על יוסף ה׳On Joseph 5
א׳
1[22] When his father heard, not the truth that his son had been sold, but the lie that he was dead and had seemingly been devoured by wild beasts, the words that he heard and the sight that he saw fell like a blow on his ears and eyes. For Joseph’s tunic had been brought to him rent and marred and stained scarlet with much blood. Collapsing under his great emotion, he lay for a great while with closed lips, not even able to lift his head, so utterly did the calamity afflict and break him down.
ב׳
2[23] Then, suddenly pouring forth tears like a fountain, he watered his cheeks and chin and breast and his own raiment, while bitterly wailing, and uttered such words as these: “Child, it is not your death which grieves me, but the manner of it. If you had been buried in your own land, I should have comforted and watched and nursed your sick-bed, exchanged the last farewells as you died, closed your eyes, wept over the body as it lay there, given it a costly funeral and left none of the customary rites undone.
ג׳
3[24] Nay, even if it had been on foreign soil, I should have said to myself: ‘Man, be not downcast that nature has recovered the forfeit that was her due.’ Separate countries concern the living: every land is the tomb of the dead. Death comes early to none, or rather it comes early to all, for few are the years of the longest-lived compared with eternity.
ד׳
4[25] And, indeed, if you needs must have died by violence or through premeditation, it would have been a lighter ill to me, slain as you would have been by human beings, who would have pitied their dead victim, gathered some dust and covered the corpse. And then if they had been the cruellest of men, what more could they have done but cast it out unburied and go their way, and then perhaps some passer-by would have stayed his steps, and, as he looked, felt pity for our common nature and deemed the tendance of burial to be its due. But, as it is, you have become, in common phrase, a rich banquet for savage carnivorous beasts who have found my own flesh and blood to their taste, and feasted thereon.
ה׳
5[26] I am long trained in the athletics of adversity, drilled by many a random stroke of misfortune, a wanderer, a stranger, a serf, a thrall, my very life and soul a mark for the malice of those by whom I should least have been so treated. Many desperate calamities I have seen and heard: thousands of them have I experienced myself, but trained to moderate my feelings at such I remained unmoved. But none was more unbearable than this event which has overturned and destroyed the strength of my soul.
ו׳
6[27] For what sorrow could be greater or more pitiful? My son’s raiment has been conveyed to me, his father, but not a part of him, not a limb, not a tiny fragment. But, while he has been utterly made away with beyond even any possibility of burial, his raiment too would not have been sent to me at all save to remind me of my sorrow, and to make his sufferings live again as calamities constant and indelible to myself.” Thus did he bewail. But the merchants sold the boy in Egypt to one of the king’s eunuchs who was his chief cook.