Joseph in the Joint: Fatalism, Transformation, and the Bible’s Most Illustrious Prisoner

In the last few weeks I’ve been sharing snippets from my new book in progress, Behind Ancient Bars. Chapter 2 of the book will be devoted to the Hebrew Bible’s most illustrious prisoner, Joseph. You can find the full story in Genesis 39-41. Briefly, Joseph is thrown in prison following a false rape accusation by the wife of Potiphar, to whom Joseph had been sold as a servant. The biblical story offers us a rather rich account of Joseph’s carceral experience, including his responsible role in prison management while a prisoner himself and his interaction with two fellow inmates (the chief cupbearer and the chief baker). We also learn of his unsuccessful efforts to have the chief cupbearer curry favor for him with Pharaoh and of his eventual release, and auspicious rise, when his dream interpretation skills are needed.

Medieval midrashists found Joseph a fascinating subject, but tended to focus on his dreams, the salacious story with Potiphar’s wife, and Joseph’s later reconciliation with the brothers who sold him to the Ishmaelites. But one also finds quite a bit about his prison journey there, and the expanded stories tend to adhere to two important messages. The first is a concerted effort to frame the entire incarceration journey—in terms of time as in terms of content—as orchestrated by God for specific purposes, suggesting God’s interest not only in the people of Israel but also in geopolitical matters. I see examples of this in other biblical incarceration stories, but it is especially pronounced here. Second, and relatedly, there is an idea I’ve already discussed in the context of Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: the notion that Joseph undergoes a penological transformation within confinement that prepares him for his prophetic leadership after reentering Egyptian society.

I’ve recently come across Nicholas Reid’s excellent book Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia. In his analysis of primary sources, Reid urges us to use a wide lens when discussing prisons in antiquity, similar to what we now do in modern incarceration studies. He says this, with which I’m wholeheartedly in agreement:

When thinking of a history of prisons and imprisonment, one must look beyond the stated goals and stated functions of the prison to the actual practice. . . since prisons are multifunctional, the historical investigation into imprisonment should not revolve solely around the question of punishment. . . the adaptability of limiting corporal movement through imprisonment to meet numerous social goals and handle numerous social ‘problems’ has deep roots in history, even though direct connections and linear developments do not exist.

Even though Joseph was not sentenced to a prescribed period behind bars, and even though biblical punishment is usually retributive in nature, there is enough in the biblical descriptions and the midrashim to point to a message eerily similar to the one parroted in rehabilitation programs and parole hearings today: that incarceration is a “rock bottom” point in a prisoner’s journey that is an essential part of his or her coherent life story, that one goes down in order to go up, and that one develops important prosocial and other skills in confinement that set him or her up for a pivotal historical role postincarceration. In light of this, I decided to rewrite the Joseph story as a parole hearing transcript, relying heavily on the medieval midrashim. Here’s a short snippet:

PHARAOH: Okay, since we’ve moved to the inmate’s C-file, let’s see how he did in prison. From what I see from the record, you haven’t had many visitors in the twelve years you’ve been inside.

JOSEPH: No, Your Majesty. I believe only in the early days, when Zulycah still visited me.

AMHOST: I’m not sure I understand: The woman whom you claim falsely accused you of rape visited you in prison?

POTIPHAR: Your Priestly Eminence, since I oversee the prison, she can come and go as she pleases, and she even helps me with the logistics.

PHARAOH: And when she visited you, what did you talk about?

JOSEPH: She was trying to persuade me to give in to her. You know, “How ‎long wilt thou remain in this house? do but listen unto my voice, and I will release thee from ‎thy prison.” Like that. I had to keep saying: It is better for me to remain in this house, ‎than to listen unto thy words, and transgress against God.[1]

AMHOST: I guess we keep things nice and cushy for you in Thebes. Some people would easily mistake you for a prison administrator, rather than an actual prisoner, and think Potiphar just moved you to another job to put some distance between you and his wife.[2]

MERITAMUM: It’s not like that, Your Grace. The write-up about the visit documents that the inmate was repeatedly threatened by his accuser‎. She was overheard saying, “if thou wilt not do my wishes, I will put out thine eyes, and I will put ‎additional chains upon thy feet, and I will surrender thee into the hands of such as thou hast ‎not known, neither yesterday nor day before yesterday.”

HAT: Looks like it was even worse. I have the 128 write-up that she put in his file, and it says that, while they were setting the table at chow hall, cleaning the drinking glasses and all that, she would say to him: ‘In this matter, I mistreated [ashaktikha] you. As you live, I will mistreat you regarding other matters.’

MERITARIUM: Oh, but he gave as good as he got. Basically played her at her own game. Like she said “ashaktikha,” so he would say to her: ‘[God] “Performs justice for the oppressed [laashukim].”’ (Psalms 146:7) [She would say:] ‘I will reduce your sustenance.’ He would say to her: ‘[God] “Provides food for the hungry.”’ (Psalms 146:7) [She would say:] ‘I will shackle you.’ He would say to her: ‘“The Lord frees the imprisoned.”’ (Psalms 146:7) [She would say:] ‘I will cause you to be bent over.’ He would say to her: ‘“The Lord straightens the bent.”’ (Psalms 146:8) [She would say:] ‘I will blind your eyes.’ He would say to her: ‘“The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.”’ (Psalms 146:8)[3]

PHARAOH: Dear Maat. How far did all of this go?

MERITARIUM: We’re not entirely sure, because there’s a lot of hearsay in prison intelligence. Rav Huna said in the name of Rabbi Aḥa, you know, that sort of thing. But rumor was that she placed an iron bar beneath his neck until he would direct his glance toward her and look at her. Nevertheless, he would not look at her. That is what is written: “They tortured his legs with chains; his body was placed in iron.” (Psalms 105:18)[4]

PHARAOH: Nice facility you run there, Potiphar.

