The Marriage and Conversion of Aseneth (also called Joseph and
Aseneth) sweeps the reader up more effectively than do many of
the other texts in this volume. There are two great movements
in the plot, one contained inside the other. The story begins
and ends as a romance of Joseph and Aseneth and includes the
conflicts that arise between Joseph and his brothers and also
within Pharaoh's royal house. Aseneth is a wealthy Egyptian
woman of marriageable age, who rebuffs her parents' sugges-
tion that she marry the Hebrew Joseph. Once she sees him,
however, she is struck to the heart by his appearance and re-
pents of ever having scorned him. This much is similar to the
contemporary Greek novels, where “lovesickness” is often the
motif that begins the narrative. In the middle section of this
novel, however, the typical romance elements of wealth and
class become fantastic and heavily laden with symbols. Aseneth
lives in her tower and has never been seen by a man. Her tower
consists of ten rooms, and she is waited on by seven virgins
born on the same night as she. Her family's compound has four
gates, beautiful fruit trees, and a spring that flows into a stream
running through the courtyard. Such symbolic descriptions
overwhelm the reader in this section, but there is no clear in-
terpretive key to them, and none has yet been successfully put
forward by scholars. Some of the symbols may reflect the ap-
propriation of sun god symbols to a Jewish context, perhaps

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