out that their brother Joseph was not just dead, as they’d long believed, but in a position of importance. You may remember the story from reading the Bible, although what you read there wasn’t exactly what happened.
Uncle Joseph was my Grandfather Jacob’s favorite son, although he was always much fonder of his eldest daughter Maacah, Rachel’s first and long-forgotten child. Alas, my poor grandfather Jacob had long been in mourning for Joseph, after his sudden and unexpected disappearance, and his wives, my four grandmothers, were all afraid that the news of Uncle Joseph’s survival would be too great a shock for Jacob. I was around fourteen at the time, had a clear strong voice, and was minorly accomplished on a stringed instrument not unlike a modern oud. During the day I would do my chores, all the while singing, and every night I used to go into Grandpa’s tent to play music and sing songs for him. So my grandmothers sent for me and told me the good news. Although I’d never met my Uncle Joseph, who was only spoken about in whispers, I was as happy as they were to find out that he was alive. What they asked me to do was to weave the good news into the words of a song when I sang to Grandfather that night. So I did. “And Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, lives. He lives. Yes he lives. Yes he lives.” Sung to plucked strings made out of sheep gut, inserted into a song about a lonely dove perched in a treetop, the one that Noah had sent out from his ark, which didn’t return to him, letting him know it was safe to leave the ark and go back to dry land.
To this very day I can see the tears in Grandfather’s once nearly black eyes, turned white with cataracts, his face a web of wrinkles. Sniffling, wiping his hairy nose on the back of his sleeve, he leaned over, kissed the top of my dark hair, right above the line in the middle where it was parted, and said, “If what you are telling me is true, my little one, may death never come to you.” Well, never is a very long time. But so is three thousand years. And while my life, but not my name, has been edited out of the Bible, every once in a while someone noticed me, as I already said, a rabbi or more often than not, a storyteller. I’ve been talked about more in some places than others. The Jews of Persia, a place I lived in for quite some time, were very fond of me and treated me well. But they were wrong when they claim that a fiery chariot carried me off to heaven many centuries ago. It didn’t. Instead, I left by camel along the Silk Road, ending up in China.
For more than two thousand years I have moved about the globe as a wanderer, always settling in with our people. And for the last sixty years I have been living in the United States of America, first in Manhattan, then Boston, then Brooklyn—and now I make my home in Venice Beach, in the city of Los Angeles, in a lovely old apartment complex half a block from the ocean. (The older I get, the more I like warmth, and like to be near the water, as far away from wars as I can get.) To support myself I give guitar lessons to young students. (I’ve always loved stringed instruments.) And now, old, bitter, and blessed, I am ready to begin to tell you my story.
Chapter Two
In which I continue my tale and
introduce you to our earliest ancestors
I was born in a tent, and that tent seems like a good place to start my memoir, a fine place to peg my story in your minds. It was my Canaanite mother Arsiyah’s tent, and her mother Kalanit’s before her, a tent made of tan and brown speckled goat skins sewn together, section by section. Rolled up and packed on donkeys, tents like that were easily carried from place to place, from camp to camp. Now, when I look back on it, I’m amazed at the way that we lived, in such simple conditions, as we were actually a large and prosperous clan.
People think of us with tents and with camels. Some archaeologists claim that camels weren’t domesticated yet and that when they appear in early stories in the Bible they’re anachronisms, proving the text was written later. But they’re wrong. Camels were domesticated, only they were very expensive and most people didn’t have any when I was small. We had a few. Our family stock was being bred slowly, generation by generation, from camels that were part of Abraham’s father’s marriage gift to Sarah. I’ll have more to say about this in a little while.
Speaking of Sarah and Abraham, now is probably the perfect time, right at the beginning, to fill you in on who they were and on what really happened to them. And surely my ancestors (and yours) are an important part of that picture. Contemporary scholars link the Hebrew people with groups of wandering Semites called Apiru or Habiru, who are mentioned in ancient sources from Egypt to Mesopotamia. This is wrong. The Hebrew word for Hebrew, is Ivri, which means, “Those people from the other side of the river,” that river being the Euphrates, and Ivri begins, or used to, with a deep open-mouthed sound made far down in the throat, a sound you still find in Arabic, Mizrachi Hebrew, and other languages. So you can hear that the word Habiru hardly resembles the word we called ourselves back then. We Hebrews were a clan of Western Semites who roamed back and forth from Canaan to what today is western Turkey. The Habiru were someone else. Very nice people. I knew a few when I was little. But someone else, entirely.
The text that you know, the Torah, and the stories about it that our people have told over time, would have you believe that Abraham was the very first person to speak to God, and that Sarah his wife was only that, a wife and eventually, late in life, a mother. Much of this is a distortion of the real truth, but here I find myself on slippery soil, because I never knew my great-great grandparents, or my great grandparents either. What I’m about to tell you comes to me second hand, from parents and grandparents and other relatives. On the other hand, I’m a lot closer to them than you are, so you may find things here that will interest or provoke you, depending on your outlook or beliefs. This book will not be for the faint of heart or orthodox of stomach, and if you possess either, good reader, I suggest that you put down this book right now, lest it create in you mental indigestion, spiritual heartburn, or possibly both.
That little disclaimer out of the way, let’s go on. An old writing companion of mine, back in Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon, liked to remind me that the job of a good author is to establish plot, character, setting, and theme, for whoever will be reading their story. I used to be big on plot and character, but the older I get the more I favor setting and theme. So the setting for the beginning of my story is the city of Ur, the home of Abraham and Sarah. The Torah would have you believe that they came from the city of Ur that was near the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in what today is called Iraq. Not so. The truth, and there is evidence for it in the Torah itself, is that they came from a town in the north that was also called Ur. It’s a lovely spot in what today is Turkey. I’ve been there many times. If you ever get to the Middle East, I encourage you to visit. Archaeologists say the city wasn’t inhabited during the time of our ancestors, but they’re wrong. That Ur is my and your original hometown.
Some scholars see a link between the southern city of Ur, known in the Bible as Ur of the Chaldees, and the city of Haran that is near the northern Ur. The Torah says that Abraham’s family moved to Haran from Ur. The tie between them is that both were centers of the cult of the moon god Sin. Scholars also connect the word Sinai with Sin and posit that our ancestors worshipped that god. Wrong again. This confusion is very human. Are we talking about Paris, Texas—or Paris, France? Odessa, Texas—or Odessa, Ukraine? (And why are there so many foreign places in Texas, anyway? They’ve even got a Palestine.) Back when the Torah was being put together, the real Ur was about as attractive and familiar as Paris, Texas, so the other Ur was written in, Ur of the Chaldees, a large lovely city, far more famous than the real Ur—but the wrong one.
Legends tell us that Terah, Abraham’s father, was an idol maker. This is not so. Terah’s wife isn’t named in the scriptures. She’s called Emteli or Amitlai in the Talmud, and Edna in the book of Jubilees, but her real name was Kaivah, which was a local variety of crocus, one that’s long been extinct. Kaivah was a midwife, while Terah her husband was a traveling salesman, a fairly successful one at that, who covered a territory that stretched from eastern Turkey to northern Canaan—Canaan the name that I still prefer for the land that is now called Israel and Palestine. Today a traveling salesman isn’t a job with prestige or power, but in those days a roving merchant in gold or silver or unguents, perfumes, or spices, could become a very very rich man, and Terah was quite successful in what he did.
The Torah tells us that Kaivah and Terah had three sons, Nahor, Haran, and Abraham, whose