does when pulling a tablecloth off a table under a stack of champagne glasses! See Kugel, In Potiphar's House, 97. Even if one were to imagine rabbinic understanding of slave clothing as minimal and easily removed, the almost ineluctable movement of “clothed to naked” seems overly brisk. Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 16–50 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1994), 376, writes, “To pull … garments off against the wearer's will must have involved surprise and violence”; to this, I would add, “unless the wearer was complicit.” See his citation of Haran, Menahem, “Clothing (מלבושים),” in Encyclopedia mikra'it (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1962), 4:1034–50Google Scholar (note in particular photographs and images, 1035–44).

48. Sarna, Nahum M., The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 273Google Scholar, notes the ambiguity also in other descriptions of Joseph's work, though without the use of the term מלאכה (Genesis 39:3, 22). He also references the Targum's interpretation that Joseph did Potiphar's accounting, לְמִבדַק בִכתָבֵי חוּשׁבָנֵיה, “[Joseph] checked the books of [Potiphar]’s accounts.”

49. See Rashbam and Ibn Ezra ad loc.

50. B. Sotah 36b. See Rashi on Genesis 39:11, who echoes this talmudic passage. Islamic tradition, as well, reports that Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar (there, “the wife of al-‘Aziz”) intended to consummate their attraction for one another. As Shari Lowin describes, “the wife of al-‘Aziz lay before him and he sat between her legs, or Joseph loosened her clothes as she lay before him, and/or he loosened his own, or he ‘sat with her as a man sits with his wife’”; see Lowin, Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in Al-Andalus, chapter 7, “The Cloak of Joseph.” Lowin also notes (n. 96) that other Islamic interpreters state that “she managed to untie seven knots on Joseph's trousers before Joseph came to his senses and raced out of the room.”

51. Rashi, B. Sotah, ad. loc. לדבר עבירה: והאי מלאכתו תשמיש.

52. In Potiphar's House, 97 and see 120 n. 4.

53. Tanḥuma 1:9, translated somewhat differently by Kugel.

54. See Kasher, Torah shelemah, 6:1498 n. 96.

55. In rendering this biblical citation, and the next, I have followed Everett Fox, The Schocken Bible, vol. 1, The Five Books of Moses (New York: Schocken, 1995). The parallel variant of this midrash found in the Babylonian Talmud (B. Sotah 36b) cites an explanatory interpretation of the biblical verse: “R. Joḥanan said in the name of R. Meir: ‘[This means] that [Joseph's] passion subsided.’”

56. Bereshit Rabbah 87:7 (Theodor-Albeck 3:1072); see also Y. Horayot 46d. With respect to Joseph, approaching the moment of climax, and seeing his father's image, Dalia Marx writes, “It is hard not to notice an Oedipal undertone in the midrash about Joseph encountering the image of his father while he is in a woman's bed. The image of the ‘great father’ appears in the middle of the sexual act, cools off his son's passion and denies his manhood.” See Dalia Marx, “Joseph and Gender Complexity,” Parsha E-letter, Vayeshev (Genesis 37:1–40:23) (December 2014), http://rhr.org.il/eng/2014/12/joseph-and-potiphars-wife-gender-compexity/. Levinson, “An-Other Woman: Joseph and Potiphar's Wife,” 299, also draws our attention to what he terms “the Freudian family romance,” but particularly stresses the cultural dimension that is his main point: “Why would Joseph's act of adultery result in the subsequent loss of his patrimonial connections? By cross-coding the gender and the cultural codes, not only is the foreign other troped as female, but masculine sexual identity … becomes a sine qua non of cultural identity” (298).

57. Lori Lefkovitz also cites this midrash in her essay, “Coats and Tales,” 23.

58. Referenced in the notes to Theodor-Albeck, מנחת יהודה, ad. loc.

59. We should, at the very least, consider Rashi's understanding of the expression (B. Sotah 36b): אלה תולדות יעקב יוסף - תולדות שיצאו מיעקב כנגדן ראוי לצאת מיוסף: … ואף על פי כן יצאו מבנימין אחיו - אותן עשרה שפיחתו מיוסף בעשר אצבעותיו, “These are the generations of Jacob, Joseph … [Genesis 37:2]: The same number of generations that descended out of Jacob should likewise have descended from Joseph … nevertheless they descended from Benjamin, his brother—those self-same ten whom Joseph diminished by means of his ten fingers.”

60. Perhaps one ought to read ואמרה לו: נטמאתי, “but who said to him: ‘I have become impure.’”

61. See Levinson, “An-Other Woman,” 293 and n. 91.

62. On rabbinic portrayals of men resisting illicit or inadvisable sexual expression, see Satlow, Michael, “Try to Be a Man: The Rabbinic Construction of Masculinity,” Harvard Theological Review 89, no. 1 (1996): 26–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63. Y. Horayot 46d offers a variant of this midrash, and adds: אמר ר’ אבין: אף איקונין שלרחל ראה, “Said R. Abin: Even an icon of Rachel did he see”; see Sussmann, Yaacov, ed. Talmud Yerushalmi: According to Ms. Or. 4720 (Scal. 3) of the Leiden University Library with Restorations and Corrections (Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2001), 1420Google Scholar. This raises an additional layer of potential Oedipal ramifications in the rabbinic evaluation of Joseph's conduct.