POTIPHAR: I can’t possibly screen my own wife from the list of visitors, Your Majesty.

PHARAOH: Why would you let her do it? Did you think he was guilty?

POTIPHAR: Oh, no, I knew he was innocent. Even my kids knew.

PHARAOH: What?

POTIPHAR: We all knew. My kid kept saying, “stop beating on him, my mom is lying.”[5] Even on the way in, when I was booking him, I said to him, “Joseph, I know you didn’t do this, but I’m locking you up so I will not attach stigma to my children.”[6]

MERITAMUM: And even so, Your Majesty, when she visited him in prison, it didn’t seem to faze the Inmate. He was overheard replying, hold on, it’s hard to read the hieroglyphs, “‎Behold the God of all the earth, he is able to deliver me from all that thou wouldst do unto me. ‎For he giveth sight to the blind and he freeth the captives and he preserveth the strangers ‎that are in the land they never knew.” Eventually she gave up and stopped coming.  

PHARAOH: Do we have any laudatory chronos in the file?

MERITAMUM: Yes, Your Majesty. The inmate was charged, de facto, with the functioning of the entire administration.

PHARAOH: You entrusted. The entire prison administration. To a prisoner.

POTIPHAR: The whole thing. Eating, drinking, binding people, releasing them, torturing them, giving them a rest. He would call the whole thing and whatever he said, went.[7]

HAT: It says in this chrono, “the minister did not have to see anything he put in the inmate’s hand.” I’m not sure what this means.

POTIPHAR: It means I didn’t have to supervise him, because God helped him succeed in prison as well as on the outside. It’s a kal vahomer.

HAT: A what?

POTIPHAR: A kal vahomer. Argument a fortiori. They have to say he was successful in prison, because success on the outside would be self-evident.[8]

HAT: See, I read it differently. I read it that you didn’t see anything fishy or poorly performed.[9]

POTIPHAR: You know these prison write-ups. You can read them seventy different ways.

HAT: Mr. Jacobson, do you feel that you were treated fairly in prison?

JOSEPH: To be honest, I did end up feeling relieved. Back home, whenever we ate, my father would give me the choice portions, and I always had to look over my shoulder lest my brothers take revenge. And I confess that here in prison I could breathe a bit easier. But God likes to give me a challenge, so I figure he’ll sic a bear on me anytime soon.[10]

HAT: Not sure I understand what the bear’s got to do with any of this.

JOSEPH: It’s got to do with the grain.

AMHOST: What grain?

JOSEPH: You’ll see.

[1] Sefer HaYashar (midrash), Book of Genesis, Vayeshev 19

[2] McKay (2009).

[3] Bereshit Rabbah 87: 10.

[4] Bereshit Rabbah 87: 10.

[5] Sefer HaYashar (midrash), Book of Genesis, Vayeshev 18-19

[6] Bereshit Rabbah 87: 9.

[7] Midrash Sekhel Tov, Bereshit 39:22:2

[8] Bereshit Rabbah 87:10; Midrash Sekhel Tov, Genesis 39:23:3.

[9] Midrash Sekhel Tov, Bereshit 39:23:2

[10] Midrash Sekhel Tov, Bereshit 39:23:4

Fighting Bigoted Work Environments: Tips from the Trenches

It’s been a few weeks since I started providing pro bono legal services to professors and students confronted with antisemitic bigotries at their universities and colleges, and a few months since I started providing ersatz advice to people emailing me about their campuses. What I’ve seen so far is a paraphrase of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina opening: each unhappy academic situation is unhappy in its own special way. The experience at a gigantic R1 university in the Midwest might be different than the experience at a tiny college town on the East Coast, and the experience of STEM researchers might be different than one of people in the arts and humanities. I’m already at a place where I can see some similarities, though, and it’s time to offer a few things to consider.

What Is Your End Goal? Any person wants to feel safe, welcome, and valued at their workplace. Unfortunately, a big part of this desired outcome cannot be obtained through legal measures. It might be useful, as an exercise, to ask yourself what concrete things about your campus experience you would like to see improve. For example, were talks and events on campus violently disrupted? One thing to do would be to reinvite the speakers and compensate student groups for losses incurred at these events. Were violent incidents left uninvestigated? You might want them to be looked at more seriously. Are there any areas of campus that are barricaded or otherwise impermeable to students and faculty? You can ask for free passage throughout campus. Are people being compensated, in terms of promotion and advancement, for espousing views that are congruent with those of the violent protestors, or penalized for expressing dissenting opinions? Perhaps the faculty handbook needs updating about promotion standards. These are all concrete things that can improve campus climate. By contrast to this stuff, as I’ve said to several people, expecting symbolic groveling from the administration or insincere apologies from individuals who do not feel apologetic at all is a losing premise that creates rancor and does nothing for you in the real world. Some remedies are debatable: I know folks who have more faith than me in the premise of including antisemitism literacy, or viewpoint diversity issues, in the campus DEI package. Only you know whether, on your campus, this would be meaningless pageantry or a pathway to lasting change.

One Big Incident versus Lots of Little Ones. If you’ve been blatantly discriminated against in a provable way, this one incident could be all you need for litigation. But in a lot of the cases I see, people go through weeks in which nothing that happens around them is beyond the pale, and everything complies with the broad understanding of First Amendment principles. You could walk through a gauntlet of horrid flyers and booths, see advertisements for events in which lies and incitement to hate will be proclaimed, get the stink-eye from people who used to be your colleagues or even friends, spy some ugly social media content from people you sometimes get coffee with at conferences, and get a couple of meanspirited student evals. Any of these things on its own might not brighten your day–might even blemish it–but grownups know that adult professional lives are not a bed of roses and Mama said there’d be days like this. Whether or not in the aggregate we’ve hit the mark of an abusive work environment is a big question, and the answers could depend on the disposition and worldview of the individual judge. Which brings us to the question: How ardently do you want to fight this?

