Joseph and His Brothers

Sixteen Years in the Making

Thomas Mann began the first volume of Joseph and His Brothers in 1926 and completed the fourth in 1943. He wrote the work largely in exile — from Germany first, then from Europe entirely, eventually from a house in Pacific Palisades, California, a German writer watching his country destroy itself while retelling the oldest story of exile and redemption in the Western tradition. The four volumes — The Tales of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider — together comprise approximately 1,500 pages and represent, without serious competition, the most sustained act of literary ambition of the twentieth century.

The source material is Genesis, chapters 37 through 50: the story of Jacob’s favourite son, thrown into a pit by his jealous brothers and sold to slave traders, who rises from slavery and imprisonment to become the second most powerful man in Egypt and eventually saves his brothers from famine. Mann’s transformation of this material is fundamental: he treats the biblical narrative not as sacred history but as myth — as a pattern that has always been being lived, that exists in a pre-time that is simultaneously the ancient past and an eternal present. His characters are aware that they are enacting stories that have been told before, that they are playing roles in a drama whose shape they partially know.

This is the novel’s central and most extraordinary idea. When Joseph, thrown into the pit by his brothers, calls up to them, “What have you done? Have you considered what you are doing?” — he is asking not merely the practical question but the mythological one. He knows, or half-knows, that descent into the pit and emergence from it is a pattern that human beings have been living through since before memory. He is simultaneously a young man in terrible danger and a figure in a story that has always been being told.

The Character of Joseph

What prevents this formal audacity from becoming a merely intellectual exercise is Mann’s characterisation of Joseph himself. Joseph is charming, vain, gifted, beloved of his father, and entirely aware of all these things — which makes him, at seventeen, insufferable to his brothers. The novel does not sentimentalize him. His vanity is real, his enjoyment of his own position is real, and his initial obtuseness about how this affects his brothers is rendered with comic precision.

But Joseph is also genuinely exceptional: his intelligence, his gift for narrative and interpretation, his ability to hold together seemingly contradictory truths, his fundamental goodness — these are not generic virtues but specific capacities that Mann renders in granular psychological detail over the course of thousands of pages. By the time we reach the great scene of reconciliation in the final volume — “I am Joseph your brother” — the reader has lived with all the parties to this reunion long enough for the scene to carry its full weight.

Mann’s most remarkable achievement is the texture of ordinary life in which these mythological events are embedded. The world of Canaan, the caravan routes to Egypt, the household of Potiphar, the prison, the court of Pharaoh — all are rendered with the specificity of a historical novelist who has done his research and a literary novelist who knows that documentary detail in the service of character is what makes the past feel inhabited rather than merely described.

The Greatest Biblical Fiction

The question of what makes Joseph and His Brothers the greatest work of biblical fiction in any language is worth attempting. It is not merely the scale, though the scale is part of it — the sustained attention across 1,500 pages generates a kind of intimacy with its world that shorter works cannot achieve. It is not merely the mythological sophistication, though the reading of myth as a structure of recurring human experience is genuinely original.

It is, ultimately, the combination of formal ambition and human warmth that distinguishes the work. Mann is doing something philosophically serious — arguing about the nature of myth, about the relationship between story and experience, about the way human beings understand their lives retrospectively in terms of patterns — while simultaneously telling a story in which we care, deeply, about whether a young man survives his brothers’ jealousy and finds his way to his father’s arms.

Our rating: 4.8/5 — The most ambitious novel of the twentieth century and one of the most rewarding — a work that changes what a reader thinks the novel form is capable of.