Interrupting the Cycle of Violence Without Forgiveness? The Story of Joseph in the Bible and Early Jewish Literature

This paper critically examines practices that follow violence in the Bible and early Jewish literature. It focuses on the story of Joseph, often read in different faith communities and in scholarship as a narrative of forgiveness. I analyze the story as it is told in the Hebrew Bible and in one of its late antique reinterpretations, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. These texts illustrate different ways of interrupting the cycle of violence. In contrast with modern conceptions, interpersonal forgiveness and reconciliation are absent (also Konstan, Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea, Cambridge University Press, 2010; Morgan, Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness in Ancient Judaism. In Ancient Forgiveness, ed. Charles L. Griswold and David Konstan, 137–157, Cambridge University Press, 2012). Instead, the texts describe other kinds of techniques, such as a complex set of role plays or reenactments in the Hebrew Bible and an inner softening of the self in the Testaments.