But let us try to turn it around and say that once raised, the very existence of the question lends Joseph a new density. Suddenly we suspect a secret. If, despite all that is said about him, he is the Just Man in the Bible, it must mean that we have been misled by appearances. We have been looking at a mask, we have not seen the face.

So far Joseph has impressed us as a sort of boastful, power-hungry politician. A second, more thorough analysis of his biography demonstrates our error. Joseph: the most misunderstood man in the Bible. More complex, more mysterious than one assumes at first. Through him, we are in touch with a tragic vision of Jewish fate, a vision worthy of his ancestors.

• • •

One recognizes the value of a text by the weight of its silence. Here the silence exists and it weighs heavily.

First, there is Joseph’s astounding silence during the brutal scene at Shechem. All the brothers (except Benjamin) participated in it in one way or another. One imagines their discussions, one sees them hurling him into the snake pit. They wanted to kill him; they were about to kill him. And Joseph was silent. Face to face with his brothers, who shout their hate; face to face with the “sons of servants” whom he had befriended and who now have turned against him, like the others. Looking into their murderous eyes, he became mute. At the most critical moment of his life he let them deliberate, decide his fate, without uttering a word. Rabbinical tradition stresses that he began to weep, to plead for mercy only when his brothers prepared to sell him into bondage.

More striking still is Jacob’s silence. From the day that Joseph was taken from him, he led a solitary, almost secret life. For twenty years he did not speak. Not a word, not a complaint. He lived outside language, beyond hope. Bathed in silence and penetrated by it, he was distant and inaccessible. He seemed to have cut his ties with the world and its Creator.

For, on another level, there was also the silence from above. God no longer spoke to Jacob and Jacob no longer addressed himself to God. The break was total.

The Midrash tries hard to explain God’s silence. At Shechem, it says, the brothers took an oath of secrecy on the affair and also swore to excommunicate anyone who would break that oath. But every ceremony of excommunication requires the presence of ten people. Since the brothers were only nine, says the Midrash, they decided to make God the tenth. That was why God could no longer speak to Jacob; he had become an accomplice.

But Jacob’s silence remains unexplained, inexplicable. He no longer seemed to pray, no longer seemed to think of God. Between God and him, there was only silence. During the entire period of uncertainty, those interminable years when Jacob needed to express his grief and hear a word of consolation, he said nothing. His relations with God were renewed only after the family reunion. Only when Jacob hesitated to join Joseph in Egypt did God encourage him.