Joseph’s wife Asenath אָֽסְנַת

Who was this woman Asenath (Genesis 41.45) What did she represent?

And Pharaoh called Joseph’s name Zaphnath-paaneah; and he gave him to wife Asenath the daughter of Poti-pherah priest of On. And Joseph went out over all the land of Egypt.

Hugh Nibley had this to say about her:

The most remarkable thesis on the sacred offices of the bee is found in that minor epic which is an integral part of the Abraham cycle, the story of Joseph and Asenath, the wedding of Israel and Egypt. The angel who comes to marry Asenath, the daughter of the High Priest of Heliopolis, to Joseph the son of Jacob, a king and a priest in his own right, first asks her for a honeycomb, which she orders brought from the family estate near the temple. Then he has her go to the pantry and fetch a comb of honey, “white honey like the dew of heaven.”^[1]Joseph and Asenath 16.7. For an English translation, see C. Burchard, trans. Joseph and Aseneth, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth, 2 vols, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, … Continue reading Taking the form of Joseph, the angel sits on the bed with Asenath while he shares bits of honeycomb with her^[2]Joseph and Asenath 16.15., saying, “Blessed are they who will eat of this honey, made by the bees of Paradise. … Whoso eateth thereof will never die. It is the food of heaven.”^[3]16.14. I (Mike Day) see this as the blessing of both fertility and invulnerability given to Asenath. This is a great parallel to Genesis 49.22-26, the blessing given to Joseph by Jacob before he … Continue reading

Having eaten, the bride is told, “The flowers of life will now spring from thy flesh, thy limbs will flourish … fresh strength will fill you, and you will never grow old.”^[4]Joseph and Asenath 16.16. Then the angel rubbed the honeycomb and vast numbers of bees issued forth from it, all white as snow^[5]16.17.; they alit on Asenath, the queen bees gathering on her face and making a honeycomb in her mouth^[6]16.19., of which all the bees ate until the angel dismissed them and they all flew off to heaven.^[7]16.20. There were some bees that would have harmed Asenath, but they had all fallen dead, until the angel stretched his rod over them and said, “Arise and return to your place!” Then all the dead bees were resurrected and flew to the court of the House of Asenath and lived in the garden there.”^[8]16.23. When the angel touched the northern corner of the honeycomb with his forefinger, the mark left by the finger turned to blood.^[9]Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt: The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley: Volume 14: Pearl of Great Price, chapter 12 The Desert Connection, p. 624.

Asenath and her connection to bees

The bee is before all creatures the sponsor, inspiration, and guide of the Great Trek. As a creature of the preexistent or pre-Diluvian world, and all but sole survivor of the great catastrophes that desolated the earth, the bee is first to arrive on the scene and start things going again in the new world. In the first of all migrations, Adam and Eve were accompanied and guided by the bees as they moved from the Garden into the dark outer world. The bees brought with them “the primordial creative divine power”;^[10]Joseph and Asenath 16.14. For an English translation, see C. Burchard, trans. Joseph and Aseneth, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth, 2 vols, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, … Continue reading their honey, “made by the bees of Paradise,” is “the food of heaven.” When our first ancestors were allowed to bring some of their original blessings from Eden with them, Adam bore the olive, vine, date, pomegranate, and nard, but to Eve was given the greatest blessing, for she was accompanied by her friends from the Garden with their honey—the busy bees whose beneficent labors among the plants and trees made it possible to renew the verdure of the former world in their new one. According to one of the oldest Egyptian ritual sources, when they found the earth barren of life after the Flood, the bees got to work restoring the fertility of the woods and fields while busily producing their honey and wax for the benefit of man. They were especially qualified to conduct Adam and Eve into a strange world, because they knew the place from its older times, themselves being the survivors from that other and better age.^[11]Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt: The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley: Volume 14: Pearl of Great Price, chapter 12 The Desert Connection, p. 612.

Deseret

If the earliest traditions of migrations of peoples insist on harping on the bees—and even the Hebrew word for the migrating of the hordes is “Bee-swarms,” zibariah—then Joseph Smith puts us right into the picture. For he has told us not of one but of two separate migrations taking place shortly after the Flood, starting from about the same place, from the Tower, but moving in opposite directions. Both parties toiled through the deserts of a blighted earth under dark and violent skies, moving toward promised lands. And the intimate and peculiar link between the two migrations is the friendly bee. The account of the Jaredite trek makes the bee explicitly the most significant item in the baggage of the host: “… and they did carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honeybee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees.” (Ether 2.3) Why the odd name, why used in the singular, if they took swarms? Here the bee is representative and symbolic as well as real, and recalls the bee leaders and migrating swarms of the Mayan migrations in the book of Chumayel. The Latter-day Saints, ever settling and ever on the move, adopted the bee symbol from the beginning. It caught their imagination, and they saw in it exactly what the ancients did, the example of a society in which “men lived together like bees,” of the authority and order by which they were ruled, and of the industry and organization with which they gathered the sweets of the field and enhanced their growth: in the State of Deseret, “our lovely Deseret,” the beehive symbol was everywhere.^[12]Nibley, 629-630.

