Bible Review

“The sons of Reuben the first-born of Israel (for he was the first-born; but because he polluted his father’s couch, his birthright was given to the sons of Joseph the son of Israel, so that he is not enrolled in the genealogy according to the birthright; though Judah became strong among his brothers and a prince was from him, yet the birthright belonged to Joseph)…” (1 Chronicles 5:1–2).

Cross, “Reuben, First-born of Jacob.”

I have discussed these conflict stories in detail and their origin in the conflict between two priestly houses in the chapter, “The Priestly Houses of Early Israel,” in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, pp. 193–215.

For a brief exposition of my analysis of the so-called Epic sources, JE, see Cross, “The Epic Traditions of Early Israel: Epic Narrative and the Reconstruction of Early Israelite Institutions,” in The Poet and the Historian, ed. Richard E. Friedman, Harvard Semitic Studies 26 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), pp. 13–39.

See the Priestly portions of Numbers 25 [Numbers 25:6–18] and Numbers 31.

For the date of early Portions of the hymn, and the translation I quote below, see Theodore Hiebert, God of My Victory: the Ancient Hymn in Habakkuk 3, Harvard Semitic Monographs 38 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986).

See S.M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, transl. J. Crookenden (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), esp. p. 152, who asserts that “confederations” among nomads “in all circumstances…emerge for military-political reasons.”

One need only examine the problems of fragments of tradition in Judges 1.

See Israel Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988).

For those interested in reading more, there is a new, magisterial edition of these letters by William L. Moran, Les lettres d’El Amarna, transl. Dominique Collon and Henri Cazelles (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1987). See now, The Amarna Letters, ed. Moran (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992).