64. See below. In Rashi's oft-cited methodological statement (in his commentary on Genesis 3:8), this might thus be considered an instance of אגדה המיישבת דבר המקרא ומשמעו, “an aggadah that settles a matter of Scripture and its sense.” On my reading of this methodological statement, along with a slight emendation of the received version, see most recently Robert A. Harris, “What's in a Blessing? Rashi and the Priestly Benediction of Numbers 6:22–27,” in Birkat Kohanim: The Priestly Benediction in Jewish Tradition, ed. Martin Cohen and David Birnbaum (New York: New Paradigm Matrix, 2016), 254 n. 10. Having recently examined Rashi's commentary in the authoritative, thirteenth-century Leipzig MS Hebrew 1 during a visit to that city, I will take this opportunity to correct one aspect of that note: contrary to what I write there, Rashi's methodological statement does survive in the manuscript, though partly faded and partly deficient due to some degree of medieval damage. Despite the unique reading in the manuscript, which I will address in a future study, the fundamental idea remains the same.

65. Theodor-Albeck 3:1268–69. For other ancient interpretations of Joseph's triumphal procession (in light of Genesis 49:22), see Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 444–47.

66. In addressing questions of gender and sexuality, I have been guided by definitions of these and related terms found on the website of the American Psychological Association, https://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/sexuality-definitions.pdf.

67. Buber, Solomon, Midrash lekaḥ tov … of R. Tobiah Ben Eliezer (Vilna: Romm, 1880), 228Google Scholar.

68. Ibn Ezra and Ramban, on Genesis 48:6, postulate that Scripture alludes to other sons of Joseph but does not mention them by name, but their comments seem apologetic and unconvincing; cf. Abarbanel's critique (Va-yehi, Genesis 48, question 6 and accompanying commentary).

69. See Genesis 46:8–27. We will not address the problem of Genesis 46:23; see Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, 316. Joseph's brothers may have indeed fathered many children each, but in fathering only two, Joseph follows in the footsteps of his mother, Rachel, yet another link between mother and son. I am indebted to Gwynn Kessler, who pointed this out to me.

70. In an otherwise anomalous interpretation of Genesis 35:22, David Kimḥi holds that following the birth of his twelve sons, Jacob abstained from further sexual relations with any of his wives and, monk-like, devoted himself exclusively to the worship of God. (וישמע ישראל: ופירש מן האשה, זהו שאמר: ויהיו בני יעקב שנים עשר, כי לא היה עוד בן והיה פרוש עוד כל ימיו מאשה ומדרכי העולם והתעסק בעבודת האל, זהו שאמר: והיה ה‘ לי לאלהים “And Israel heard: And he separated himself from the woman, as it is said: And the sons of Jacob were twelve. Indeed, he had no more children after that, and he remained celibate and removed from the ways of the world all the remaining days of his life, and occupied himself with the worship of God, as it says: And the LORD shall be my God [Genesis 28:21].”) No analogous medieval commentary of which I am aware offers any remotely comparable interpretation of Joseph's lack of further progeny after Ephraim and Manasseh.

71. Y. Berakhot 9:3 (14a). See the discussion below.

72. The formula is abbreviated with regard to births of Zilpah's sons (Genesis 30:9–13), and states only ותלד, “she bore.”

73. The formula ותהר ותלד בן, “she conceived and bore a son,” itself goes back to the very first births recorded in the Bible (see Genesis 4:1–2).

74. See, e.g., Gesenius, Wilhelm, Kautzsch, Emil Friedrich, and Bergstrasser, Gotthelf, Wilhelm Gesenius’ Hebraische Grammatik (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1929)Google Scholar, 2:6c; Lambdin, Thomas Oden, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (New York: Scribners, 1971), 279–82Google Scholar; Walsh, Jerome T., Style and Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), 155–59Google Scholar.

75. אין המקרא הזה אומר אלא דרשני “This verse says nothing other than ‘expound me’!” The formula is famously found in Rashi's first midrashic interpretation of Genesis 1:1. Surprisingly, the complete expression does not appear elsewhere in rabbinic literature (though elements of it do), but one may state that the sentiment behind Rashi's gloss animates virtually the entirety of midrashic enterprise with respect to biblical verses. See the observation by J. D. Eisenstein, ’Oẓar Midrashim: A Library of Two Hundred Minor Midrashim [in Hebrew] (New York: Noble Offset Printers, 1915), vii: למלאכת הדרוש האגדי השתמשו בכל פסוקי תנ”ך כ”ז שהיו יכולים להוציא מהם איזה דבר טוב ומועיל, ובפרט הפסוקים הקשים והסתומים, ומורגל בפיהם לומר אין המקרא הזה אומר אלא דרשני “For the purpose of expounding narrative [the sages] used all of the Bible's verses on any occasion that they could derive from them some worthy or useful teaching, and especially with respect to difficult and obscure verses, and they were accustomed to saying, ‘This verse says nothing other than expound me.’” On this formula, see also the addenda to Berliner, Abraham, Rashi on the Torah: The Commentary of Solomon B. Isaac (Berlin: Levant, 1866)Google Scholar, 182b n. 1.

