Page:The Theme of the Joseph Novels.djvu/17

 man—so good a man, that Joseph later makes him his Major Domo, accepting him into the divine story as a helpful friend. In the fortress, Joseph is commissioned to act as a valet to the distinguished servants of the Royal Court who arrive one day as prisoners under investigation: the baker and the cup-bearer. Now the dreamer interprets dreams, and the day comes when he is taken from the prison in haste and stands before Pharao. He is thirty years old then, and Pharao is seventeen. This hypersensitive and tender youth, a searcher of God, like Joseph's forefathers, and enamoured of a dreamy religion of love, has ascended to the throne during the time of Joseph's imprisonment. He is an anticipating, a premature Christian, the mythical prototype of those, who are on the right way, but not the right ones for that way. It is a widely ramified sequence of chapters in which Joseph gains the unlimited confidence of the young ruler, and at whose end he receives the ring of power.

Now he is Viceroy, takes the well-known measures of Providence for the coming famine and enters into a matrimony of State with Asnath, daughter of the sun priest of On-Heliopolis. But here, the story returns from the Egyptian soil to the theatre of the first and second volume, to Canaan, and a complete long short-story is interpolated which gives to this volume its outstanding female character, as the first one had it in the person of the lovely Rachel, the third one in the fruitlessly desiring Mut-em-enet. It is Thamar, the daughter-in-law of Juda, a figure of grand style, the female paradigm of determination, whose spiritual ambition scorns no means that might help her, the pagan child of Baal, to get on the path of Promise and to become a forbear of the Messiah.

Now the famine assumes reality, and dramatically the [13]