Fighting a Legal Battle Has Pros and Cons. If you’re facing some sort of disciplinary procedure, like a Title XI complaint or something similar, you really have no recourse but to fight back with everything you’ve got. But if you’re the one initiating the escalation, such as if you want to start building a Title VII case based on your work environment, you have to make a choice: how much are you willing to take, psychologically and practically, to obtain evidence for your case? I’ve now heard of cases in which people were so harangued and mistreated at faculty meetings that they stopped showing up. Attending a meeting where you are derided and berated can be the source of a lot of misery and isolation, and it’s understandable that not everyone has the stomach to withstand prolonged exposure to abuse. But you cannot trust a record of a meeting you have not attended in person, certainly not if the meeting hasn’t been recorded or transcribed. Bigoted remarks and slurs will likely not find their way to the record, and if you haven’t heard them with your own ears, they are not always provable. Relying on second-hand rumors is also risky in the sense that the people who experienced the event might be paraphrasing, or exaggerating, or telling you their interpretation rather than the naked facts. Moreover, even the best employment or civil rights lawyer cannot do this for you. They don’t know your campus, they don’t understand the relationships and the people involved, the long histories of campus issues will not make as much sense to them as they do to you. Also, in my experience, many lawyers are unfamiliar with the highs and lows of academic careers, and thus might not understand that there’s a whole banquet of consequences ranging from “nothing” to “being fired,” and that, as an academic, you could be paid a full salary and still be treated like a leper on campus. All of which is to say: if you want documentation, you have to commit to collecting it yourself, and that calls for fortitude and tolerance that not everyone has 100% of the time. You are the best judge as to whether the benefit is worth the psychological cost.

What Is and Is Not a Bigoted Remark. Bigotries and hatreds tend to be expressed in broad, vague brush strokes, and sometimes rely on words that can have a derogatory cultural resonance for some people but sound completely innocuous to others. This is true of many hatreds on the basis of race, gender, national origin, ethnicity, religion, you name it, and it is especially true of antisemitism which, kind of like a virus, tends to mutate and express itself differently across time and place. If one is a researcher in the social sciences or humanities, and has studied the intricacies of dogwhistle utterances and their cultural underbellies, one would read a lot of offense and derision into the use of certain words, but might be surprised that lawyers and judges who do not share these linguistic sensitivities are not in a hurry to adopt this understanding. E.g., oblique references to greed, friends in high places, crassness, etc., which might ring in your ears as antisemitic, might not read the same way to people without your attention to hermeneutics and familiarity with the history of antisemitism. In these cases, careful documentation of the context surrounding the utterance might be useful.

Keeping Solid Records. If you want to fight this fight, make it a habit to write down detailed memos, as accurately as you can, shortly after the events or conversations take place. I’m a fairly experienced ethnographer, and I’ve learned from years of fieldwork that, even if you think to yourself, “I’ll never forget what this interviewee said,” you will, unless you record it immediately. If some comment or encounter has shaken you up, sit at a café or at your office or at home and write down the facts: who said what.

Ask for Clarifications. Unclear as to why something has happened to you? Rather than stew in your own interpretations, ask as straightforwardly as possible. If you’re getting some poor review, or bad news about a promotion, ask what the criteria were. Use neutral language: “I would like to know where I fell short, so that I can be more competitive at this [x thing] in the future.” Accusing people of bigotry in these scenarios rarely goes over well, and risks that they will clam up, denying you invaluable information you can accurately record, compare to the academic regs, and invoke next time it comes around. When confronted with vague accusations about conduct in class, a-la “we felt unsafe,” it is especially important to ask dry, informative questions to figure out what the facts were.

Facts Are Not Opinions. Opinions Are Not Facts. If a colleague or student claims that you said X or did Y and you did not, their claim is false. But if they say that you are an idiot, or that they dislike you, they do have a right to their opinion, even if it’s an ugly, bigoted opinion (as an aside: attacking people for having an unfavorable opinion of you, or asking for intervention from the administration, casts you in the role of a petulant child and is unlikely to produce tangible improvement.) The problem with subjective opinions begins when people in power assume that they are objective referenda on a person for raises, promotions, etc. In other words, if an administrator denies you promotion on the basis of murmurs from people who dislike you, rather than on the basis of your proven record of scholarship, pedagogy, and service, that’s when we do have a legal problem.

Did Nothing Wrong? Do Not Apologize. Something I’ve now seen a few times is an instructor confronted with some vague accusation made by anonymous students and asked for a comment. If you’ve done nothing wrong and have nothing to apologize for, say: “I have done nothing wrong and have nothing to apologize for.” Rehearse this if you need to – it is a basic act of self-preservation. Non-apology apologies, or insincere or incomplete apologies, are more likely to be twisted against you and misused in proceedings. Not apologizing when you are innocent also preserves your own sanity, because in the face of outlandish accusations, even people with a solid moral fiber and strong character can begin to doubt the facts (I see a parallel of this in the world of false accusations and confessions in criminal cases.) Of course, if you *did* do something wrong, the buck stops with you, and you should apologize and do better in the future.

Stay Lawful with Recording. One way to keep accurate records of conversations about advancement and work conditions is to surreptitiously record them on your phone, but depending on where you live or work, that might be illegal. In many states, recording a conversation requires the consent of both parties, and if you surreptitiously record, you are committing a misdemeanor. Find out whether your state has an all-party consent law here and keep to the limitations of the law. Needless to say, do not ever lie, falsify, forge, use creative AI, or whatever, to present evidence that is not true.

