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And it came to pass after these things that his master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said—

All the world knows what Mut-em-enet, Potiphar’s chief wife, is supposed to have said when she cast her eyes upon Joseph, her husband’s young steward, and I will not and dare not deny that at last, one day, in her extremity, in the fever of her despair she did actually so speak, did make use of the frightfully direct and frank expression which tradition puts in her mouth. So direct, indeed, so frank, that it sounds like a lewd proposal coming from a woman who made it quite naturally and at small cost to herself, instead of being the final outcry of her utter agony of spirit and flesh. To tell the truth, I am horrified at the briefness and curtness of the original account, which does so little justice to life’s bitter circumstantiality. Seldom have I felt more acutely than in this connection the harm done to truth by abbreviation and compression. Yet let no one think that I am deaf to the reproach—whether expressed or, out of politeness, not expressed—which hangs over my account, my entire exposition: to the effect that the laconic terseness of the original text cannot be surpassed, and that my whole enterprise, which is already of such long continuance, is so much labour lost. But since when, may I ask, does a commentator set himself up in competition with his text? And besides, is there not as much dignity and importance attached to the discussion of the “how” as to the transmission of the “what”? Yes, does not life first fulfill itself in the “how”? Let us remind ourselves once again that before the story was first told, it had to tell itself—with an exactitude of which life alone is master, and to attain which a narrator has no hope or prospect at all. He can only approach it by serving the “how” of life more faithfully than the lapidary spirit of the “what” condescended to do. But if ever the fidelity of a commentator can justify itself, then surely it does in the story of Potiphar’s wife and of just what, according to the tradition, she is supposed to have said.

For the picture which one inevitably makes, or is irresistibly tempted to make, of Joseph’s mistress; the picture, I fear, which most people make of her, is so false that one does a service to the original in correcting it in the way of truth—if we understand by original the first written, or better yet the story as life first told it. This deceptive picture of unbridled lust and shameless allurement does not, at least, agree with what we overheard, when we were with Joseph in the garden-house, from the lips of dignified old Tuia about her daughter-in-law. It was there that we began to learn with a little more particularity of the life of the house. Petepre’s mother called her “proud,” after declaring that it was impossible to accuse her of being a goose. Haughty she said she was, reserved, a moon-nun, a nature with the bitter fragrance of the myrtle leaf. Does such a one speak as tradition makes her speak? Yet she did so speak, literally and repeatedly, as her pride broke under the assaults of passion. We are agreed upon that. But the tradition neglects to state how much time passed during which she would have bitten out her tongue rather than have so spoken. It neglects to say that sitting in solitude she actually, literally, and physically bit her tongue so that she stammered for pain when first she uttered the words that for all time have stamped her for a seductress. A seductress? A woman, overcome as she was, is of course seductive—seductiveness is the exterior and physical shape taken by her affliction; it is nature makes her eyes sparkle more sweetly than any drops the toilette-table can supply; heightens more alluringly the red of her lips than rouge can do it, and pouts them in a soulful, suggestive smile; makes her dress and adorn herself with innocently abandoned calculation; gives her movements and all her body a purposeful grace, lending to it, as far as physical constitution permits, and even a little further, an expression of blissful promise. And all that fundamentally means nothing else than what Joseph’s mistress finally said to him. But is she to whom it happens so to speak from within to be made responsible? Does she do it out of deviltry? Does she even know of it—otherwise than through her torturing pangs which express themselves in outward charm? In short, if she is made seductive, is she then a seductress?

In the first place we must examine the nature and form of the seduction in the light of the birth and upbringing of the smitten one. Against the assumption that Mut-em-enet, familiarly called Eni or even Enti, behaved herself in her afflicted state like a common prostitute must be set her whole nurture, which was aristocratic to an unimaginable degree. It is but just that we should—as we did in the case of Mont-kaw—consider briefly the origins of the woman who exerted upon Joseph’s destiny an influence so very different from that of our honest steward.

