Strata: The Bible in the News: Twins

These days, so the statisticians inform us, one in thirty births (or 3.3 percent) results in twins. It is likely that in Biblical times the birth of twins (to say nothing of triplets, etc.) was a rarer event. Therefore, we should probably not be surprised by the relative paucity of references to twins (identical or fraternal) in the Bible.

As I recall, only two sets of twins are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible: Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25ff) and Peretz and Zerah (Genesis 38:27–30). Both sets—since they involve brothers—can be called fraternal, although that’s not the way the term is used these days.

For the Biblical authors, as for modern mass culture writers, far more attention is paid to Jacob and Esau than to Peretz and Zerah.

In a first group of references, Jacob and Esau, often in tandem with other sets of siblings (twins or not), are presented as bywords of battling boys. So this London Times review of Scott Turow’s Identical: This book “is a tale of twins … Drawing on Greek mythology (Castor and Pollux) and with shades of scripture (Jacob and Esau), Identical is packed with hairpin turns, a rich array of memorable characters and some nail-biting courtroom moments.”