At the Same Time, Assume Others Are Recording. At my home institution, the default is that every classroom is audio recorded, and we have signs alerting our campus population to this fact. Some people bristle about this and talk about academic freedom and stifling surveillance, but I think it’s excellent policy. To paraphrase James Comey: Lordy, I’m glad there are tapes! If you have a similar rule and find yourself accused based on a surreptitious recording a student made in class, you now have some control over whether the recording was edited or manipulated to twist the narrative. Most institutions do not record as a matter of course, but I recommend that everyone in higher education behave as if they did. In other words: Assume that everything you say outside of your own home, and within earshot of anyone who is not a member of your immediate family, is being said in public. If whoever heard you is quoting you faithfully and you truly are at fault for something, the buck stops with you. If they twist it, lie about it, or choose to interpret it in vile ways, the buck stops with them, and you should fight them every inch of the way.

Lateral Moves: Pros and Cons. Some folks are pretty exasperated with the administration and environment where they are and looking for a lateral move, which is understandable. If you have a sense that there are no responsible adults around you who understand the difference between free speech and terror and who protect you from discrimination and abuse, look for a place that seems healthier in that regard. But consider that, especially if you’ve been somewhere for a considerable period of time, you’ve earned respect that will be difficult to replicate at a new place, and institutional reactions to, say, a swastika or a trashed mezuzah on your office door might vary based on how much personal cache you’ve accrued at your workplace. If you do decide that your workplace is not salvageable, please exercise due diligence about any prospective workplace. Ask the people who work there, honestly and sincerely, whether they feel comfortable and welcome on campus. Look up bigotry incidents online and get a sense of whether there are isolated incidents (no university is perfect) or part of a pattern. Also, consider what effect your staying or going might have on a spouse who is also employed at the university, or on your kids.

Consider Whether You Want to Buy Into the Victim Game. There are two main paradigms through which one can see experiences of discrimination and abuse: looking for recognition of oppression and victimization, and looking for pride and celebration of one’s identity. There is a lot in the college environment that pressures in the direction of the former, and I suggest balancing it out with the latter. Extend kindnesses to students while also encouraging them to be proactive and resilient about the situation. Respectfully and patiently argue with people who lack good information or profess to know things they don’t. One of the most powerful examples of this approach is the wonderful Holocaust museum in Skokie, which I recently visited. After the town residents, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, lost their Supreme Court case against the Nazi march, they realized that they, too, have freedom of speech, and inaugurated an educational enterprise like none other. The museum includes an amazing exhibit in which the audience can directly interact with holocaust survivors who were recorded and made into holograms, and hear their life story from their own mouths. At the end of the experience, there are pictures of the survivors who narrate the museum exhibits, and the words, “I did not tell you this to weaken you, but to strengthen you.”

Come Together. Are you the only person who is being mistreated, or do you have colleagues that experience the same thing? Rather than isolating yourselves, come together and talk about this. If there are several of you in the department, take turns attending meetings and taking notes. If there’s a university Hillel or other affinity group or institution that could be helpful, liaise with them. In some places, there’s a regional Hillel office that serves several institutions, and you can reach out and make friends at other institutions (which is always a bonus.) Additionally, a pattern of discrimination that targets people of the same racial, ethnic, and/or religious group, reduces the odds that mistreatment will be dismissed as a consequence of one particular, oversensitive personality. It also offers the benefit of celebrating your heritage and culture with others, which is so important when times are tough. And, talking through this stuff with other people can help you collectively figure out what you want to get out of this and whether legal action is the way to get there.

Dark Esther

My new project Behind Ancient Bars looks at several prominent incarceration stories in the Hebrew Bible. One that is often missed is Esther’s stint at Ahasuerus’s harem. Because most of the story is a bedroom farce, and some of it a bloodthirsty schadenfreude fest, many commentators skip over Esther’s confinement before she is taken to the king, which you can find in Chapter 2. But this short vignette illuminates not only commentary about empire in general (and probably Persian empire in particular), but also about the multiple forms of vulnerability of women and the ways in which governmental systems are crafted to exploit these vulnerabilities. This paints the festive Esther story a much darker, more sinister hue.

Seeing the Esther story as an incarceration story to begin with requires doing what modern penologists do on the regular: expanding our definition of incarceration. I find it interesting that people who happily read Foucault and Goffman, seeing obvious parallels and symmetries among total institutions and across the carceral archipelago, suddenly adopt a hyper-legalistic approach to punishment in antiquity, forcefully arguing that there is no incarceration in the bible because it is not listed as a sanction for a criminal conviction in Deuteronomy or in Hammurabi’s law. If incarceration scholarship in modernity can look at pretrial detention, immigration detention, and even cattle towns–because those are carceral experiences–then incarceration scholarship in antiquity can and should encompass political detention and shady government programs for locking up and reeducating children. And indeed, some commentary on the Book of Esther moves away from the entertaining popular presentations of beauty pageants to identifying incarceration elements.

How much of this represents true carceral practices, or is a realistic portrayal of royal harems, is hotly debated. Summarizing the literature for and against a reading of Esther as fiction, Adele Berlin opines that the story, like the Daniel story, dates to the Hellenistic period, and reflects stereotypical Athenian perceptions of Persia: “luxury, hierarchy, bureaucracy, wine drinking, the postal system, imperial law, bowing down, eunuchs, impalement, a royal garden, and a sexually virtuous queen.” But at least some of this fed commentators who used it to glean more about imperial Persian governmentality.

The background to the Esther story is well known: during a royal feast with his courtiers, an inebriated king orders his queen, Vashti, to appear before the courtiers. She refuses, angering the king, and is either banished or executed, which results in a vacancy. The king’s servants propose that all good looking virgins in the kingdom be gathered at the “women’s house” in Shushan, the capital, under the supervision of Hege, the king’s eunuch, so that the king may pick whichever one pleases him to be his queen in lieu of Vashti.