76. This observation remains true even accounting for the “drum roll” nature of the previous, interceding verse, “Now God remembered Rachel; God heeded her and opened her womb” (Genesis 30:22).

77. Most of these texts and traditions were thoroughly analyzed in Gwynn Kessler, “The God of Small Things: The Fetus and Its Development in Palestinian Aggadic Literature” (PhD diss., Jewish Theological Seminary, 2001), 107–20. Relying on her own analysis in a subsequent publication, Kessler concludes, “When the rabbis imagine individual fetuses, they imagine them as male—to the point that the one female fetus that makes it into rabbinic literature, Dinah, is ‘made male.’” See Kessler, Gwynn, Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 24Google Scholar; see also 77–80.

78. Y. Berakhot 9:3 (14a); I have translated this according to the version found in Sussmann, Talmud Yerushalmi, 73.

79. Of course, the reader knows that Rachel is barren, since the Bible has explicitly stated this in Genesis 29:31, but Rachel accuses Jacob of not giving her seed (Genesis 30:1). Despite all of her efforts to conceive (see Genesis 30:14–18), Rachel remains barren until God steps in to “open her womb” (Genesis 30:22).

80. Rosen, Tova, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 170CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 246–47 n. 6, briefly discusses this midrash in her analysis of the unusual medieval piyyut by Kalonymos ben Kalonymos, ’Even boḥan, which features a man's prayer that he might become a woman. I am grateful to my colleague, Ray Scheindlin, for this reference.

81. See Rashi, who references this rabbinic narrative. For an account parallel to the Bavli, albeit with some nuanced differences, see Bereshit Rabbah 72:6 (Theodor-Albeck 2:845); and Tanḥuma, Va-yeẓeh 19, Solomon Buber, Midrash Tanhuma (1913; repr. Jerusalem: [n.p.], 1964), 157. Cf. Ibn Ezra, who cites an unattributed opinion that Dinah was essentially Zebulon's twin (יש אומרים כי עם זבולון היתה בבטן אחת, “There are those who say that she [Dinah] was with Zebulon in one womb”); Bekhor Shor concurs with this interpretation.

82. See, e.g., Bereshit Rabbah 71:4 (Theodor-Albeck 2:826–27).

83. The importance of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 30:21 seems to have escaped the attention of others engaged in the academic discussion of midrashic sources on the relationship between Dinah's and Joseph's birth stories.

84. That is the conclusion of no less an authority on the breadth and scope of rabbinic literature than Menahem Kasher: ויש חידוש בדבריו שכתוב ואיתחלפו עוברייא במעיהון, “There is an innovation it its words, in that it is written ‘and the fetuses of their wombs were exchanged’”; see Kasher, Torah shelemah, 5:1199. See also the brief comments of Shinan, Avigdor, The Embroidered Targum: The Aggadah in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan of the Pentateuch [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1992)Google Scholar, 142 and n. 215.

85. Marx, “Joseph and Gender Complexity,” cites only the midrash in B. Berakhot 60a, and concludes: “The author of the midrash seems to feel there is something essentially feminine about Joseph. He explains it with the judgment Leah passed upon herself and her sensitivity towards her sister, worrying that if Rachel gave birth to fewer males than the handmaids it would disgrace her. That is why she had the fetuses switched: the fetus in her womb turned into a girl, namely Dinah, whereas Rachel, who was supposed to give birth to a daughter, had a son—Joseph. This midrash explains … Joseph's latent femininity.” However, without referencing the expansive translation of the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, which explicitly mentions the switching of the fetuses (but even at that, not that the male fetus “turned into a girl”), she deduces implications from the Bavli that are not explicitly present in that text.

86. Thinking about the targum's midrash from a reader-response perspective, were one to want to suggest a gender relationship of some kind between the two fetuses that results in the births of Joseph and Dinah, one might build an interesting case through reference to quantum information processing. Quantum computing relies on two basic principles of quantum mechanics: superposition, meaning that a quantum “object” essentially occupies multiple states at the same time; and entanglement, whereby two or more quantum objects can share their states even if they are separated from one another by great distances. Based on these quantum mechanical principles, one might consider Joseph and Dinah in the wombs of Rachel and Leah as an entangled quantum system, instantaneously sharing their quantum states (via superposition and entanglement). In any case, through quantum computing one can measure or otherwise understand the relationship between what had appeared to be two separate objects, but which are really one and the same; see https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/quantum-computing-101. For a wonderful prose explanation of quantum computing, see Phillip Ball, “How Quantum Mechanics Could Be Even Weirder,” The Atlantic, June 22, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/quantum-mechanics-weird/487691/. I am grateful to my friend, Dr. Shalom Wind, of the Columbia University Applied Physics Department, for introducing me to this subject.

