To describe Joseph as tempted by idolatry cuts across an exegesis that extols his righteousness from the beginning. Usually the dreams of Joseph are seen as good dreams and the jealousy he stokes in his brothers and the rebuke he provokes in his father are seen as the fault of his family, not his own. I find this interpretation unlikely — an adoring hagiography in the middle of the otherwise gnarly Genesis text. It’s a better story than that: The story of Joseph is a story of the redemption of the sin of the woman, who would be “like God.” It is an instruction to our age, which would do the same.
That idolatry is essentially related to technology
Like Adam and Eve, Joseph is a keeper of sheep. Like our first parents, he is beloved by his father and robed in glory: “Now Israel loved Joseph...and he made him a long robe” (Genesis 37:2). Like Eve, he hears a whisper that he will be “like unto God,” through dreams in which “the sun, the moon, and the eleven stars were bowing down” (37:9) to him. We know the story: Enslaved for his dreams of greatness and imprisoned for his chastity, Joseph is lifted to the heady heights of Egyptian political power for interpreting the Pharaoh’s dream: “Seven years of great abundance are now coming throughout the land of Egypt; but seven years of famine will rise up after them” (39:29-30).
Faced with famine, Joseph enters into a technological mode of being. Egypt’s fields of grain no longer appear as simply given; plants that wait for Joseph to till and keep them unto their perfection. They appear as material ordered to the fulfilment of a lack; a reserve to be gathered up and stored. I think the ex-seminarian Martin Heidegger had Joseph in mind when, in his Question Concerning Technology, he argued that technology is a mode of being wherein we set-upon the real in order to reveal it as “standing-reserve” in which “everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand.” “The food shall be a reserve,” (41:36) says Joseph, simplifying.
That Joseph risks becoming a god seems clear. He is juxtaposed with magicians — those who would ape divine power by human and demonic mechanism. A pagan god-king, the Egyptian Pharaoh, sees the “Spirit of God” in Joseph (41:38) and orders Egypt into a technological mechanism under his authority: “you shall be over my house, and all people shall order themselves as you command” (41:39). Taking him into his chariot, Pharaoh enacts a partial fulfilment of Joseph’s dreams of greatness. He robes him and makes “him to ride in his second chariot; and they cried before him, ‘Bow the knee!’” (41:43). It is no wonder that, in a Jewish tradition, the Egyptians are entirely taken in. Thanks to his marvelous mechanism, they treated Joseph as a god, steeping his sarcophagus into the Nile as blessing upon the river in order to assure fertility, abundance, and salvation from scarcity (Sotah 13a).
That Joseph creates a technological mechanism for storing and distributing grain and that he risks being seen as a god are two, related facts. The one who orders the world to the fulfilment of a lack is in danger of appearing as a god insofar as he appears to achieve directly what is, in fact, the result of many powers combined into a mechanism. It would be idolatrous to say “by my power I have saved Egypt.” It claims super-humanity through the erasure of the real means by which salvation is produced — the labor and fields of many men; “in each city the crops of the fields around it” (41:48). This, I would argue, is the proper definition of the god-king throughout the Bible: the one who presumes scarcity, orders creation into a mechanism that wards off scarcity, and then, by forgetting or obscuring the truth of the mechanism, claims that he saves the world from scarcity by his own power.
2. That, despite being the means by which we produce gods, technology is not thereby evil.
By grasping at the wisdom he believed he lacked, Adam committed sacrilege against the creation which God had declared as “very good” and without lack. Now that Adam’s wish is fulfilled, our habits really are imperfect, and our lack of knowledge of the nature of things renders us susceptible to disease, famine and terror on every side, technology is a relative good.
One must hit this nail with a rather large hammer in order to avoid the criticism of being a Luddite. The technological gaze was evil for Adam because he faced no real lack. The technological gaze is not evil for us insofar as we are faced with real lack. To use medical technology when one is sick is a great good; to reduce a healthy people to a population whose health is to be constantly monitored and managed by their government is an evil. We redeem technology when we limit its use to real conditions of scarcity rather than extending its use into conditions of abundance.
