part0059

T he founders of ancient Israel were Abraham, his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob, collectively known as the Patriarchs. Jacob, who on two occasions changed his name to Israel, had twelve male children, the most important of whom were Joseph and Judah, and each of the sons founded one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

The story of the Patriarchs begins with a call by God to Abraham (initially called Abram) to leave the anachronistically named city of “Ur of the Chaldees” in Mesopotamia and go to Canaan: “In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:” (Gen. 15:18).

The primary purpose of the patriarchal history is to trace the transmittal of this covenant from generation to generation. While Genesis frequently says or implies that the covenant passed from Jacob to Joseph, and then from Joseph to his son Ephraim, in a portion of the story known as the Blessing of Jacob, there is an indication that the covenant passed into the hands of Judah. This inconsistency, one of many, shows how the later feuds between the kingdom of Israel (under the leadership of Ephraim) and the kingdom of Judah heavily influenced the telling of the patriarchal history.

Biblical chronology places the patriarchal period in approximately the first half of the second millennium B.C. but we have no direct contemporaneous proof in the historical record for the existence of either the Patriarchs or the twelve sons of Israel. Many of the places and relatives of Abraham, however, have names that point to the first millennium B.C. as the time in which the stories were written. Everything we know about the Patriarchs and their families comes from either the Book of Genesis or folk tales and legends.

When Abraham was seventy-five he brought his wife Sarah (initially called Sarai) and his nephew Lot from Mesopotamia to Canaan. When they arrived, they found the land engulfed by famine and continued on to Egypt.

In Egypt, Abraham feared that the pharaoh would have him put to death in order to take his beautiful Sarah as a royal wife. So Sarah pretended to be Abraham’s sister and she became a member of the royal court. Despite the Pharaoh’s lack of knowledge about Sarah’s marital state, God brought down a series of plagues to punish the Egyptian monarch for his indiscretions with Abraham’s wife, and when the king learned the truth, he returned Sarah to her husband, gave Abraham great wealth in repayment, and ordered him and his family out of the country.

Abraham returned to Canaan and, when he arrived there, determined that the land where he settled was not large enough to support both him and his nephew Lot. So he gave Lot first choice of land and agreed to take what was left. Lot looked about and decided to cross over into the Transjordan, the territory east of the Jordan River, where he settled in at the city of Sodom. Abraham remained on the Canaanite side of the Jordan.

Sodom had become a city known for evil and corruption and God decided to destroy it. But Abraham intervened and God agreed to leave it alone if it contained ten honest men living within. Two angels went to scout the place out and, in disguise, received hospitality from Lot. After an attack on Lot’s guests by the citizens of the town, the angels determined that Sodom failed God’s test and gave warning to Lot to leave without looking back. Lot’s wife couldn’t help herself, though, and turned around to see what was happening. As a consequence, she was transformed into a pillar of salt. Lot’s two daughters thought they and their father were the last people left on the earth and, in order to preserve the race, the daughters became pregnant by Lot. The children born of those unions became the ancestors of the people of Moab and Ammon, two nations that didn’t exist until long after the patriarchal period.

In Canaan, as in Egypt, Abraham again encountered a monarch who he thought would kill him in order to take Sarah as a wife. So again they pretended to be brother and sister. Many years later, his son Isaac had a similar experience in the same city, with a monarch having the same name.

When Abraham reached the age of eighty-seven, Sarah allowed her handmaiden, Hagar the Egyptian woman, to have a son by Abraham to provide an heir. Hagar gave birth to Ishmael. Abraham loved Ishmael but God told him that Sarah would have a child when she reached the age of ninety and this child would be heir to the covenant. As a consolation, he told Abraham that his older son would also be the founder of a nation. Ishmael became the ancestor of the biblical Ishmeelites, who in turn were identified with the ancient Arab people. Abraham thought the idea of a child so late in life was quite amusing and laughed heartily. When the son was born Abraham named him Isaac, which in Hebrew means, “he laughed.”

Isaac married Rebecca and she became the mother of twin sons, Jacob and Esau. During her pregnancy the children struggled in the womb over who would be first born. Then God told her, “Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23).

Esau emerged first and by tradition should have been heir to the covenant, but Jacob, with the help of his mother, tricked his father and cheated his brother out of the covenant. The younger son became the founder of the House of Israel and Esau became the father of the Edomites. Jacob’s brother was furious over the deception and vowed to kill him after the period of mourning ended. Jacob decided that the smart thing to do was flee north to Syria and live with relatives.

