Jacob and His Sons. The End of the Patriarchal Era

The sagas of Jacob and his sons are presented in the biblical book of Genesis in a series of sometimes seemingly unrelated episodes. In this book, the author undertakes to show that these episodes are all intimately connected and were selected to illustrate the problems faced by Jacob in coping with the sibling rivalries among his dozen sons and welding them into a collective body capable of giving birth to a nation. The focus in Jacob and His Sons is on what the biblical text is telling us, explicitly as well as implicitly, about the world in which they lived and how the historical conditions came into being for them ultimately to become transformed into a nation. In the struggle to comprehend the biblical text, the author has consulted a wide range of commentaries and studies written over a period of some two millennia that have sought to understand the biblical texts from a wide variety of perspectives, many of which are presented for the reader's consideration, including many sources inaccessible to those without a working knowledge of Hebrew.