This extension of the logic of famine into the conditions of abundance is the crisis of the seven-year famine. Joseph says “there will arise seven years of famine, and all the plenty will be forgotten in the land of Egypt; the famine will consume the land, and the plenty will be unknown in the land by reason of the famine which will follow” (41:31) It is not simply the seven years of famine, but the forgetting of plenty; the unknowing of abundance; the total presumption of scarcity that threatens the land of Egypt.
3. That Joseph falls to the temptation to become a god-king
Eve’s temptation came from the mouth of a snake. Joseph’s temptation came from the mouth of a god-king who ruled under the sign of a snake. Adam and Eve capitulate. To what extent does Joseph capitulate? The text suggests some degree of failure. Joseph indulges in Egyptian magic; dipping his toes, as it were, in the life of a god. He calls his silver cup “from this that my lord drinks, and by this that he divines.” (44:5), a reference that has put Jewish commentators on the defensive: “Ezra explains that Joseph had used the goblet as a test of the brothers’ honesty, and to this end he had pretended to divine from it...” (Tur HaAroch, R' Jacob ben Asher Genesis 44:5).
Once Joseph’s grain is store, stuff, and standing-in-reserve, it becomes divisible into units of exchange. This makes sense. A tree, considered as a particular, leafy, upspring, “stands over against us” as a unique object. It cannot be exchanged for anything else. The same tree, considered as a reserve of energy, can be exchanged — for equivalent reserves of energy. This is the perennial problem of the man who loves a piece of land run up against one who sees that same piece under the technological reduction — as a mineral deposit. The first man cannot exchange it — the land is particular and thus it has no equivalent. The second man cannot but offer a price for it — the land appears as a resource that contains a definite and calculable wattage and cash value and can thus be swapped and switched with identical quantities of wattage and cash.
Joseph exchanges what he has reduced, through the technological reduction, to a resource: “Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt...for the grain which they bought.” When the money was gone “Joseph gave them food in exchange for the horses, the flocks, the herds.” When these were gone, the Egyptians gathered and asked that Joseph “buy us and our land for food, and we with our land will be slaves to Pharaoh” (47:13-26).
Heidegger argues that as soon as the world loses its particularness and independence and concerns man “exclusively as standing-reserve...and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.”
The famine of Egypt gradually reduced man to this very state. In the face of an all-consuming lack, first their wealth, then their animals, then their land, and then their very selves appeared as reserve — as stock which could be exchanged for stock. This is a magnification of the sin of Adam, that in viewing all of Creation as being ordered unto the fulfillment of a perceived lack, the technological gaze eventually falls upon that pinnacle of Creation, one’s neighbor, and considers him as part of a lack-fulfilling mechanism — as a slave.
The slavery of the Egyptian people is an exchange of ownership for a new relationship of rent. Joseph purchased their productive property and labor and established of a system of regular payment to their new owner: “I have this day bought you and your land for Pharaoh. Now here is seed for you, and you shall sow the land. And at harvests you shall give a fifth to Pharaoh” (47:23).
The Egyptians were not foolish to exchange ownership for rent. The rejoiced in it, and rightly cheered, “You have saved our lives” (47:26) in honor of Joseph. Again, in the face of real famine, technological reduction, even the technological reduction of man and his labor, can be temporarily justified. The Egyptians were foolish in that they signed an indefinite contract. They did not agree to exchange ownership for rent insofar as there was a seven-year famine. They extended the logic of famine indefinitely. They did not see Joseph and his technology as a temporary means for healing a wound. They saw it as replacing the normal God-given abundance of the world in exchange for dependence upon and slavery towards the one seen as the Ever-provider. Joseph was correct; the famine caused them to forget abundance. The Jewish story of Joseph becoming a god of the Nile makes perfect sense in this context; he became the one who provides the fields with their abundance and the grain with its increase. He possesses this power, not by technology, but in and through his own person. His body blesses the river. He is a god.
