The Oxford History of the Biblical World by Michael D. Coogan Page A

arise, is taken into the harem of the Egyptian pharaoh, and Abraham nearly loses her. But God intervenes and returns Sarah to her husband. In Genesis 13, a threat to the promise of the land arises when Abraham and his nephew Lot come in conflict over where they are going to pasture their enormous flocks. Abraham allows Lot to choose which part of the land he wishes to take. Were Lot to select the area of Canaan that God had pledged to Abraham, the promise would be void. Lot, however, prefers the land east of the Jordan River to the region that will eventually become Israel.
    The birth of the promised heir also falls into doubt. As Abraham and Sarah age and Sarah remains childless, she gives her husband her maidservant Hagar as a surrogate wife to bear a child. But this son, Ishmael, is not the child of the promise. Finally, Sarah, at the advanced age of ninety, conceives and gives birth to Isaac, the divinely designated heir.
    Few traditions about Isaac are preserved in the narratives. Most of the stories of Isaac present him as a character secondary to the main protagonists, who are either his father, Abraham, or his sons, Jacob and Esau. The only narratives in which Isaac does play the primary role (Gen. 26) virtually duplicate stories told earlier about Abraham. For the most part these quasi-reruns reiterate themes found in the Abraham cycle.
    Isaac and his wife Rebekah have twin sons, Jacob and Esau. The brothers are intense rivals. Jacob, the younger, usually gets the best of the dull-witted Esau, trickinghim into selling his birthright (Gen. 25.29–34) and stealing his firstborn’s blessing from their blind father (27.1–40). Eventually Jacob must flee to avoid the anger of Esau, and so he sets out for Haran in northern Syria. There he meets his extended family and marries his uncle’s two daughters, Leah and Rachel (Gen. 29).
    Although portraying Abraham as the ultimate father of Israel, the tradition reserves to Jacob the honor of giving the nation its name and its twelvefold tribal makeup. There are, in fact, two stories in which God changes Jacob’s name to Israel (Gen. 32.22–32 and 35.9–15), and, in Genesis 29.31–30.24 and 35.16–18, Jacob sires twelve sons, who become the eponymous ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel.
    Beginning in Genesis 37, the focus of the story shifts to the sons of Jacob/Israel, and especially to Joseph, the beloved son by Rachel. But more than just the subject is changed; there is a noticeable difference in the literary and thematic style of the Joseph story compared to the preceding narratives. Whereas the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are made up of loosely connected episodes, often independent of one another, the Joseph story is intricately plotted and complex. With the exception of the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 (clearly an intrusion), no episode between chapters 37 and 45 can be dropped easily without creating a hole in the plot. Here we have a finely crafted narrative with detailed plot and character development, the story of how Joseph was sold into Egyptian slavery by his jealous brothers, only to rise to high position in the government of the pharaoh. When a famine strikes Canaan, Joseph, after testing whether his brothers have matured over the twenty years since they sold him, brings his entire family to Egypt and settles them in the eastern Nile Delta.
    All these ancestral narratives act as a prologue to the epic story of Israel’s emergence as a nation that begins in the book of Exodus. God’s two promises, that he would make the descendants of Abraham a great nation and that he would give them the land of Canaan, move toward fulfillment in the books of Exodus through Joshua.
    There are many reasons to be skeptical of these narratives as historically accurate accounts of the lives of Israel’s progenitors. Indications within the narratives suggest that they had a substantial prehistory as oral literature. Modern studies of oral transmission