Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Yigal:

It is not that I ignore “the way in which the genealogical genre works”, 
rather I question if Israel followed that genre. It is how I understand the 
rest of Tanakh that makes me say that this is not following the genealogy 
genre as practiced by other tribes. In one way this is similar to the 
genealogical genre, in that it traces the genealogies, then goes back to the 
source, yet in another way it is not in that real people are named as the 
leader for that generation, and for no other reason. And while two people 
sharing the same name is rare in Tanakh, it is not unheard of, so there is no 
reason to assume that BRY(H, the son of )PRYM is the same as BR(H the 
descendent of BNYMN [were they even pronounced the same way? Two millennia is 
a long time to remember pronunciation]. )$R also had a son with the same name 
[ Genesis 46:17 ], are they then all the same person?

Verse 21 mentions the “men of Gath born in the land”—born in which land? If 
they were born in Gath, why mention that at all? But if born in a different 
land, in this case I read it as Egypt, but still self-identifying themselves 
as men of Gath, that fits this verse.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>

> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
> 
> 
> > Yigal:
> >
> > You are making assumptions that the text doesn't necessarily support.
> >
> > For example, in verse 21, which land? Any reason why it couldn't have been
> Egypt? When were Ephraim's sons killed, after at least one of them had
> children and his children named for several generations? And while the text
> mentions the daughter building three towns, is there any reason to suggest
> that they were other than small settlements only for as long as Israel was
> in Egypt, hence were not mentioned in Egyptian records?
> >
> > Karl W. Randolph.
> >
> 
> Karl, you are totally ignoring the way in which the genealogical genre
> works. Segmented genealogies often take one branch down for several
> generations and then go back to the "stem". In this case, of course,
> Beth-horon is in Israel, right on the border of Ephraim's territory - so why
> claim that it is "another" unknown Beth-horon. As for Gath, as you know,
> there where several towns by that name. Note that in 1 Chr. 8:13, Beriah,
> this time a descendant of Benjamin, is also associated with a war against
> Gath. Since this is not a "different" Beriah, I'd look for Gath somewhere on
> the border between Ephraim and Benjamin - I can think of who in the general
> area of the Aialon Valley: Gath-rimmon and Gath-gittaim. B. Mazar and others
> have dealt widely with both.
> Notice that Beriah is also a son of Asher, in 1 Chr. 7:30, but also in Gen.
> 46:17 and Num. 26:44. Now while Asher is usually seen as a northern tribe,
> note that here, Beriah's sister, Serah, has the same name as the town in
> Ephraim in which Joshua, an Ephraimite, was buried, Timnath-serah/heres.
> Also note that Beriah's grandson, Birzaith, is the same as a town in
> Ephraimite territory (Birzeit, near today's Ramallah). Several others of his
> descendants also have names similar to towns and regions along the
> Benjamin-Ephraim border.
> Since I (and many others) see the genealogies as NOT being intended to
> represent "real people" but rather eponyms of tribes, clans and phratries,
> and the Chronicler's genealogies being a composite of several different
> traditions from different times, I read this as meaning that at one time,
> the Beriah branch of Asher lived in the central hill country. As Ephraim and
> Benjamin spread into the area, maybe after a war with the "native" Githites,
> some clans of this group married into these tribes, reflected in their
> secondary and tertiary position in their genealogies. Once again, this has
> been widely discussed in scholarly literature.
> 
> Yigal
-- 
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