The Family of Israel in Genesis

Moving from the origins of the world at large in Genesis 1–11, the biblical account focuses on the origins of Israel. First to appear is Abraham, to whom God promised the land of Canaan and the progeny that would ultimately become the nation of Israel. God’s promise is not easily fulfilled but is threatened by episodes of famine, childlessness, and family strife during the lives of Abraham and his wife Sarah. The narrative continues through the stories about Isaac and Jacob, and their wives, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, and about Joseph and his brothers. Jacob is the progenitor of the twelve tribes, the nucleus of what will become the people of Israel. The ancestors’ movement in and out of Canaan culminates in the Joseph story, when the entire family of Jacob settles in Egypt. The sustained focus on life and relations within the family in the formative generations of the nation, as distinct from the heroic battles of epic literature, is one of the notable features of these narratives.

Modern scholars differ widely in their assessment of the accuracy of the biblical account, particularly its portrayal of the earliest periods of Israelite history. Nothing that the Bible says about Israel’s earliest ancestors, the patriarchs and matriarchs, can be confirmed by evidence from outside the Bible. Although this does not prove that they did not exist, some of the stories about them contain anachronisms indicating that the stories originated long after the time of the Bible’s “patriarchal/matriarchal period” in the Bronze Age. For example, Beersheba, the scene of some events, was founded only later, in the Iron Age, and the Philistines, with whom the patriarchs supposedly interacted, did not arrive in Canaan until the Iron Age. Other details are clearly legendary, such as angels visiting Abraham and Sarah’s giving birth to Isaac at the age of ninety. In addition, the schematic portrayal of all Israelites as descended from Abraham and Sarah is not realistic. Some scholars argue that the Israelites originated as an amalgam of diverse groups, including the Israelites mentioned in the stela of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah and pastoral nomads from Canaan and Transjordan and other parts of the southern Levant, as well as displaced urban Canaanites.