על יוסף ל״חOn Joseph 38
א׳
1[222] This stern decision had greatly distressed them, utterly dejected as they were by the false accusations made against them, when the fourth in age, who combined boldness and courage with modesty and practised frankness of speech without effrontery, approached him and said: “My lord, I pray you not to give way to wrath, nor, because you have been appointed to the second post after the king, to condemn before you have heard our defence.
ב׳
2[223] When you asked us at our first visit of our brother and father, we answered, ‘Our father is an old man, aged not so much by years as by repeated misfortunes, whereby as in a training-school he has been continually exercised amid labours and sufferings which have tried him sore. But our brother is quite young, the idol and darling of his father, because he is the child of his later years, the only one left of the two that their mother bore, since the elder has died a violent death.
ג׳
3[224] Now when you bade us bring that brother here, and threatened that if he did not arrive we should not even be admitted again to your presence, we departed in dejection, and, when we got home, only with reluctance told your orders to our father.
ד׳
4[225] He at first opposed them in his great fear for the boy, but, when necessaries grew scarce and yet none of us dared to come and buy corn without the youngest because of the stern warning you had given, he was with difficulty persuaded to send the boy with us. Many a time did he blame us for admitting that we had another brother. Many a time did he pity himself for the coming separation from the boy, for he is but a child and without experience, not only of life in a foreign land, but of city life in general.
ה׳
5[226] Then, since such are our father’s feelings, how can we return to him? How can we look him in the face without the boy? He will suffer the saddest of deaths on merely hearing that he has not returned, and we shall be called murderers and parricides by all the spiteful people who gloat over such misfortunes.
ו׳
6[227] And the chief stream of obloquy will be directed against me, for I pledged myself with many forfeits to my father, and declared that I received the boy as a deposit which I would restore when it was demanded from me. But how can I restore it, unless you yourself are propitiated? I pray you to take pity on the old man, and realize the miseries which he will suffer if he does not recover him whom he unwillingly entrusted to my hand.
ז׳
7[228] But do you exact the penalty for the wrongs which you believe yourself to have received. I will willingly pay it. Write me down your slave from this day onwards. I will gladly endure what the newly-bought endure if you will spare the child.
ח׳
8[229] This boon, if indeed you grant it, will be a boon not to the boy himself but to one who is not here present, whom you will relieve of his cares, the father of all these many suppliants. For suppliants we are who have fled for refuge to your most august right hand, which we pray may never fail us.
ט׳
9[230] Take pity, then, on the old age of one who has spent all his years labouring in the arena of virtue. The cities of Syria he won over to receive and honour him, though his customs and usages were strange to them and very different, and those of the country alien to him in no small degree. But the nobility of his life, and his acknowledged harmony of words with deeds and deeds with words, prevailed so that even those whom national feelings prejudiced against him were brought over to his ways.
י׳
10[231] Such is the gratitude which you will earn, and what greater could be earned? For what greater boon could a father have than the recovery of a son of whose safety he has despaired?”