Julia Schwartzmann points out that the details of Esther’s arrival in the harem can be disturbing to modern readers, because of Mordechai and Esther’s “ambiguous uncle/niece relationship, the way Mordechai hands over Esther to the king’s harem, and his manipulative handling of his silent and passive niece.” Not only modern readers: Two important medieval commentators, Abraham Ibn Ezra and Immanuel of Rome, propose that Mordechai planned, as a foster parent, to marry his beautiful charge, a-la Dickens character John Jarndyce (his charge in the book, you’ll remember, is also called Esther!) One can only imagine many young women and girls in similarly precarious situations who would end up swept into the harem–a rather hopeless prospect, as only one girl would be officially crowned queen, and as no girl, per Ibn Ezra, would be available for marriage or any life outside the harem after having bedded the king–with girls like Esther, without parents and with guardians who have agendas beyond their charges’ best interests, more vulnerable to apprehension and lockdown.

The pageant story will have us believe that the girls gathered at the capital out of their own free will, but some commentators see this more as a coercive executive action. Shelom Esther draws the readers’ attention to the large number of officers and bureaucrats involved in the concubine-gathering operation, which had to visit each house to prevent parents from hiding their daughters. Joseph Ibin Yahya adds that Mordechai hid Esther, and that she was taken against his will and against hers.

The administration of the harem, as we saw in the Daniel court stories, is given to eunuchs. The word “saris” (eunuch) might be used differently in different biblical contexts, and could be a reference to a high government official rather than to the sexuality of these personages, but what we know of various empires–especially the Persian empire–suggests that, at least in some contexts, the meanings converge. Last week, at our archaeology course, Brett Kaufman told us that it was common to entrust military commands in imperial armies to eunuchs because they would have no dynastic aspirations and thus would not attempt to usurp the throne. But it makes sense that confinement operations, where sexual exploitation is a serious risk, would be entrusted to sexually inactive supervisors, as 19th century commentator Malbim very explicitly explains.

Even if sexual abuse was not a risk, there were other ways to render the eunuchs’ charges pliable and docile. Much is made in chapter 2 of the issue of cosmetics (“tamrukim”). Some commentators, like Ibn Yahya, interpret these in a straightforward way as beauty-enhancing products, while others, like Immanuel of Rome, thought these could be medications, including first-aid supplies. What is interesting is that the sole purveyors of these items were the eunuchs, which Malbim shrewdly interprets as part and parcel of the king’s power play which, in turn, reflects the lessons learned from the Vashti episode:

He feared that [the girl he would choose] would not want to marry him, and [his advisors] said that after they examined those who came willingly and did not find an appropriate wife for him, then he will appoint officers and they will round up all the girls with a strong arm, (and they even shrewdly said that he should appoint new officers, so that it would be someone who has not been bribed to ignore the rich people’s girls), and against the fear based on his memory, and the concern that [the prospective bride] would do as Vashti did, they advised to gather the girls around Hege, and that they must not bring their own cosmetics from home, but rather only receive them from the eunuchs, and from this side will always be submissive toward the Eunuch and not uppity as Vashti was.

Malbim on Esther 2: 3: 2

When Julia Schwarzmann marvels at how captivating the Esther story is given its telenovela-like synopsis, I want to add: the power of the story is that both ancient and modern readers would recognize the patriarchal fear of subversive and disobedience, the injured pride, the opportunities for exploitation and exertion of power. But it also points to a source of power and ingenuity on the part of the incarcerated person. We’ve already seen how Daniel, when failing to negotiate his diet with chief Eunuch Ashpenaz, makes a deal with “the waiter” on the sly to receive his special vegan rations. Here, we see Esther realizing that the key to surviving in the harem is to charm Hege, who proceeds to favor her with food and luxury items.

Another aspect of the story that exudes verisimilitude is Mordechai’s concern for Esther’s welfare–whether because of the general situation or because, at his request, she hid her identity from harem management. He is told to come to the harem yard every day to inquire after her, and perhaps one advantage of charming the pants off Hege was the availability of daily reports of her wellbeing.

By contrast to the later story of her tenure as queen, Esther of chapter 2 is described passively: she is beautiful, parentless, young, vulnerable, and puppeteered by her uncle/guardian as well as by the various government officials. But between the lines, one finds glimmers of transformation. Placed in a complicated logistical and social scenario, Esther figures out that personal charm and charisma are useful tools, and that performing modesty and restraint pays off. Both Ibn Ezra and Immanuel of Rome emphasize that her restraint, which earned her the favor of Hege, reflect her intelligence. Ibn Yahya opines that she had the good fortune to be taken to the king in the winter, when one enjoys intimacy and closeness more than in summer, thus improving the odds of being the king’s favorite, but what if Hege, who was in her corner, was the one in charge of the schedule and deliberately scheduled her sexual audition for an auspicious date? The emerging picture is one of strategic thinking, charming the key people responsible for her welfare, and performing royal virtue even prior to her selection (perhaps impressing Hege as “queen material”) which the story does not demonize or regard as duplicitous but rather as an understandable, even commendable, survival strategy.

This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that, regardless of the official goal of incarceration in biblical stories, there is evidence of personal transformation occurring behind bars. Martin Pritkin, who approaches biblical punishment from a more doctrinal perspective, finds evidence of rehabilitative motives amidst the retributive rationales, but I think these stories make a somewhat different point: there’s a difference between the espoused nature of a confinement program and the sociological and psychological features of the experience of going though said program. Second, and relatedly, personal transformations in incarceration stories are a means to an end. Notably, incarceration serves as a cauldron, a crucible, a vehicle, for developing leadership characteristics that predict the protagonist’s success at his or her post-incarceration life. Joseph, for example, is incarcerated as punishment for a wrongful accusation or to allow Potiphar and his household to save face; behind bars, however, he develops not only the administrative and logistics acumen that will later serve him well in Egyptian administration, but also a prosocial approach to dream interpretation and the skills of getting along with different kinds of people (skills he lacked as a youth). Daniel learns some wheeling and dealing and perhaps impresses Ashpenaz and “the waiter” with his initiative. Jeremiah, admittedly a “finished character” by the time of his incarceration, has an opportunity to flex against Zedekiah and to leverage his existing friendship with Ebed Melekh to obtain relief, as well as to forge an important alliance with Nebuchadnezzar that grants him relative freedom in exile. And Esther’s reputation for virtuousness and humility and capacity to marshal personal charm and good looks to make important friendships goes a long way toward earning the favor of the king, both at her audition and later, when her skills are needed at a time of national crisis. The dire straits of incarceration are an essential part of the formulaic, fatalistic narrative. Theologically, they support the idea that the divine jails these people to foster the development of the personal characteristics that will come in handy later. I don’t see this as being much different than the sort of logic I see and here at many a rehabilitation program in prisons–namely, the way people are encouraged to construct and tell a coherent personal narrative, in which the prison journey, the crucible of change, is an essential ingredient on the way up, and support for an “everything happens for a reason” notion of meaning-making.