87. I have long used this idiom to render Rashbam's innovative term יתורי מקרא, literally, “the (apparently) superfluous/redundant aspects of Scripture” through which traditional Jewish exegetes had developed their midrashim (and in contrast with which Rashbam sought instead to give exclusively contextual, or peshat, explanations). See, e.g., Rashbam's introduction to the legal section of Scripture (at Exodus 21:1). For a related use of the familiar idiom “grist for the mill” in Zoharic interpretation, see Wolfson, Elliot R., “Beautiful Maiden without Eyes: Peshat and Sod in Zoharic Hermeneutics,” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History, ed. Fishbane, Michael (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 184Google Scholar.

88. I am not the first person, of course, who has raised these questions, and I acknowledge, inter alia, the following other readers who have offered readings that examine Joseph as a transgender or queer character: Carden, Michael, “Commentary on Genesis,” in The Queer Bible Commentary, ed. Guest, Deryn (London: SCM, 2006), 52–60Google Scholar; Drinkwater, Gregg, Lesser, Joshua, and Shneer, David, Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 53–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stone, Ken, Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

89. This, of course, is the famous rendering of the King James Bible; cf. RSV (“a long robe with sleeves”) and NJPS (“an ornamented tunic”).

90. For a color plate of an Egyptian depiction of Canaanites wearing what may be similar garments, see Weinfeld, Moshe, ed., ‘Olam ha-Tanakh: Bereshit (Tel Aviv: Yedi‘ot ’Ahronot, 1993), 207Google Scholar.

91. Genesis 37:3; Genesis 37:23; Genesis 37:32.

92. The full text reads: וְעָלֶיהָ כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים כִּי כֵן תִּלְבַּשְׁןָ בְנוֹת־הַמֶּלֶךְ הַבְּתוּלֹת מְעִילִים וַיֹּצֵא אוֹתָהּ מְשָׁרְתוֹ הַחוּץ וְנָעַל הַדֶּלֶת אַחֲרֶיהָ: וַתִּקַּח תָּמָר אֵפֶר עַל־רֹאשָׁהּ וּכְתֹנֶת הַפַּסִּים אֲשֶׁר עָלֶיהָ קָרָעָה וַתָּשֶׂם יָדָהּ עַל־רֹאשָׁהּ וַתֵּלֶךְ הָלוֹךְ וְזָעָקָה, “Upon her was a ketonet passim, for so would the daughters of the King, marriage-aged, wear cloaks. He thrust her out, (did) his attendant and locked the door after her. Tamar took ash on her head and as for the ketonet passim that was upon her—she tore it; she put her hand on her head, and walked, walking and crying” (2 Samuel 13:18–19).

93. According to several midrashim, Jacob knew he had endangered his ostensibly favorite son by sending him to his brothers (Genesis 37:12–13); see Kasher, Torah shelemah, 6:1408–11, and notes there. For an Islamic interpretive tradition that Jacob endangered Joseph even as he intuited his brothers’ hatred for him, see Sura 12:11–13: “They said, “O our father, why do you not entrust us with Joseph while indeed, we are to him sincere counselors? Send him with us tomorrow that he may eat well and play. And indeed, we will be his guardians. [Jacob] said, ‘Indeed, it saddens me that you should take him, and I fear that a wolf would eat him while you are of him unaware.’” I have cited this from the text found at The Noble Quran, www.quran.com. On this sura and its treatment in post-Quranic commentary and medieval Islamic poetry, see Lowin, Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in Al-Andalus, chap. 7, “The Cloak of Joseph.”

94. For other biblical couples who first met at a well, see Exodus 2:15–21; one may also add Genesis 24:11–17, where Abraham's servant, effectively Isaac's surrogate, meets Rebecca.

