Many know the tale about Joseph, Jacob’s beloved son who was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, exploited, and imprisoned, but who eventually rose to become second-in-command over Egypt (Genesis 37-50). Buried in this story is a brief reference that fascinated Jewish writers in antiquity: Joseph’s wife, Aseneth, was Egyptian.
According to Genesis, she was the daughter of an Egyptian priest (Potiphera in Hebrew; Pentephres in Greek), and she married Joseph and bore Manasseh and Ephraim (Genesis 41:45, Genesis 50–52). Aseneth is never mentioned again in the Tanakh or Christian Bible, and Genesis expresses no concern that she was Egyptian. The Israelite ancestral stories are interesting in this regard; sometimes they care about endogamy (marrying within kinship boundaries), and sometimes they do not (e.g., compare Genesis 24 and Genesis 28 with Genesis 38). Nevertheless, what didn’t bother the scribes of Genesis raised questions for later Jewish writers. How could Joseph marry an Egyptian woman?
Among other ideas, rabbinic authors suggested that Aseneth was the daughter of Joseph’s half-sister Dinah (Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer 38; Soferim 21), but a Hellenistic Jewish writer took a different tack, narrating how Aseneth changed her allegiances to Joseph’s deity.1
That text, Joseph and Aseneth, embeds its plot into the biblical story about Joseph, but it tells the story of Aseneth—a woman renowned for her beauty but who disdained men, until she caught sight of the handsome Joseph, married him, and ultimately became a model of mercy and a refuge for treacherous brothers. When we first meet Aseneth, she spends her time in a tower of elaborate chambers where she venerates her Egyptian gods daily. Pentephres plans to arrange Aseneth’s marriage to Joseph, and although she initially scowls at the idea, she becomes smitten with him after watching Joseph arrive to Pentephres’s complex. But when she finally meets Joseph, he refuses to greet her with a kiss because, he explains, “It is not fitting for a God-fearing man” to kiss a woman who venerates other gods.
This rejection motivates Aseneth to discard her religious objects and disavow her allegiance to Egyptian gods. She sits in mourning attire and ashes for a week and offers prayers of repentance and lament. On the eighth day, an unnamed angel visits her. He declares that God has heard her pleas, promises that her name will be written in a heavenly book of the living, renames her “City of Refuge,” and confirms that she will marry Joseph. This encounter concludes with Aseneth sharing a meal with the angel by consuming part of a heavenly honeycomb, which provides Aseneth knowledge of God’s mysteries; royal-looking bees rise out of this comb in a miraculous scene that seals her encounter with the angel. Joseph returns and reciprocates Aseneth’s affection, the two wed soon after, and Aseneth bears their sons.
Yet now, in a fit of jealousy, Pharaoh’s 064son tries to enlist Levi and Simeon to kill Joseph and kidnap Aseneth. Pharaoh’s son had heard of the military prowess of these sons of Jacob at Shechem (Genesis 34), and he promises great rewards if they cooperate with him. Simeon wishes to respond with his sword, but Levi abruptly stops him, saying that as God-fearing men, “It is not fitting to repay evil for evil.” Levi sternly rejects the proposal of Pharaoh’s son. He also warns that he and Simeon will use their swords in defense against him if he proceeds.
Pharaoh’s son then turns his attention to Jacob’s sons born of Bilhah and Zilpah. In ancient Israel, children born of a female slave and her male owner could be legitimate heirs; it was one way that wealthy men maintained property ownership within their household. Bilhah and Zilpah, the female slaves of Rachel and Leah, produced legitimate sons according to Genesis (Genesis 29-30; Genesis 49), but in this story, we find out that Dan, Gad, Naphtali, and Asher worry about their future and so commit to the plan without hesitation. Pharaoh’s son commissions thousands of soldiers under their care, and an ambush attempt is set. Military skirmishes follow, which include Aseneth protecting the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah and convincing their brothers not to repay evil for evil. Within days, though, both Pharaoh and his son pass away, and Pharaoh had left the crown to Joseph. He reigns for 48 years in Egypt and then passes the crown on to his predecessor’s next heir.
Joseph and Aseneth was likely composed in Greek in Egypt during Hellenistic and early Roman rule (between 100 B.C.E. and 100 C.E.), and it expresses one way that Jewish communities rewrote their heritage in Egypt—a place where many of them thrived but which their ancestral stories despised. Joseph and Aseneth subverts Jewish ancestors to be greater than Hellenistic rulers (one of their own was a pharaoh), but it also echoes real life in Hellenistic Egypt where a high percentage of Jewish men were soldiers, all inhabitants had to negotiate hostilities and disputes in their multicultural environment, foreign rulers embedded their presence into pharaonic history, and some Jews arguably married people from non-Jewish families.
Joseph and Aseneth’s literary style and content borrow from other Septuagint texts (Judges, 1 Samuel, Daniel, and the Psalms), and it is one of several stories composed during this period that rescripted power to belong to Jews and their deity and not to imperial rule (other examples are the books of Judith and Tobit).2
Joseph and Aseneth likely began as a Jewish story, but it spread among Christian scribes in later years. It is preserved in 91 manuscripts, spanning the seventh to early 19th centuries and written in several languages (primarily in Armenian, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Syriac). Some scholars argue that the story was created in late antiquity as a Christian text, but most still posit a Hellenistic Jewish origin.3 Interestingly, the manuscripts share a core storyline but individually exhibit distinct alterations, deletions, and expansions. If anything, the evidence demonstrates the longevity and popularity of this story about Aseneth, a Hebrew queen of Egypt.
Many know the tale about Joseph, Jacob’s beloved son who was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, exploited, and imprisoned, but who eventually rose to become second-in-command over Egypt (Genesis 37-50). Buried in this story is a brief reference that fascinated Jewish writers in antiquity: Joseph’s wife, Aseneth, was Egyptian. According to Genesis, she was the daughter of an Egyptian priest (Potiphera in Hebrew; Pentephres in Greek), and she married Joseph and bore Manasseh and Ephraim (Genesis 41:45, Genesis 50–52). Aseneth is never mentioned again in the Tanakh or Christian Bible, and Genesis expresses no concern that she […]
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1. Patricia D. Ahearne-Kroll, “Joseph and Aseneth,” in Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, eds., Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, vol. 3 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), pp. 2525–2589.
2. Patricia D. Ahearne-Kroll, Aseneth of Egypt: The Composition of a Jewish Narrative (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2020).
3. The most thorough argument advocating for a late antique, Christian setting is Ross Shepard Kraemer, When Aseneth Met Joseph: A Late Antique Tale of the Biblical Patriarch and His Egyptian Wife, Reconsidered (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).