There are two ways of looking at this–benign and cynical. The benign approach relies on Victor Frankl’s logotherapy to argue that people survive and thrive after suffering–even extreme suffering–by imbuing their experiences with meanings. Shadd Maruna’s Making Good offers many examples for the role that a personal narrative of hardship and redemption plays in desistance from reoffending. The more cynical approach, akin to the one I developed in Yesterday’s Monsters, is that rehabilitative programming becomes sort of a mediocre community play that has to follow a script that prison authorities and parole commissioners recognize and validate: follower-to-leader, toxic-thinking-to-empathy, anger-to-understanding, opacity-to-insight. These scripts have a quasi-theological flavor (in some cases, the programs that encourage them, such as Twelve Steps groups, actually have a religion component.) Whether or not the fatalism and meaning-making project is genuine or artificial, it is a well-recognized story, and so, these incarceration stories feel familiar and similar to each other because they evoke a recognizable, universally familiar trope.

Political Incarceration Under Siege: Jeremiah in the Pit of Mire

An important question in the sociology of punishment is whether the social reaction to deviance/challenge becomes more ferocious during times of social and political turmoil. This question is often attributed to Emile Durkheim and his concept of anomie. As Bruce DiCristina explains, Durkheim used the term “anomie” in various different ways in his scholarship: insufficient regulation of interactions, insufficient regulation of desires, excessive imprecision and weakening of the collective consciousness, and a decline in morality. Most crime and punishment theorists I am familiar with are interested in whether social control rises when the consensus is challenged: For example, Kai Erikson shows that, in Puritan colonies, repression and swift punishment were at their height during times in which religious authorities felt most challenged and imperiled. Similarly, there is a wonderful article by Martin Killias that compares 47 countries (as of 1972) in terms of their political structure and incarceration rates. Killias finds that countries plagued by dictatorships, high power concentration, unemployment, and unequal income distribution tend to be more punitive. Killias ties these punishment-enhancing factors into the concept of a “legitimation crisis,” which occurs “when rulers cannot meet the standards emanating from their own self-justification and when the power gap between rulers and subordinates grow and power is concentrated among a few.”

This makes a lot of sense: it doesn’t take a lot of heavy theorizing to figure out that a society at risk, in which the leadership faces challenges, lashes out at people and displays punitive power in a last-ditch effort to instill fear, if not earn legitimacy. A classic example of this can be found in Jeremiah, where the biblical authors outdid themselves painting a vivid picture of a city under siege, a king in decline, conflicts, intrigue, and secrets, and the resulting incarceration of a prophet suspected of being an enemy shill.

Harold Wilmington offers a thorough biographical sketch of Jeremiah, from which one learns that his fortunes swung high and low in the last few days of the kingdom of Judah. During the discovery (or the “discovery”) of the Torah under King Josiah’s reign, he served in an official capacity, helping implement religious reforms, but after Josiah was felled in the battle against Pharaoh Necho, Jeremiah fell out of favor with his descendants. The biblical text (as well as Wilmington’s biography) paints a picture of someone well known throughout the Judean kingdom as nobody’s patsy, and certainly someone who provokes strong reactions: steadfast friends and bitter enemies abound.

The text suggests that Jeremiah’s incarceration during the Babylonian siege was not his first time at the rodeo. In Jeremiah 36:5-6, the prophet dictates his prophecy to his scribe, Baruch ben Neriah, instructing the scribe to read the prophecy in public because “I am detained; I cannot go to the house of God.” It’s possible that short-term political detention of a tiresome dissident was a usual government approach during Josiah’s descendants’ reigns; the text, which describes a failed manhunt for Jeremiah and for Baruch, certainly suggests that Jeremiah was acting in the shadow of the law and had to evade capture. But things really come to a head under Zedekiah, the last king of Judea, a puppet monarch instilled by Nebuchadnezzar. Kevin Tolley contextualizes Jeremiah’s imprisonment:

Zedekiah came to the throne at a time of great spiritual, economic, and political turmoil. The previous kings had made “disastrous choices.” The city was caught between two external political powers since both Egypt and Babylon vied for power. Over the past decades, loyalties had shifted and allegiances had waned as Jerusalem was continually controlled by one side or another. Egypt had heavily taxed the people (2 Kings 23:33), and Babylon had pillaged the temple and national coffers and had exiled a portion of the inhabitants, leaving the state in financial ruin (2 Kings 24:13). Zedekiah had witnessed the murder of his father, Josiah, and the exile of his brother Jehoahaz. He had seen his brother Jehoiakim mismanage Jerusalem, which had caused the might of Babylon to come down on the city for a three-month siege, resulting in the death of Jehoiakim and the exile of his son Jehoiachin. Thousands of people were deported, and both the city’s economy and defenses were in shambles. Civil unrest prevailed, and various political groups competed for power. . .