It will surprise nobody to hear that the wife of Petepre the fan-bearer was no daughter of an innkeeper or quarry labourer. Her stock was no more and no less than that of the old princes of the nome, though it had been long ago that her forbears had lived like patriarchal kings on their extended property in one of the districts of Middle Egypt. Foreign sovereigns of Asiatic shepherd blood had then lived in the north and worn the double crown, and the princes of Wese, in the south, had for centuries been subject to these invaders. But there had arisen men of might, Sekenenre and his son Kamose, who rebelled against the shepherd kings and fought them stoutly, finding their foreign blood an effective stimulant to their own ambitions. Yes, Ahmoses, the dauntless brother of Kamose, had laid siege to the invaders’ fortified royal seat, Avaris, had taken it and driven the kings from the country, setting it free, in the sense that he and his house took it for their own and substituted their domination for the foreign one. Not all of the nome princes had been at once willing to regard the hero Ahmoses as their deliverer or his sovereignty over them as freedom. Some of them had on whatever grounds adhered to the foreigners in Avaris, preferring to remain their vassals rather than be freed by somebody else. Even after their old overlords had been entirely ejected some of these petty kings, unambitious for freedom, mutinied against their deliverer and, as the sources say, “gathered the rebels against him” so that he had first to defeat them in open battle before freedom was established. It goes without saying that these rebels forfeited their estates. It was the method of the Theban deliverers to keep for themselves what they had taken from the foreigner; so that a process now began which at the time of our tale was already far advanced though only entirely consummated in the course of it: that is to say, the dispossession of the princes and the confiscation of their property in favour of the Theban crown. The latter gradually became the owner of all the lands and let them out or presented them to favourites or religious houses—as, for instance, Pharaoh had presented the island in the river to Petepre. But the old princes of the nome became a new class of officials and nobility, who owed allegiance to Pharaoh and occupied commanding posts in his army and administration.

From such as these, then, Mut had come. Joseph’s mistress descended directly from a nome prince called Teti-’an, who in his time had “gathered the rebels” and had to be defeated in battle before he admitted that he was free. But Pharaoh did not lay that up against Teti-’an’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Their clan had remained great and aristocratic, it gave to the state commanders of troops, heads of cabinets, and administrators of the treasury, to the court high stewards, first charioteers and overseers of the royal bath-house; some of them, for instance the administrative heads of large cities, like Menfe or Tine, even kept their old princely titles. Eni’s father, Mi-Sakhme, held the high office of a city prince of Wese—one of two; for there was one for the city of the living and one for the city of the dead in the West, and Mi-Sakhme was prince of the Western city. As such, to use Joseph’s language, he lived as one of high rank and might certainly anoint himself with the oil of gladness—he and his, including Eni, his fine-limbed child, even though she was no longer a landed princess but the daughter of a modern office-holder. In the destiny which her parents chose for her one can read the changes that had taken place in the ways of thinking of the clan since the days of the fathers. They gained great advantage at court when they gave their beloved child in her tender age to the son of Tuia and Huia, Petepre, the man-made courtier; yet in doing so they proved that the instinct for fruitfulness possessed by their land-owning, soil-attached forbears had been greatly weakened by modern ideas.

Mut was a child when her parents disposed of her destiny in the same way that Potiphar’s parents had disposed of their unsteady little son when they speculated in the hereafter and made him a courtier of light. The claims of sex which Mut’s parents passed over, claims symbolized by the water-darkened earth, the moon-egg, the origin of all material life, were still but a germ, still slumbering within her; she was unconscious of them, she made not the least objection to the loving, life-denying deed. She was blithe, merry, untroubled, free. She was like a water-flower swimming upon a glassy pool, smiling beneath the kisses of the sun, untouched by the knowledge that its long stem is rooted in the black slime of the depths. The conflict between her eyes and her mouth had not existed in those days, rather a childish inexpressive harmony, and her pert, little-girl glance was undarkened by any harshness. The peculiar serpentine shape of the mouth, with its deep corners, had not been nearly so pronounced. The discord between them had come about gradually in the course of years during her life as moon-nun and titular consort of the sun-chamberlain—in token, obviously, that the mouth is a tool and image more closely allied to the nether powers than is the eye.