4. That Joseph repents
To whatever degree Joseph participates in the creation of a slave state under the regime of a human, his story does not end in acceptance, but in repentance. His dreams of godliness come true, and all his brothers repeat the words that the Egyptians used to become slaves under Pharaoh: “His brothers also came and fell down before him, and said, “Behold, we are your servants” (50:18).
Joseph does not simply reject their deference, he rejects the entire forgetting-of-mechanism that would turn him into a god. He rejects his brothers’ vision of himself as an ever-provider, the proper object of supplication, and he rejects it as idolatrous: “But Joseph said to them, ‘Fear not, for am I in the place of God?” (50:19). The very end of Genesis, then, is a minor redemption of its beginning. It is the rejection, however faltering, of being “like unto God,” the rejection of the adoring bow of the sun, moon, and eleven stars. The faith of Israel triumphs.
5. That Egypt is a Biblical sign of idolatry because it actually first involved the Israelites in a god-producing mechanism; not simply because the Egyptians happened to worship false gods
It is my belief that the Israelites are to be included in the transition of Egypt from a land of distributed ownership to a slave state. It is clear that they existed in some relationship of rent with the king of Egypt, who says “dwell in the land of Go’shen; and if you know any able men among [you], put them in charge of my cattle” (Genesis 47:6). That is to say, they lived on the “best of the land” on the condition that they work for the Pharaoh.
For this reason, Egypt is not considered a new home. In the midst of Egypt’s plenty, Jacob says, “Do not bury me in Egypt.” He insists that he is to be buried in “in the cave of E’phron the Hittite,” laying great stress on the fact that this is land that he owns (49:30-50:13).
Furthermore, when it is said that “Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; and the Egyptians sold their fields” it excludes one group — “only the land of the priests he did not buy.” This would seem to discount the idea that the land of Go’shen was truly given to the Israelites.
But the greatest evidence lies in the beginning of the book of Exodus, when the new king of Egypt says, “Come, let us deal shrewdly with [the Israelites], lest they multiply and, if war befall us, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land” (Exodus 1:10). For the fear of a possible “escape” does not arise after the Egyptians “set task-masters” over the Israelites; rather, this fear is precisely what inspires them to “afflict [the Israelites] with heavy burdens.” The Israelites must have already been in some relationship of benefit to the Pharaoh if their escape was already something to be feared. It would make sense if this relationship was a privileged version of the same slavery that “all of Egypt” entered into as a result of the famine.
If this is true, the Israelites were guilty of the same folly as the rest of Egypt — the indefinite presumption of a famine known to be a finite, limited affair. They were guiltier, even, than the Egyptians, for the Israelites existed under a promise of abundance, the promise of God to their father Abraham, “I will make of you a great nation” (Genesis 12:2). Their presumption of famine would have amounted to a kind of idolatry, in which the security of man was something to be trusted over the security of God; his promises overshadowed by the great material success that the relationship of rent brought to the Israelites, who “dwelt in the land of Go’shen, and...gained possessions in it, and were fruitful and multiplied exceedingly” (Genesis 47:27).
This makes sense out of the last words of Joseph, who prophesied the exodus prior to the Egyptian demand that the Israelites serve “with rigor”: “God will visit you, and you shall carry my bones from here.” Egypt was evil from the beginning, because it was the organization of the Israelite people into a slave-state under a human being who, through governing, organizing, controlling that same slave-state, would appear as a god. Another Jewish tradition holds that the genealogy at the beginning of Exodus “is designed to impress upon the reader that the exile in Egypt did not begin with the new Pharaoh, but that it commenced with Yaakov’s and his family’s descent to Egypt some 93 years earlier” (Tu HaAroch, Jacob Ben Asher on Exodus 1:1).
Joseph typifies the response of prudence in the face of famine, but his prudence is not exhausted by his capacity for calculation. It is also the prudence that continues to trust in a good and giving God — refusing to extend the logic of famine into the conditions of abundance. This trust in God sees the continued position of slavery, with its abject dependence on other men, as an evil. Joseph could see in the tiny seed of Israelite dependence on Pharaoh the whole tree of their eventual oppression, and thus he could prophesy: “God will visit you, and bring you up out of this land to the land which he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” (Genesis 50:24).
