Can you imagine Joseph in Egypt? When I was wandering around the Egyptian museum, his image kept coming into my mind. A slave, sold by his brothers, to a guy named Potiphar, who turns out later as Potiphara, and the rabbis say he bought Joseph as a sex slave but was later castrated. You can see the status of slaves as they appear – hands and feet bound – on the footstool of the Pharoah, and anything could be done with them. And then Joseph gets thrown in prison for turning down Potiphar’s wife, but when he interprets the Pharoah’s dream he gets to marry Potiphara’s daughter. So the 7 years of plenty and then famine for Joseph was all good. He’d already gone through hell, and now he’s making life bearable for his adopted nation. what a story – how sexually complex! how emotionally flexible! i rarely talk about the weekly portion of the bible but i do read it every week, and this one may be the most dramatic of them all. Especially now that I have been in Egypt and constantly think about the Egyptians I wanted to meet there.