In Syria, Jacob acquired two wives and two concubines by whom he had twelve sons and a daughter. The two wives were sisters, Leah and Rachel, and the two concubines were Zilpah and Bilhah, handmaidens to the two sisters. Jacob loved Rachel most and she bore him the two youngest and favorite sons, Joseph and Benjamin. Leah had six sons, among whom was Judah, and a daughter named Dinah. The two handmaids had two children each.

The territories associated with each of the children in the tribal allotments have some geographic connection to the order of birth, the matriarchal divisions, and political relationships among the various factions.

The first four children born, sons of Leah, correspond to the four southernmost tribes in the full Israelite confederation. Reuben lay at the southern portion of the Jordanian side and Simeon encompassed the southern portion of the Canaanite side. Judah stood on the northern boundary of Simeon and became the political center of the united monarchy and later of the southern kingdom of Judah. Levi, although distributed throughout the other territories, had its political center within Judah at Jerusalem (after Judah took Jerusalem away from Benjamin).

Rachel had only two children, Joseph and Benjamin. The tribe of Joseph’s separated into two parts, one for each of his sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. The territory of Ephraim led the opposition against Judah’s domination over Israel and, after Solomon’s death, it became the political center of the northern kingdom of Israel. Manasseh became the largest territory in the kingdom, part in Canaan and part in Jordan. The Bible often describes each of the two pieces as the half-tribe of Manasseh.

Benjamin, Rachel’s other son, held the territory between Judah and Ephraim and included the city of Jerusalem. Saul, the first king of the united monarchy, came from Benjamin.

Together, the Rachel tribes correspond geographically to the central portion of the House of Israel and the southern half of the northern kingdom. At some point, Jerusalem became the capital of Judah and the physical status of Benjamin became ambiguous, probably because Judah obliterated it.

The organization of the main Leah tribes in the south and the Rachel tribes in the center reflects the later political divisions between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Five of the six remaining lesser tribes—Dan, Naphtali, Asher, Issachar, and Zebulun—occupied the northern portion of Canaan, above the Rachel tribes. The sixth—Gad—occupied the central portion of Jordan, between Reuben and Manasseh.

Curiously, the Bible provides little anecdotal information about the sons of Jacob. With the exception of Joseph and Leah’s four oldest children, we have little more than a birth order and a couple of blessings describing their nature. For Leah’s first four children, the few stories we have are mostly brief and negative, reflecting the later political factionalism between Judah and Israel. Only for Joseph do we have a full-blown epic.

Joseph had the gift of prophecy and told of dreams that indicated he would become the head of the family. His brothers hated him and they secretly sold him into slavery, telling their father that a wild animal had devoured him. Through God’s intervention, however, Joseph rose from servitude to become Prime Minister of Egypt.

In the course of a famine in Canaan, Jacob sent his children to Egypt to buy grain. When they appeared before the royal court, Joseph recognized his brothers, but they didn’t recognize him. This gave Joseph an opportunity to put them through a number of tests to determine their nature and character. After he was satisfied that they had redeemed themselves, he revealed his identity and forgave them. Jacob, joyous at learning that Joseph lived, moved the family to Egypt where the pharaoh gave them a land allotment.

Joseph had married the daughter of the chief priest of Heliopolis, one of the chief cult centers in Egypt, and he had two children by her, Manasseh and Ephraim. Joseph expected that Manasseh, the older of the two, would become heir to the covenant, but Jacob passed it on to Ephraim.

Jacob adopted both children as if they were his own sons, and during the Canaanite conquest each received territorial allotments, giving the tribe of Joseph a double portion. At the same time that Joseph received two portions, Levi, the priestly tribe, received no territory of its own. Instead, it had enclaves within the other tribal allotments. This meant that there were thirteen tribes with twelve land allotments, causing some confusion over which tribes constituted the Twelve Tribes. Traditionally, when referring to the House of Israel as a unified entity, the Twelve Tribes include Levi and count Joseph as one tribe, but when describing Israel on the basis of territorial distribution, Levi is omitted and Joseph counts as two tribes.

Archaeologically, we have no evidence for the existence of either Jacob or his sons or the tribes associated with his sons. Nor do we have any extra-biblical evidence for the existence of the tribes at any later date. At best, we have occasional place names, but place names provide no reliable proof for the existence of eponymous ancestors.

In the time of Solomon, according to the Bible, tribal boundaries were eliminated and replaced by twelve new administrative districts, probably to reduce the influence of the Ephramite opposition to Solomon’s rule. When Solomon died, Israel split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. The Bible presents a confusing picture about which tribes belonged to which kingdom, raising some serious questions about whether there ever was such an entity as the Twelve Tribes. Some portions of the Bible, especially the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges, cast substantial doubt on whether all the tribes can be traced to a common ancestor.