95. Biblical Hebrew רכות might mean “weak” or “soft.” Ibn Ezra refers to a Karaite interpreter (with whom he disagrees) who believes that an initial aleph has elided, and that the word should be understood as though it were ארכות. Assuming that the Karaite did not simply mean that Leah's eyes were “long,” that is, “almond-shaped,” presumably, the meaning would then be “crusty, scabby,” that is, in need of healing; see the word אֲרֻכַת, “healing,” in Jeremiah 8:17: כִּי מַדּוּעַ לֹא עָלְתָה אֲרֻכַת בַּת־עַמִּי, “Why has the healing of the daughter of my people not arisen?” While an Arabic cognate might have led either Karaite or Rabbanite exegete to think of this interpretation, it is curious that there is a rabbinic midrash that might also have contributed. In B. Bava Batra 123a a midrash relates the circumstances through which Leah's eyes became “injured” or “weak”: ?כתיב: ועיני לאה רכות. מאי רכות … רב אמר: לעולם רכות ממש ולא גנאי הוא לה אלא שבח הוא לה, שהיתה שומעת על פרשת דרכים בני אדם שהיו אומרים שני בנים יש לה לרבקה, שתי בנות יש לו ללבן, גדולה לגדול וקטנה לקטן, והיתה יושבת על פרשת דרכים, ומשאלת: גדול, מה מעשיו? איש רע הוא, מלסטם בריות; קטן, מה מעשיו? איש תם יושב אוהלים, והיתה בוכה עד שנשרו ריסי עיניה, “It is written And the eyes of Leah were weak. What [is meant by] weak? … Rav said: indeed [her eyes] actually were weak—but that was no disgrace to her but a credit. For at the crossroads she heard people saying: Rebecca has two sons, [and] Laban has two daughters; the elder [daughter should be married] to the elder [son] and the younger [daughter should be married] to the younger [son]. And she sat at the crossroads and inquired: ‘The elder one, what are his deeds?' [And the answer came that he was] a wicked man, a highway robber. ‘How does the younger man conduct himself?’—‘A quiet man dwelling in tents.’ And she wept until her eyelashes dropped.”

96. In other words, in contradistinction to her sister, Rachel had both a beautiful body and a beautiful face.

97. See, e.g., the “Tatterhood” tale in Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen and Moe, Jorgen, “East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon,” in Popular Tales from the Norse, trans. Dasent, George Webbe (Edinburgh: David Douglass, 1888)Google Scholar; cited from http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/asbjornsenmoe/tatterhood.html.

98. Ibn Ezra (commentary on Genesis 39:6) quite tersely expresses recognition of the connection between the description of Joseph's beauty and Rachel's in a single word: כאמו, “[Joseph's beauty is] like his mother's.” See Cohen, Menachem, Mikra’ot gedolot “Ha-keter”: A Revised and Augmented Scientific Edition of ‘Mikra’ot Gedolot’ Based on the Aleppo Codex and Early Medieval Mss, vol. 2, Genesis (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1999), 113Google Scholar. Bereshit Rabbah likewise observes the connection between the biblical narrator's description of Rachel's beauty, and of Joseph's; see Bereshit Rabbah 86:6 (Theodor-Albeck 2:1059). A contemporary commentator writes, “This sort of language in reference to male beauty is unusual in the Bible and draws our attention for that reason if no other. But in addition it teaches us something about Jacob's reasons for feeling so close to this particular son.… Joseph resembled his mother and so was a constant reminder of her for the bereaved Jacob.” See Cotter, David W., Genesis (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 291Google Scholar.

99. Cf., e.g., Genesis 12:11 (Sarah); 1 Samuel 25:3 (Abigail); Esther 2:7 (Esther).

100. As earlier stated, Kugel, In Potiphar's House, 67, notes the rabbis are aware that the precise biblical description of Joseph's beauty is elsewhere only used of Rachel, although both he and they draw different conclusions from this connection than I do.

101. See, e.g., Fuhs, H. F., “נער,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. Botterweck, Johannes, G.. and Ringgren, Helmer, trans. Willis, John T. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), 9:474–85Google Scholar; MacDonald, John, “The Status and Role of the Na‘ar in Israelite Society,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 35, no. 3 (1976): 147–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar (see in particular p. 152, n. 16, for references to scholarship about the term in its ancient Egyptian context); Leeb, Carolyn S., Away from the Father's House: The Social Location of Na‘ar and Na‘arah in Ancient Israel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000)Google Scholar. These and other studies are discussed in Wilson, Stephan M., Making Men: The Male Coming-of-Age Theme in the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 48–51Google Scholar; as Wilson points out, each of the aforementioned studies seeks to explore meanings of the term outside the narrow considerations of “youth.”

102. A search of “נער followed by את,” using Accordance 11.1.6, yielded fifty-nine results, but only Genesis 37:2 contains this precise syntactic arrangement. Trenchantly, Rashbam cites a corresponding text not often referenced in the standard commentaries, Hosea 11:1: כִּי נַעַר יִשְׂרָאֵל וָאֹהֲבֵהוּ, “Israel was a lad and I [God] loved him.” However, Rashbam does not follow up with any further suggestion about any other meaningful connection between these two verses.

103. Speiser, E. A., Genesis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), 287–89Google Scholar.

104. Skinner, John, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1910), 443–44Google Scholar.

105. Ibid., 444.

106. Although I have considered the potential of ancient Semitics to aid in understanding the root n-‘ -r in some sort of sense indicating sexual arousal, I have thus far been unsuccessful. In fact, the only occasion when I have found such a suggestion in print was in a surprising (and unsubstantiated) source, Braude's English translation of Bialik-Rawnitzki's Sefer ha-’aggadah: “The commentator seems to take na‘ar as a nominal form of the stem ‘r (‘to awake, to become sexually mature’).” Following this observation, the editor adds: “So Rabbi Julius Kravitz of Tucson, Ariz.” Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik and Yehoshu‘a Hana Rawnitzki, The Book of Legends equals Sefer Ha-Aggadah: Legends From the Talmud and Midrash, trans. William G. Braude (New York: Schocken, 1992), 51 n.1.