For the next few years, Zedekiah maintained a quiet reign. The Babylonians had successfully cowed him. Few would have dared to question the might of Babylon after their armies had just sacked the city. Over his eleven-year reign, Zedekiah realized he needed to rebuild without provoking the ire of either Babylon or Egypt. Zedekiah was a well-intentioned leader (Jeremiah 38:14–16), but he was weak, vacillating, and fearful of public opinion (Jeremiah 38:5, 19).

Throughout Zedekiah’s reign, various political groups pressured Zedekiah to break his oath of allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar. Rumors began to arise that Egypt would assist in a rebellion against Babylon. News of civil unrest in Babylon reached Jerusalem; Zedekiah gave in to the pressures and joined an alliance with Egypt to rebel against Babylon (2 Kings 24:20). And so the countdown to Jerusalem’s destruction began.

In January 588 BC Nebuchadnezzar caught wind of the rebellion and moved quickly against Jerusalem, laying siege to the city. The blockade ultimately lasted over eighteen months. In the spring or summer of 588 BC, Judah became hopeful when the Egyptians began to march toward Jerusalem (Jeremiah 37:5–7). Nebuchadnezzar briefly left the siege of Jerusalem to smash this Egyptian resistance, and then he quickly returned Jerusalem. Zedekiah was in a desperate situation.

Kevin Tolley, “The Imprisonment of Jeremiah in Its Historical Context,” Religious Educator 20(3) 2019, https://rsc.byu.edu/religious-educator/vol-20-no-3-2019

What happens next, vividly described in Jeremiah 37-38, is a veritable political thriller. As the Babylonians lay siege to the city, Jeremiah prophesied the destruction of the city and the temple (presenting Nebuchadnezzar as an instrument of God) and outlined the three options: leave the city by escaping the siege, remain in the city and be ravaged by the Babylonians, or surrender and hope for the best. Jeremiah’s advice to surrender to the Babylonians did not sit well with a group of government officials, who managed to catch Jeremiah when he was dealing with some property matters at the Benjamin Gate. One of them, Irijah, accused Jeremiah of defecting to the Babylonians. Jeremiah said, “lie! I’m not defecting!,” but the denials fell on deaf ears and he was brought to the officials, who beat him up and put him in a place described as “beit ha’asur.”

Religious commentators fault the government officials for this grievous miscarriage of justice, and the classical midrashim, invested in Jeremiah’s image as righteous, all use remarkable linguistic gymnastics to explain how bad of a king Zedekiah was (by “bad” they don’t mean “politically weak, manipulated by the bureaucracy, and speaks out of both sides of his mouth,” but rather, “disloyal to God.”) Agaddat Bereshit 35:2 and Esther Rabbah, Petichta 6 both rely on the fact that Zedeikah is not described as a “king” (a word associated with the righteous), but rather through the verb “to reign” (suggesting that he is unworthy of the descriptive noun). But if one reads this story as a political thriller, rather than a theological morality tale, I think there is enough in the text to suggest that Jeremiah could be reasonably believed to be a Babylonian shill. Not only was he advocating surrender during a stressful time, which could erode everyone’s morale given the siege and resulting hunger, but he is later said to have been released and treated well in Babylonia (perhaps as an expression of Nebuchadnezzar’s gratitude?).

Rembrandt Van Rijn, The Prophet Jeremiah Mourning over the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630

What sort of prison was “beit ha’asur”? Notably, the text does not speak in plural (‘beit ha’asurim”), and this perhaps strengthens the description of this facility: it is the house of Jonathan the scribe, converted into a makeshift jail, perhaps specifically to hold Jeremiah (was Jonathan in cahoots with Jeremiah’s jailers?) The architecture of this improvised prison is somewhat unclear, and different commentators have different takes on it. Jeremiah was put in “beit habor” and in the “hanuyot”, where he is said to sit for “many days.” The “bor,” translated as a pit, is said by 18th century commentator David Altschuler (“Metzudat David”) to be the worst place in prison (think “down in the hole”). But what are the “hanuyot”? Rashi translates this as “cells,” but Altschuler opts for the literal translation as “stores,” and Medieval commentator Radak explains that these stores were also converted into prison cells, akin to the conversion of Jonathan’s house. What I find interesting about this “hanuyot” business is that it is supported by some of today’s controversies about evidence of incarceration. Last week, as part of my rabbinical program, I attended our summer intensive, during which we took a phenomenal archaeology course with the one and only Brett Kaufman, who told me that some places where locked rooms were found were initially thought to be storage places, only to later be found to evince evidence that people were housed there (I need to dig, pun intended, deeper into this issue of material culture support for confinement structure.)

At this point, we’re thrown into a web of political intrigue to rival Game of Thrones. Zedekiah, who we already know is viewed very unfavorably in this text, gets Jeremiah out and into his own house in secret, asking him for the prophesy. Jeremiah repeats his dire predictions about Babylon, also complaining, “how have I sinned against you, your servants, and this people, that you put me in jail?” Jeremiah points to the fact that, so far, his predictive ability exceeds that of other prophets, who mistakenly (or perhaps buoyed by his brief sojourn in Egypt) prophesied that the King of Babylon would not move against Jerusalem. Jeremiah begs Zedekiah: “Don’t send me back to sit in the house of Jonathan the scribe, so I will not die there.” Zedekiah relents and moves Jeremiah to a place called “hatzar ha’matarah.”

Commentators differ widely on how they perceive this new space, which is obviously better than the “bor” and “hanuyot” area. Malbim says that Jeremiah sat there of his own free will, meaning that it was not a confinement space. Chomat Anakh says that this was a “spacious place, and even though it was still a prison, Jeremiah was not sorry” about the change in his circumstances. Metzudat David says that “incarceration wasn’t so hard there” and adds an important detail: that Jeremiah received bread from the bakeries every day until the bread supply was depleted, from which we learn that hunger and deprivation was beginning to affect everyone on the outside, too. Steinsaltz refers to this place as a “detention camp of sorts,” identifying it with a prior mention of the same place in Jeremiah 32:2. If these two places are not telling of the same incident, this implies that hatzar ha’matarah might have been a permanent detention camp, whereas the “bor” and the “hanuyot” were ad-hoc places with worse conditions, perhaps fashioned specifically for Jeremiah.