As for her body, everybody knew its shape and loveliness, for the “woven air,” that luxurious silken fabric like a zephyr’s breath which she wore in compliance with the custom of the land, revealed its every line to the admiring eye. And one might say that it was more in harmony with her mouth than with her eyes. Its honourable rank had not checked its ripening or its bloom. The small firm breasts, the fine line of neck and back, the tender shoulders and perfect statuesque arms, the high-flanked legs expanding into the splendidly feminine haunches and pelvis—all these composed a form admitted far and wide to be the most beautiful of its sex. Wese knew none more worthy of praise; and as men’s nature was, the sight of it stirred in them old lovely fantasies, pictures of beginnings and pre-beginnings, pictures that had to do with the moon-egg and the origin of things: the picture of a glorious virgin, which, at bottom—right at the bottom, in the moist earth—was the goose of love itself in the shape of a virgin, and in its lap, with spread wings flapping, nestled a splendid specimen of a swan, a strong and tender snowy-feathered god, fluttering his lovesick work upon her, honourably surprised, that she might bear the egg.

Such pictures of aforetime did indeed light up in the inmost depths of Wese’s folk, where they had lain in darkness, at sight of Mut-em-enet’s translucent form, although they knew the moon-chaste honourable state in which she lived and which could be read from the stern look in her eyes. They knew that those eyes gave a truer measure of her essence and activities than did the mouth, which said far other things and which might well have looked down smiling if protesting upon the activities of a royal bird. They were aware that this body knew its greatest moments, its highest satisfaction and fulfilment, not in receiving such royal visits, but only on the feast-days when she shook her rattle and danced the cult-dance before Amun-Re. They did not gossip about her; no evil rumours went round in the sense of Mut-em-enet’s mouth, to which her eyes would have given the lie. They were sharp-tongued enough about others, who were more truly married than Teti-’an’s grandchild and yet played fast and loose in the point of morals: ladies of the order, harem women of the god. Renenutet, for instance, wife of the overseer of bulls: things were known of her which Amun’s overseer wotted not of. Plenty was known, jokes enough were made behind her car or her carrying-chair—hers and others’ too. But of Petepre’s chief and, so to speak, true wife nothing was known in Thebes, and folk were convinced that there was nothing to know. They took her for a saint, reserved and apart, in Petepre’s house and court as well as abroad; and that was significant, considering the love of joking inborn among the people.

Whatever my readers may think, I do not consider it to be my task to inquire into the habits of Mizraim and in particular of No-Amun’s feminine world. I mean such habits as long ago we heard condemned in old Jacob’s forthright way. His knowledge of the world had a strongly emotional tinge, a mythical reference, which we must realize in order not to exaggerate. Yet his lofty condemnation was not without grounds. Among a people who have neither word nor understanding for sin, and who go about in garments made of woven air, people whose attitude toward death and worship of animals betokens and induces a certain fleshliness, one must assume—even without knowledge or experience—the existence of a light moral attitude. And Jacob, making this assumption, couched it in poetic, high-sounding words. Experience, then, bore out the assumption—I say it less in malice than in satisfaction of the claims of logic. But to confirm the assumption by prying into the daily lives of the wives of Wese would be beneath our dignity. Much can be pardoned, little disputed. We should need only to intercept a few glances between Renenutet, wife of the overseer of bulls, and a certain very smart lieutenant of the royal bodyguard, or between the same exalted lady and a young shiny-pated temple-treader of Khonsu, to realize that things went on which to some extent justified Jacob’s picturesque language. It is not our affair to sit in judgment on the morals of Wese—that great city of more than a hundred thousand people. We must, where we cannot sustain a position, abandon it. But I would put my hand in the fire and swear, staking the whole of my reputation as a story-teller, that one of those led a blameless life, up to a certain time, when the gods made of her a reeling mænad: I mean the daughter of Mi-Sakhme, prince of the nome, Mut-em-enet, Potiphar’s wife. To see her as a natural prostitute, upon whose lips those words we know for ever trembled and were lightly released, is so false that truth demands its complete refutation. When she did, biting her tongue, utter them, she knew herself no more; she was beside herself, her reason dethroned by agony, a sacrifice to the scourge-swinging, avenging lust of powers to which she was committed by her mouth, while the eyes had thought to treat them with detachment and contempt.