Aseneth and the Honeycomb

Joseph and Aseneth is a fascinating writing, most likely composed in Egypt in the first century BCE. Often considered the world’s first romance novel, it survives both in its original Jewish form, and in several later Christian reworkings. Aseneth and the Honeycomb makes three major contributions to Joseph and Aseneth studies: (1) it examines the details of Aseneth’s encounter with the divine honeycomb and bees in the light of ancient apicultural beliefs and practices, (2) it uses the varying apicultural expertise displayed in the four main textual families to settle the heretofore intractable debate over which family preserves the earliest form of the work, and (3) it proposes a literary solution to a central concern of any attentive reader: the question of why Aseneth’s heavenly visitor calls her a “city of refuge.”