Jacob and His Sons

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Dr. Martin Sicker is a writer and lecturer on the Middle East and Jewish history and religion. His is the author of 32 previous books including The Biblical Creation Narrative; Reading Genesis Politically; The Trials of Abraham; The Ordeals of Isaac and Jacob; Aspects of Jewish Metarational Thought; and The Moral Maxims of the Sages of Israel.