107. E.g., Genesis 24:14 (and throughout chapter 24); 34:3, 12; see also Deuteronomy 22:15 (and elsewhere in the chapter).

108. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew [in Hebrew] (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1908), 3714a.

109. For example, the disaster that befalls “the young people” (נערים) in Job 1:19 clearly includes both Job's sons as well as his daughters (see Job 1:18).

110. See Edward L. Greenstein, “Verbal Art and Literary Sensibilities in Ancient Near Eastern Context,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Ancient Israel, ed. Susan Niditch (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 471–72. Greenstein notes that “a special type of literary art that was oriented to the eye was the scribal joke.… A cuneiform scribe may write a word in a surprising or punning manner for the amusement of his colleagues” (471). See also Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 104–5, where the author treats the ambiguity of the morpheme [ושכבת[י, and interprets it as not necessarily an archaism but rather as a deliberate plot device employed to provide additional nuances of meaning in the narrative. I am grateful to Edward L. Greenstein for this reference.

111. See Wilson, Making Men, 53–56.

112. Ironically, this conclusion diametrically opposes MacDonald's study, which explores the military role played by characters whom the Bible and Ancient Near Eastern literature designates with this term; see MacDonald “Status and Role of the Na‘ar in Israelite Society,” 157–66.

113. Wilson, Making Men, 53; the italics are Wilson's.

114. Ibid., 55.

115. Ibid. Wilson writes this about David (1 Samuel 17:42) and Joseph (Genesis 39:6). See also 2 Kings 5:14 and Job 33:25 for references to the beautiful, soft skin of a נער.

116. The biblical phrase is צִוִּיתִי אֶת־הַנְּעָרִים לְבִלְתִּי נָגְעֵךְ, “I have commanded the lads to not touch/molest you”; see Wilson, Making Men, 55.

117. Nahum Sarna comments that Joseph “fraternized, in particular, with Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher”; Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, 255.

118. Making this distinction between the sons of the concubines and Joseph's “other” brothers is in keeping with the typical way in which proponents of the Documentary Hypothesis divide the chapter; see, e.g., Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed: A New Look into the Five Books of Moses (New York: Harper SanFrancisco, 2003), 92–93. See Rashbam, who makes a similar distinction in his comment on the phrase היה רועה את אחיו בצאן, “He shepherded with his brothers among the sheep,” in Genesis 37:2. See also Ginzberg, Legends, 5:326 n. 9.

119. On Jacob as an egocentric character see Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 474. For other studies that have helped me frame my contention that the narrator of Genesis presents the character of Jacob, throughout, as egocentric and self-centered, see: John Edward Anderson, Jacob and the Divine Trickster: A Theology of Deception and Yhwh's Fidelity to the Ancestral Promise in the Jacob Cycle (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011); Susan Niditch, A Prelude to Biblical Folklore: Underdogs and Tricksters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 93–125; Richard D. Patterson, “The Old Testament Use of an Archetype: The Trickster,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 42, no. 3 (1999): 385–94; Yair and Valerie Zakovitch, Jacob: Unexpected Patriarch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

120. The reader learns that Dinah spends the entirety of Genesis 34 in the household of Schechem (and Hamor), as she is only freed by Simon and Levi's rescue in v. 26: וַיִּקְחוּ אֶת־דִּינָה מִבֵּית שְׁכֶם וַיֵּצֵאוּ, “They [Simon and Levi] took Dinah from the house of Schechem and they left.” See Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 441–82. I am aware that Sternberg's reading of this narrative has been challenged by, inter alia, Fewell and Gunn; nonetheless, I am persuaded by the essential claims of Sternberg's interpretation. Cf. Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, “Tipping the Balance: Sternberg's Reader and the Rape of Dinah,” Journal of Biblical Literature 110, no. 2 (1991): 193–211; see Sternberg's rejoinder, “Biblical Poetics and Sexual Politics: From Reading to Counter-Reading,” Journal of Biblical Literature 111, no. 3 (1992): 476–79. See also Yael Shemesh, “Rape Is Rape Is Rape: The Story of Dinah and Shechem (Genesis 34),” Zeitschrift fur die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 119, no. 1 (2007): 2–21; Frank M. Yamada, “Dealing with Rape (in) Narrative (Genesis 34): Ethics of the Other and a Text in Conflict,” in The Meanings We Choose: Hermeneutical Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Charles H. Cosgrove (London: T & T Clark International, 2004), 157–61; Caroline Blyth, The Narrative of Rape in Genesis 34: Interpreting Dinah’s Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

121. Genesis 37:33–35: “[Jacob] recognized it, and said, ‘My son's tunic! A savage beast devoured him! Joseph was torn by a beast!’ Jacob rent his clothes, put sackcloth on his loins, and observed mourning for his son many days. All his sons and daughters sought to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted, saying, ‘No, I will go down mourning to my son in Sheol.’ Thus his father bewailed him” (NJPS).

