Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

Dave Washburn:

You say there is no evidence for the connection with Shechem. I said 
that the association with Joseph is itself evidence, but you ignored 
this. More specifically, the context concerns the political ascendancy 
of Ephraim.

Other evidence can be adduced if one accepts that the texts were written 
by different authors. You give a lot of weight to the requirement of 
consistency with other texts about Jacob. It would be more convincing if 
there were another text about Jacob's military activities.

But in any case I don't believe that the text in question is primarily 
historical. We are dealing with personifications of the political 
realities of a certain era -- an era, I would guess, in which Schechem 
was still pre-eminent, and there was a memory of its pre-Israelite status.

Gabe Eisenstein