It’s a strange verse: “And to Yosef were born two sons…whom Asnas, daughter of Potiphera, the priest of On, bore to him” (Bereishis 41:50).
Why couldn’t the Torah just state, “And Asnas bore two sons to Yosef”? Why the awkward-sounding repetition?
We find this same repetition five chapters later (ibid. 46:20): “And to Yosef were born…Menashe and Efraim, whom Asnas, daughter of Potiphera, the priest of On, bore to him.”
What accounts for this inelegant phrasing?
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch explains that in “ordinary circumstances it suffices [for the Torah] to say ‘vateled lo’ [‘and she bore to him’]” because the two parents – e.g., Avraham and Sarah or Yaakov and Leah – shared the same spiritual dream for their child. So there was “no necessity…to say further that ‘yulad lo,’ that the child had been born to the father.”
But Yosef’s circumstances were hardly ordinary. His wife “was the daughter of a highly-placed priestly family, accordingly, initiated and brought up in all the ‘mysteries’ and ideas of Egypt, and Yosef was, after all, only a slave and a Hebrew raised by the grace of the king.”
True, he was now viceroy of Egypt, but a “person can be the much-feared ruler of the people outside and, at home, the cringing slave of his haughty wife.” So if the Torah hadn’t informed us otherwise, we may have thought Asnas raised her children to be proper Egyptians. And if she had, “she would indeed have born [Yosef] children, but the children would not have been born to him.”
The Torah therefore tells us that Efraim and Menashe were in fact “born to Yosef.” For Asnas “entered into Yosef’s spiritual and moral outlook on life with all her heart and mind.” She raised them to be his children. And so successful – with G-d’s help – was she that “up to this very day, parents bless their children” to be like Efraim and Menashe.
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) – head of the Jewish community in Frankfurt, Germany for over 35 years – was a prolific writer whose ideas, passion, and brilliance helped save German Jewry from the onslaught of modernity.
Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on Chumash.
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