GEN1601 Joseph, as the Talmud imagines, might have been seduced by Potiphar’s wife, but for the appearance at the crucial moment of his dead parents’ image at the window.   Why, then, does Joseph’s chastity remain his own? Because it was he who chose to heed the message that he and he alone could see encoded in his mother’s eyes and hear articulated from his father’s lips.  According to the midrash B. Sotah 36b, Jacob appealed to Joseph’s sense of history and destiny; immediately, “his bow abode in strength” [this verse], that is, his lust abated.  But even in this ancient homily Joseph was cautioned, not unmanned.   What the apparition offered him was a choice – inscription of his name on the ephod of the High Priests of its erasure from the stone reserved for it, his virtue blotted out by his dissoluteness, his memory preserved only as a whoremaster Proverbs 29:3.   The cautionary vision clarified Joseph’s choice against a backdrop larger than history – but it did not make his choice for him.   JHRHV 20-1