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' suggestion that she marry the Hebrew Joseph. Once she sees him, however, she is struck to the heart by his appearance and repents 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 interpretive key to them, and none has yet been successfully put forward by scholars. Some of the symbols may reflect the appropriation of sun god symbols to a Jewish context, perhaps

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