This is not to say that some sort of Israelite confederation didn’t exist or that at some point in time it didn’t consist of twelve political entities. The evidence, however, is that whatever these political entities were, they did not spring from a common patriarchal relationship.

While it used to be almost universally taken for granted that the Patriarchs and the sons of Israel where historical figures and that Genesis mixed some basic historical truths with a variety of legends, a growing segment of the scholarly community now accepts that the patriarchal stories may have no historical core at all.

At the same time, while the J, E, and P sources frequently can be separated from each other, they also seem to share some common traditions and themes from earlier sources. Often, the differences involve only a matter of emphasis or tinkering with details, such as where an event occurred. In this part of the book, we will look at a number of the stories in the patriarchal and tribal history and show the mythological sources that lay behind them. One of the most important of these sources was the Egyptian Osiris cycle, which provided a significant literary framework for both the patriarchal history and the later stories about the Exodus. For a more expansive and detailed look at how the Osiris myths influenced the patriarchal and Exodus histories, see my earlier work, The Bible Myth .

The Osiris cycle formed the core of Egypt’s most important religious beliefs, particularly about the afterlife. The cycle can be divided into two portions. The first concerns the stories about how the god Set killed his brother Osiris in order to become king of Egypt; the second concerns the efforts of Set to stop Osiris’s son Horus from succeeding his father to the throne. The two portions probably originated as separate and independent myths.

In the first part of the cycle, Osiris (who originally signified the grain) married his sister Isis and became king of Egypt when the god Geb (the earth) stepped down and gave Osiris the crown. Set, brother to Osiris and Isis, wanted to be king, plotted to kill his brother, and successfully carried out his mission. After killing him, he hacked the body into pieces and buried the parts around the country (the planting of seed). Isis sought to recover all the parts of her husband’s body (harvest the crop) and found everything but the penis (the original seed before it sprouted into grain), which she reconstructed through some form of magic (the new seed within the grain).Through Isis’s help, Osiris survived his death but only in the form of an afterlife. Despite this condition, he fathered a child with Isis and the child was named Horus.

In the second part of the cycle, Isis hid Horus away to keep Set from finding him and when the child reached adulthood he returned to avenge his father’s murder. After a series of contests and conflicts, Horus defeated Set and his allies and became king of Egypt.

Egyptians believed that all kings were a form of Horus and that when the king died he became Osiris and the new king became the new Horus. Osiris served as judge of the afterlife, determining who could cross over and who couldn’t. In theory, when a king died, the Osiris that judged him was the previous king, who should have been the newly deceased king’s biological father.

There is no canonical version of the Osiris cycle. For the most part, it is pieced together from numerous inscriptions and verses in a variety of texts. Many contradictions exist but the broad themes of the story remain consistent. There is, however, a collection of stories known as The Contendings of Horus and Set , dating to about the twelfth century B.C. but based on long-standing traditions, which details numerous incidents in the struggles between Horus and Set. We also have a Greek version of the Osiris myth from Plutarch (c. first century A.D.) which, though somewhat Hellenized and modified to reflect some Greek ideas, still preserves many of the basic traditions that go back more than two millennia.

Overlaying the Osiris cycle is some confusion by the Egyptians as to the identity of Horus and Set. The Egyptians recognized at least three major Horus deities, each with separate characteristics, and the Egyptians tended to merge them into a single character. The Horus born to Isis was known as both Horus the Child and Horus the Son of Isis. The son of Isis was born lame and struggled in the womb with Set. A third Horus, known as Horus the Elder, was also brother to Osiris and Set but he was born before Set and fought with him constantly. Plutarch’s account has appearances by all three Horuses, each in a separate identity.

The god Set also had two inconsistent identities merged into one character. The one Set defended Re against Aphophis, the serpent that tried to devour the sun at the end of the day; the other was thought to be Aphophis. One of the main images of Set in Egyptian art shows him as a red-haired donkey-like beast and on many occasions reddish donkeys were symbolically identified with Set. In The Contendings of Horus and Set , the red-haired deity appears as the defender of Re and he is Re’s favorite to succeed Osiris. Isis, however, supports the claim of her son Horus and uses trickery and magic to aid the child.

As we look at the patriarchal history, we will see, just as we did with the Creation myths, that while the biblical editors transformed gods into humans to eliminate the image of the underlying deity, they occasionally forgot to remove some of the physical characteristics that belonged to the original deity.