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53  nine Joseph’s Fabulous Technicolor Dreamcoat Parashat Vayeshev (Genesis 37:1–40:23) Gregg Drinkwater The story of Joseph, the longest continuous narrative in the book of Genesis, offers one of the richest and most detailed portraits of a single character in the entire Hebrew Bible. The Bible offers such an emotionally complex narrative about Joseph’s life that both ancient and modern commentators feel drawn to analyzing and interpreting his every move and identifying with his many trials and triumphs. The Nobel Prize–winning German writer Thomas Mann even wrote a novel in four parts based on the life of Joseph called Joseph and His Brothers. Scholars, rabbis, and LGBT activists looking for “queer” openings in the Torah often focus on Joseph. The ups and downs and emotional drama of his life are pregnant with queer subtexts, making Joseph the figure many LGBT readers would vote the “most likely to be gay” of any character in the Torah. The great rabbinic and medieval commentators make the modern task of “queering ” Joseph even easier, with all of them having noted that Joseph had a certain “sensibility .” Rashi, for example, wrote that Joseph “dressed his hair” and “touched up his eyes so that he should appear goodlooking.” As we shall see, Rashi’s insights echoed those of earlier midrashic commentary, suggesting that there is indeed “something special” about Joseph that has intrigued Torah scholars throughout the ages. Although Torah scholars would not argue that Joseph was gay, with all the modernday assumptions we ascribe to that word—a concept that did not even exist for the ancients —there is enough evidence to suggest that Joseph was in some sense “queer”— an outsider dwelling on the inside, a figure apart from his family, and someone who did not quite fit in. Let us explore the evidence of Joseph’s “queerness” step by step. Joseph the Na’ar The initial description of Joseph in the opening lines of Vayeshev has perplexed commentators for two thousand years. These lines describe Joseph as a seventeen-yearold who tends the flocks with his brothers, but in this same passage the Torah also tells us that he was a “na’ar”—a “youth” or “lad.” In Biblical times, a seventeen-yearold would certainly be an adult, so why is Joseph described as a na’ar? And regardless , why comment at all after having clearly listed his age? 54 Gregg Drinkwater In the midrash, the sages suggest that although Joseph was indeed seventeen, he “behaved like a boy, penciling his eyes, curling his hair, and lifting his heel” (Genesis Rabbah 84:7). Today, would not the more obvious interpretation of a man who wears makeup, does up his hair, and prances about be that he was effeminate or, to follow contemporary cultural stereotypes even further, that he was gay (as problematic as such stereotypes may be)? Although this interpretation might seem obvious from our modern perspective, in ancient cultures, particularly Greek and Roman culture, the line between a boy (as opposed to a man) and a woman was blurrier than it is today. Calling Joseph a boy is a way of feminizing him while questioning his emotional and social maturity. Calling him a na’ar also contrasts him starkly with his brothers, who are clearly understood as adults, and suggests that Joseph possessed a certain innocence —a concept often used in the Bible to imply a closer link to God. Other commentators, also trying to understand the use of the term na’ar, note that the complete line says, “V’hu na’ar et-bnai Bilhah v’et-bnai Zilpah” (And he was a na’ar with the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah; Gen. 37:2). They suggest that what is really being implied is that Joseph was a helper to some of his brothers (the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah—Dan, Naftali, Gad, and Asher)1 or perhaps even a servant.2 Whatever the intent of the term na’ar, its use in reference to Joseph certainly supports the idea of his being a “queer” figure in the sense of being apart from the rest of his family and possibly being feminized by his brothers. A Special Coat for a Special Son Joseph’s father, Jacob, put Joseph on a pedestal. Right after the “na’ar” verse, the Torah tells us that Jacob “loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age; and...

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