122. It is also telling that Simon and Levi seem to pick up on the implications of Jacob's self-centered response when they state, “Like a whore shall he [i.e., Jacob] make our sister?!” (Genesis 34:31). This verse is generally mistranslated and incorrectly, or imprecisely, taken as referencing the initial deed of Shechem son of Hamor (Genesis 34:2, see 34:7), or Hamor's proposal to Jacob and his sons (Genesis 34:8–10).

123. In addition to Dinah, whom the narrator presumably only names on account of the catastrophe that befell her, Jacob's daughters (plural) are mentioned in Genesis 37:35; 46:7, 15; see also Genesis 34:9.

124. Carden, “Commentary on Genesis,” 54.

125. In addition to the texts we explored above, we might also consider how Jacob exploits his brother and father with respect to both the birthright and the blessing (Genesis 25:29–34 and 27:6–41). Indeed, a full consideration of the Jacob narrative would yield additional examples of exclusively self-interested behavior.

126. Rashi disagrees with this assessment, and (at Genesis 28:22) indicates that the resultant clause of the condition only begins with Jacob's pledge to build a shrine. Bekhor Shor (at Genesis 28:21) sees the conditional clause as I have explained it here.

127. I have cited the Hebrew text from Malkah Shaked, I'll Play You Forever: The Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry, vol. 1, Anthology [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Miskal–Yedi‘ot ’Aḥronot Books and Sifre Ḥemed, 2005), 148–50; the English translation is my own. Shaked offers her analysis of the poem in I'll Play You Forever: The Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry, vol. 2, Criticism, 184–88. I am grateful to my friend and colleague, Dr. Laura Wiseman, who drew my attention to this beautiful poem. See Laura Wiseman, “Telling and Retelling Rachel,” in Parcours judaïques XIII: Tales Twice Told – Truth, Fiction and Authority, ed. Danièle Kahn-Paycha and Bernard Zelechow (Nanterre: Université Paris Ouest, 2015), 139–56.

128. Insofar as Zarhi is a poet, I give her wide birth to imagine the world of biblical narrative and to state its truth as she wishes to recompose it, so to speak. It is a different case altogether, I think, when modern writers impute their own reality to ancient (or medieval) circumstances. A case in point is Rachel Adelman's reading of Leah Goldberg's poem, “Jacob and Rachel.” Adelman writes, “While in Genesis, Leah ‘becomes’ Rachel on the wedding night (Genesis 29:23–25, and Rashi on Genesis 29:23–25), the poem suggests the inverse exchange of identities.” However, where Adelman might be on solid ground in her interpretation of the twentieth-century Hebrew poem, she has overread Rashi (on v. 25), who draws no such conclusion. See Rachel Adelman, “Breaking the Distaff of Silence: The Voice of Rachel the Matriarch in Modern Israeli Poetry,” in The Bible Retold by Jewish Artists, Writers, Composers and Filmmakers, ed. Helen Leneman and Barry Dov Walfish (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2015), 63.

129. Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone, Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 2. See also Ken Stone, Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 11–34.

130. S. Tamar Kamionkowski, “Queer Theory and Historical-Critical Exegesis: Queering Biblicists—A Response,” in Hornsby and Stone, Bible Trouble, 135.

131. It may be equally as important to consider the question within the context of ancient Persia, and the Parthian and Sassanid Empires. Although the period she addresses is likely too early for our concerns, the questions Irene Madreiter poses are certainly apropos; see Irene Madreiter, “Gender and Sex in Achaemenid Persia,” in A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, ed. B. Jacobs and R. Rollinger (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, in press).

132. For an example of the type of questions one might ask, see, e.g., Theodore W. Burgh, “‘Who's the Man?’: Sex and Gender in Iron Age Musical Performance,” Near Eastern Archaeology 67, no. 3 (2004): 128–36.

133. See Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 109–10. Finkelstein's assessment there is that “the population of Israel on both sides of the Jordan River in its peak prosperity in the middle of the eighth century can accordingly be estimated at … three times larger than the population of Judah of that time.”

134. For Joseph as representative of the northern Kingdom of Israel, see, e.g., Amos 5:6, 15; Zechariah 10:6; Psalms 78:67.

135. See also Judah's preparedness to stand surety for Joseph in Genesis 43:8–10.

136. Levinson, “An-Other Woman,” 272; see n. 9, there, for additional bibliography. In general, the character of Joseph as presented in the postbiblical Judean literature is much “flatter” and more one-dimensional than in rabbinic literature, and more consistently and conventionally “pious and chaste.” See, e.g., the Testament of Joseph (especially chapters 1–9) within the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs narrative (“I struggled with a shameless woman who kept prodding me to transgress with her, but the God of my father rescued me from the burning flame.”) in James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 819–21; Josephus, in Antiquities 2.4.2–5 (41–54) in H. St. J. Thackeray, Josephus in Nine [I.e. Ten] Volumes, vol. 4, Jewish Antiquities, books 1–4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; W. Heinemann, 1961), 184–95; Philo, “On Joseph,” 9–10 (44–52) in F. H. Colson, G. H. Whitaker, and Ralph Marcus, Philo: In Ten Volumes (and Two Supplementary Volumes): with an English Translation, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; W. Heinemann, 1984), 162–69.

