“And Pharaoh called Joseph’s name Zaphnath-Paaneah. And he gave him as a wife Asenath, the daughter of Poti-Pherah priest of On. So Joseph went out over all the land of Egypt.” Genesis 41:45 (NKJV)
After a lot of other events, Joseph is now second only to Pharaoh in Egypt. Pharaoh gives him Asenath as a wife. What do we know about her? Her father, Potiphar, was a priest of On. This refers to the town where her father was a priest – the town of On. Her name means gift of the sun god. She was a high-born, aristocratic Egyptian woman.
I have been especially interested in Asenath in the Bible because it was my mother’s middle name. In researching about Asenath in the Bible, I’ve been trying to connect with why my grandparents named my mother after an Egyptian. She is only mentioned in three different verses in the Bible. Genesis 41:45, 41:50, and 46:20.
The first characteristic I noticed is that she was obedient to Pharaoh when he gave her to Joseph. In today’s culture we have difficulty understanding arranged marriages and how little choice a woman had when her father decided who she was to marry. However, in those days, it was very common. Asenath appears to have gone willingly into the marriage arrangement.
Asenath gave birth to two sons by Joseph. Both of their sons’ names have reference to God. Manasseh’s name means that God made Joseph to forget all the hardships he had endured to this point. Ephraim’s name means that God made him fruitful in the land of his affliction (Genesis 41:51-52).
There is a strong possibility that Asenath became a believer in the God of heaven through the witness of Joseph to her. Joseph had been very open to Pharoah and all of Egypt about God and that God was the revealer of the dreams, not anything Joseph had done of himself. However, the Bible does not fill in the details of Asenath’s beliefs about the God of heaven. Maybe it is enough when we see that God allowed her to have two sons and that both of these sons became tribes of Israel the same as all the rest of Isaac’s sons.
The lesson for me is that while I may not understand all the details of any situation, if God impresses me to do something I need to obey wholeheartedly. I may become a witness for others to know God or to get to know Him in a deeper relationship.
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Published on MyBibleRoom.com 1/18/24, 6:00 am