Thus, when the drama of Exodus begins with the description of “a new king over Egypt, one who did not know Joseph,” we can understand this to mean, allegorically, “one who did not trust in God to provide, but who extended the logic of famine beyond the actual condition of famine, into the conditions of abundance.”
This is why the actions of the new king over Egypt are described as a perverse doubling of the actions of Joseph. Joseph faced a real famine; Pharaoh presumed a state of famine. Joseph technologized the good which the famine rendered scarce, seeing the grain as a reserve; Pharaoh’s presumption of famine made all things into scarce resources, not just the grain, but the Israelite people themselves became a reserve. Joseph recommended “a man discreet and wise” store up their reserve of grain “in the cities”; Pharaoh recommended that the Egyptians “deal shrewdly” with their reserve of Israelites by having them build the “store-cities, Pithom and Ramses.” Joseph appoints “overseers over the land” to gather up the reserve of grain during the seven years of plenty; Pharaoh appoints “taskmasters” over their reserve of Israelites “to afflict them with heavy burdens” in the midst of plentiful years. Under Joseph’s limited technological gaze, the grain becomes an object of exchange, and is rationed and controlled in its sale; under Pharaoh’s total technological gaze, the Israelites become objects of exchange, and are rationed and controlled in their reproduction: “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile.”
In both cases, two men respond to a perceived lack with a technological gaze. But for Joseph, this lack is a trial within a universe that is ultimately the gift of God; for Pharaoh this lack is the constitutive structure of the universe. Within this presumption of famine, the world appears a pile of scarce resources. To live is to strive and stockpile what one can while avoiding any particular resources “escaping the land.” There is no limit to the technologizing impulse; entire cities are built to store goods as reserve. Others are feared as competitors for a finite number of resources. Dread becomes a peacetime response towards the other. “The Egyptians were in dread of the sons of Israel,” not because the Israelites actually threatened them with violence, but because they were “exceedingly strong, and the land was full of them.” Strength and excess become threats. War is the expectation; peace is found in continuously winning an indefinite war for resources. Man becomes a god; the one who (indefinitely and personally) wins the war against scarcity for his people.
When the technological gaze meets the sabbath, the two cannot understand each other even as the modern technological state cannot understand true religion. Moses asks Pharaoh to “let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness” (Exodus 5:1). Pharaoh can only understand this plenitude as a desire for a privation of toil: “Moses...why do you take the people away from their work? Get to your burdens...Behold, the people of the land are now many and you make them rest from their burdens!” (5:4). But Moses is not asking for a break, he is asking for a new gaze, one which does not presume famine, but trusts in God to provide, and thus expects a feast —not from the gathering and amazing of wealth — but from the uncultivated wilderness.
6. That our age is Egypt and we are its Israelites
What then, are we to make of ourselves? For it is characteristic of our age that we do not see technology as a finite response to a real famine, nor a concrete impulse of making drawn out by a perceived lack, but as a wave that sweeps over humanity, producing ever-new devices and gadgets in an infinite progression towards the future.
If all technology corresponds to a lack, then an expectation of an infinitely progressing technological “wave” corresponds to the perception of an infinite lack. Technological progress can only be an absolute condition of human existence if famine is an absolute condition. A belief in indefinite technological creation is founded on a pessimism that posits human existence as a bucket that can never be full.
Thus Heidegger argues that the specific difference of modern technology lies in its detachment from real, specific and finite need. Modern technology springs from an indefinite presumption of famine. “The revealing [as standing-reserve] never simply comes to an end,” he says. “The coal that has been hauled out in some mining district has not been supplied in order that it may be simply present somewhere or other” — that is, that it may serve some specific need. Rather “it is stockpiled; it is on call, ready to deliver” — ready to serve against need considered as a general, all-consuming condition. Only the spirit of Joseph, which refuses to turn man into a god; refuses to believe that creation is a pile of scarce resources to be stockpiled against scarcity by those with the wealth and power to do so; refuses to divinize some at the expense of the fear and enslavement of all; only a spirit of trust in God to provide our daily bread can save us from another Egypt.