Deseret a Land

In the Middle Kingdom it (Deseret) was applied rarely to persons, often to places, and most naturally to a land or country, closely allied to the idea of purity; thus the necropolis of Thebes was called the Land Deseret, not as a graveyard but as a name of good omen, the best possible name. The name was applied to wine, honey (mead), and milk as used in ritual. As a goddess, dsr.t is the Moon’s Eye also a sceptre, an offering-table, and a gate to the beyond.^[13]Nibley, p. 633.

The Essenes, Asenath, and the Latter-day Saint Connection

Of recent years the hitherto exotic name Essene has come into common usage, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which have brought to light the existence of a pious community of desert sectaries whose general way of life can be designated by the generic name of Essene. For there were many such societies throughout the ancient Near East, and the name has been expressly applied to groups in Egypt, Palestine, and Greece, all having in common requirements of chastity and charity in service to God and man.

The word Essene first appears in the works of a poet who served at the court of a Ptolemid Pharaoh, who remarks in his Hymn to Zeus that the god did not become the “Essene” or supreme ruler of the gods by chance, but by merit. Origen, another Alexandrian, informs us that “Essene” means the leader of bees, or, as G.W.H. Lampe puts it, “king i.e., queen bee.“^[14]Geoffrey W.H. Lampe, ed. Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 551. This lexicon is citing Origen, Commentaria in Evangelium Secundum Matthaseus (Commentary on … Continue readingMembers of the society that performed the rites of the ever-virgin Artemis (Paul’s “Diana of the Ephesians”) had to keep pure and unspotted from the world during their year of service, but the high-priest and priestess were vowed to perpetual chastity: “The people of Ephesus call them Essenes,” writes Pausanius. That is not surprising in view of the fact that Artemis was a bee-goddess, whose emblem of the bee was stamped on all the coins of the city.

Philo^[15]Philo (20 BCE – 50 CE) was an important Jewish philosopher whose work influenced early Christians and their interpretations of scripture. Philo viewed the Bible as the source not only of religious … Continue reading compares the Essene societies of Palestine to other such communities in Greece and Persia, and Josephus notes that the Essene community to which he once belonged followed the same order as the Pythagoreans of the West. Jerome, puzzled by the dedication of Christian congregations to the Easter cult of the bee, can only justify it by appealing to the Essenes of Egypt who imitate Deborah (the name means “bee”) in their zeal and gather the honey of Christ. P. Somville has very recently shown that the cult of the Bee-mother was flourishing all around the Mediterranean in prehistoric times, and E. Saillens has argued that trade alone could account for the presence of the same cult all over Europe, though the legends speak of bee-led migrations at the dawn of history, seeking not commerce but refuge from storm and starvation—survival.^[16]For a detailed list of Nibley’s extensive source materials, see Abraham in Egypt, pages 647.

What ties it all together is Asenath, the Queen of the Deseret hive, then and now, as the mother of Ephraim and Manasseh by Joseph, whom she married in the midst of a swarm of bees, bringing her honey and covering her person to do her reverence. Her name is generally explained today as “meaning in Egyptian ‘she who belongs to, or is the servant of [the goddess] Neith,” Neith being the primal Bee-mother of the Egyptians. There are other derivations, but since the root-meaning of Essen is unknown [Syr. asan to gather food supplies, Aram. asya, asyyna, etc., all meaning to cure, heal, revive, associated by Brockelman with “Essene, Therapeut“], it is not too much to suggest a connection between Essen, Asse, and Asen-ath, the final-ath being the universal Semitic (and Egyptian) fem. singular ending; Asenath herself was undeniably the queen-bee when she married Joseph.

Why has the bee been brought back to our consciousness among the more exotic baggage of the Restored Gospel? The most likely explanation is the least appealing one. Repeated echoes from the remote past keep reminding us that the office and calling of the bee was to bring about the stirrings of life, reviving the biological cycle in a world that had been totally ravaged by cosmic forces of destruction. Is, then, Deseret waiting in the wings, held in reserve against the day, soon to come, when its salutary services will be required again?

From the first the symbol of the bee captivated the imagination of the Latter-day Saints in their migrations and their settlements; the emblematic hive became the seal of the Territory and State and adorned every important edifice within the vast expanse of “our lovely Deseret.” Finally, by what strange coincidence does the History of the Church end with the sign of the bee? After the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, “the bodies … were removed … at Emma’s request, to near the Mansion house, and buried side by side, and the bee house was then moved and placed over their graves.”^[17]Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, pages 635-638.

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