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A generation which knew not Joseph

A generation which knew not Joseph

Last updated on: April 15, 2016 at 5:15 pm by Fred Clark

A generation which knew not Joseph 2016-04-15T17:15:10-04:00 Fred Clark

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When it comes to the biblical story of Joseph, I’m with John Calvin. “It is certain that all contracts which are not formed according to the rule of charity are vicious in the sight of God,” the reformer wrote in his commentary on Genesis. Joseph, Calvin concluded, was simply indefensible. He exploited the hungry and enslaved the entire world in order to curry favor with a tyrant. He stole everything from everyone, enriching his boss and, thus, himself. And so Joseph, Calvin decided, can only be regarded as a warning sign — as a symbol of what not to do and how not to be.

In terms of results, you won’t find a worse or more despicable villain in all of the Bible. Ahab and Jezebel? Pikers. They ruled as monarchs, but never seized all the land and enslaved all the people the way that Joseph enabled Pharaoh to do. And while Jezebel may have favored the priests of Baal, she never entitled them to a separate, privileged status as the only free and propertied people in her kingdom, the way Joseph privileged the priests of the gods of Egypt.

The only tyrant and villain in the Bible who even begins to compare to Joseph is maybe the Beast of Revelation. But that book depicts this evil, Roman tyrant as a kind of Pharaoh — which is to say the Beast is based on Joseph.

Pyramid

“As for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other.” (Photo by Nina Aldin Thune via Wikipedia.)

The guy was simply a monster. And it’s baffling that we tend to treat him otherwise — as though he were an admirable, praiseworthy figure — just because his brothers treated him badly, and because he was a snazzy dresser.

As it happens, the story of Joseph was briefly in the news again this week thanks to a cringe-inducing campaign stop by Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who encountered a group of Yeshiva students in Brooklyn. As Harold Pollack put it, it’s like “a Gentile Curb Your Enthusiasm episode.”

“What are you studying?” Kasich asks the students, which should be a good start and a good question. If you ever meet a group of students or scholars, you’d do well to ask that same question because it creates an opportunity for you to learn about what they have immersed themselves in — a chance for them to share their learning with you and for you to go away afterward knowing a little bit more than you knew before you met them.

But Kasich here isn’t interested in learning about what these students are studying. He’s interested in teaching them, based on an apparent assumption that he already knows what he needs to know about whatever it is they’re devoted to studying.

As Mark Kleiman describes it, Kasich thereby “makes himself look like a complete doofus” because he winds up “lecturing experts on their field of expertise, as if he’d gone to CalTech and explained quantum theory to the physics grad students.”

That’s what makes the video above so hard to watch — why it may make you say to the screen, out loud, “Oh no. No no no no no no. Don’t ….” as he, voluntarily, does. Please proceed, governor.

But this comical self-inflation isn’t what bothers me most about this painfully awkward campaign stop. What bothers me most is what Kasich says: “You know who I like? Joseph.” And then, later, “I can’t figure out what Joseph ever did wrong.”

What he did wrong was that he exploited the poor, stole everyone’s land, and then enslaved the entire known world, creating a “contract … vicious in the sight of God.”

This isn’t something that Kasich should be enthusing about as a candidate for the nomination of the “party of limited government.”

Kasich, like many white Christians in America, has been taught to regard the story of Joseph as a sentimental devotional fable — Joseph’s brothers meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. But that interpretation isn’t possible with this story. If “God meant it for good,” then God is incompetent, because the end result of this story was anything but good. The end result of this story is totalitarian tyranny and mass enslavement.

That’s not “good.” It’s pretty much, you know, the extreme absolute opposite of good.

What we see here, in part, is the way that the ideology we carry when we read a story shapes our ability to comprehend what we’re reading. John Calvin read the story of Joseph and he was repulsed by the comprehensive injustice of it. Thanks to Joseph, this is a story in which the Bad Guy wins — crushing the poor and the innocent and the godly under his heel. That horrified Calvin, just as it horrified the writers of Exodus centuries earlier. But Kasich doesn’t even see it.

Why not? Partly because of the way the Bad Guy wins. It’s all done through what John Kasich might think of as “free markets.” This free market wasn’t really free, of course — they rarely are — because Joseph and Pharaoh had a monopoly on the necessities of life and were thus able to control and exploit everyone else with this vicious contract. This imbalance of power, this monopoly allowed Joseph to force all the people to sell all their land at a bargain price in exchange for food. And then, having taken everything else there was to take from them, Joseph ultimately forced them to sell themselves. To him.

John Kasich is a veteran of the Gingrich “revolution” of the 1990s, when “small government” and anti-government Republicans swept to power in Congress promising to deregulate everything, giving markets free reign, unchecked and unimpeded by any democratic meddling. Kasich is confident that this will always produce the best result. Unlike earlier generations of Republicans, like the trust-busting anti-monopolist Teddy Roosevelt, Kasich and Newt Gingrich and their comrades in arms were certain that unequal power could never result in vicious contracts. They didn’t believe there was any such thing as a vicious contract. Sure, the wealthy might seek to exploit the poor, but the invisible hand of the market would sort that out to the benefit of all. A robber baron might intend it for evil, but the Market intends it for good.

And the land became Pharaoh’s. As for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other. And it stands to this day.

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