137. Levinson, “An-Other Woman,” 274.

138. Ibid., 280.

139. Daniel Boyarin, “Homotopia: The Feminized Jewish Man and the Lives of Women in Late Antiquity,“ Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (1995): 41–81. See also Boyarin's book-length treatment of the subject, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

140. Journal of Textual Reasoning 10, no. 1 (December 2018). I am grateful to Marjorie Lehman for sharing this paper with me in advance of its publication.

141. Here Lehman cites Levinson, “An-Other Woman,” 274–75.

142. See Rashi's pithy summary of the midrash in his comment on Genesis 41:45: פוטיפרע – הוא פוטיפר, ונקרא שמו פוטיפרע על שם שנסתרס מאיליו, לפי שלקח את יוסף למשכב זכור “Potiphera: This is Potiphar, and his name was called ‘Potiphera’ on account of his being castrated by his actions, since he had purchased Joseph for the purpose of male [with male] sexual relations.”

143. Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “The Rise and Fall of Rabbinic Masculinity,” Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal (2013): 1–22.

144. Ibid., 13.

145. Tosefta Mikvaʾot 7:11 (ed. Zuckermandel, 660–61).

146. An excerpt from Rosen-Zvi's citation and translation of this passage should suffice to clarify his point about the violence in the rabbinic text: “At that time R. Tarfon recited this verse: ‘I saw the ram goring westward and northward, and all the animals were unable to stand against it …’ (Daniel 8:4)—[this is] R. Akiba. ‘As I was considering, behold, a he-goat came from the west across the face of the whole earth …’ (ibid., 5)—this is Jose Haglili and his answer. ‘And he came to the ram with the two horns … and he ran at him in his mighty wrath … he was enraged against him and struck the ram and broke his two horns’ (ibid., 7)—this is R. Akiba and R. Simon b. Nanas. ‘And the ram had no power to stand before him’ (ibid.)—this is Akiba, ‘but he cast him down to the ground and trampled upon him’ (ibid.)—this is R. Yose Haglili, ‘And there was no one who could rescue the ram from his power’ (ibid.)—these are the thirty-two elders who voted in Lydda and declared it clean.”

147. Rosen-Zvi, “Rise and Fall of Rabbinic Masculinity,” 15.

148. Ibid., 21. Among others who speak to his argument, Rosen-Zvi cites Jeffrey Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Charlotte Fonrobert, “The Semiotics of the Sexed Body in Early Halakhic Discourse,” in Closed and Open: Readings of Rabbinic Texts, ed. Matthew Kraus (New York: Gorgias, 2006), 69–96.

149. Levinson, “An-Other Woman,” 274.

150. Levinson, “Cultural Androgyny in Rabbinic Literature,” 137–38.

151. To draw this essay's case more precisely, one might contrast the sages’ treatment of the Joseph narrative with their virtual neglect of the biblical narrative that features the relationship between David and Jonathan. Despite the strong affection of Jonathan for David described by the biblical narrator, and despite the powerful, even if enigmatic, expression of love David expresses for Jonathan in the lament for his fallen friend, rabbinic midrash is all but utterly silent on the relationship between the two. Whatever biblical evidence to the contrary contemporary readers might find in supporting this as a homoerotic relationship, ancient and medieval rabbis seem uninterested in it for almost any purposes. For the few rabbinic notices, see B. Sanhedrin 104a (on 1 Samuel 20:42); M. Avot 5:16; Yalkut Shimoni, part 2, remez 141 (on 2 Samuel 1:26; see David Kimḥi and Gersonides there).

152. This excerpt is but a small portion of a much longer commentary with which the exegete glossed 1 Samuel 1:17–18. See Menachem Cohen, Mikra’ot gedolot “Ha-keter,” 7.

153. See also Kara's commentary on Isaiah 5:8–10. I have treated this comment in another context, see Harris, Robert A., “Structure and Composition in Isaiah 1–12: A Twelfth-Century Northern French Rabbinic Perspective,” in “As Those Who Are Taught”: The Interpretation of Isaiah from the LXX to the SBL, ed. McGinnis, Claire Mathews and Tull, Patricia K. (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 171–87Google Scholar. On the subject of enabling original contextual meaning to inform contemporary religious sensibilities, see Simon, Uriel, “The Religious Significance of the Peshat,” Tradition 23, no. 2 (1988): 41–63Google Scholar; and Garfinkel, Stephen, “Applied Peshat: Historical-Critical Method and Religious Meaning,” The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 22 (1993): 19–28Google Scholar.