The story doesn’t end there, because apparently Jeremiah continues to advocate surrendering to the Babylonians even from his confinement in hatzar ha’matarah. Ministers who hear him speak to the people (unclear whether in person or through a scribe) turn to Zedekiah, asking for Jeremiah to be executed “for he disheartens the solders who remain in this town and the people when he speaks thus to them, because this man does not speak for the benefit/welfare of these people, but for evil.” If one removes the religious, pro-Jeremiah filter from this incident, the ministers’ concern seems valid, especially when mitigated by the lens of a siege and the prospect of destruction. Anyway, Zedekiah gives in, with a heavy implication that these ministers are more powerful than him and he simply does not have the clout to oppose them.

The descriptions of what happens next are horrifyingly vivid. The ministers use ropes to lower Jeremiah into a pit within hatzar ha’matarah, which is said to belong to one of Zedekiah’s sons. The cistern does not have water; it has mire, and Jeremiah sinks into it. But not all his friends have abandoned him. Ebed-melech the Cushite (or the Ethiopian, depending on translation), who was a eunuch in the king’s service, hears of this, and complains to the king that Jeremiah is to unjustly die of hunger. Zedekiah changes course again, ordering Ebed-Melech to take thirty men and pull Jeremiah out of the cistern.

The text offers a detailed description of the mechanics of this liberation effort. Ebed-Melech proceeds to take rags from the treasury and lower them carefully into the cistern using ropes (commentators explain that he does this so as not to drench them in mire.) He then calls out to Jeremiah to wrap these rags under his armpits, between his skin and the ropes. Once Jeremiah pads his armpits, the men pull the ropes, getting him out of the cistern, and returning him to his less constrictive confinement at hatzar ha’matarah.

It’s hard to tell who Zedekiah is more afraid of: Jeremiah, who perhaps he believes is telling him the truth, or the ministers, who can bring him down. Perhaps his concern for Jeremiah’s welfare is part and parcel of his fear of the Babylonians and he, like his ministers, suspects that Jeremiah is in cahoots with them. In any case, he tries to eat the cake and leave it whole. He again brings Jeremiah in, in private, through the third entrance of the House of God, and asks him to tell him the truth. Jeremiah understandably hesitates: “If I tell you, you will kill me for sure, and if I offer advice, you won’t follow it.” After Zedekiah swears he will spare Jeremiah’s life and protect him from his enemies, and Jeremiah repeats his dire predictions about the Babylonian destruction of the city and his advice to surrender so as to save it. Perhaps inspired by his own recent predicament, Jeremiah uses the pit of mire as a metaphor for Zedekiah’s fate. Leslie Allen comments that the “two crises are linked as cause and effect. The rejection of the prophetic message that resulted in Jeremiah’s dire predicament, despite the partial amelioration granted by the king, was to land Zedekiah himself in a comparable predicament. . . Zedekiah rescued Jeremiah from mud, but the king’s friends had abandoned him to it.”

Zedekiah keeps his word: he does not return Jeremiah to Jonathan’s house, but rather to hatzar ha’matarah. He even instructs Jeremiah to lie to the ministers and obfuscate about the true nature of his conversation with the king. Jeremiah manages to effectively deceive the ministers about his royal interview, and as a consequence remains in hatzar ha’matarah until the city falls. Notably, Zedekiah does not actually follow Jeremiah’s advice, and as a consequence sees his sons executed before he is blinded by the conqueror. Jeremiah fares better under the new empire–Nebuchadnezzar orders his captains and eunuchs to set him free, which they do, and he continues to prophesy to the freshly defeated people.

There are several remarkable features to this story. The first is the detailed, quasi-documentary description of the various confinement facilities: a pit, or pits; cells, or makeshift cells from converted storage rooms; a home converted into a makeshift facility as the worst location; an easier detention center. We are provided the minutia of lowering someone to the pit and elevating them from it, including the humane (?) measure of padding their armpits so they are not cut by the ropes. We are also told, akin to what we saw in Daniel’s story, details about food rationing, which are especially important during the miseries of a siege. And, we are offered a window into the use of incarceration as a tool in political conflict and intrigue, in which even the incarcerated person holds some modicum of negotiation power and how that plays into the reversals of fortune in the story.

This story is also a microcosm, a window into Zedekiah’s court. One thing I notice about all these exilic incarceration stories is the way the biblical authors use them: as a good index of quality of governance, akin to the well-known Tolstoy maxim. Lovers of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish will remember his foundational distinction between punishment in antiquity (dramatic, violent, centralized) and punishment in modernity (decentralized, vague, aimed at the soul, normalizing, self-monitored). Foucault saw the prison as the epitome of a modern way of punishment, identifying earlier historical periods with corporal punishment. I think that descriptions of prison in antiquity both strengthen and challenge his framework. On one hand, incarceration stories tend to portray the regimes that run the prisons (Egypt, Persia, Babylon) and jails as capricious, risky, easily swayed by things like dreams or conspiracies, and spiteful. The power of incarceration is centralized and brutal. On the other hand, these are, undoubtedly, prisons. The sources do not make the distinction that modern penologists (including Foucault) make between prisons and corporal punishment. In other words, they support what I’ve come to see as true since we wrote Fester: incarceration IS corporal punishment. It can come in different flavors: it could be a drab, gray, vague experience at a modern juvenile facility that destroys the soul and makes people obedient and docile, or it can be the drama of throwing a particular person into a pit of mire and getting him out. But both are incarceration. We can, and should, revisit Discipline and Punish by decoupling prisons from modernity, and by seeing incarceration modes not as a historical rift, but along a historical continuum.