Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Jacob Fathered Two Sets of Twins

Read Genesis 29 and 30 carefully and you'll notice most of the time each child's birth is preceded by an account of that child's conception.  But Chapter 30 has two exceptions to this, Asher in verses 12-13 and Dinah in verse 21.

Now with Dinah it's tempting to say the patriarchal bias of the culture was less interested in detailing her birth, but why record her birth at all given I feel there is later evidence she wasn't Jacob's only daughter?  It could be because she's important later to chapter 34 but David's daughter Tamar didn't need a prior account of her birth.

So I think Gad and Asher the sons of Zilpah were twins, and later so were Zebulun and Dinah who were borne by Leah.

Why not detail their twin births the way Jacob and Esau or Pharez and Zarah were?  Those are narratives about issues complicating who would qualify as the first born.  None of these were eligible to be a paternal first born.  With Zebuln and Dinah we're dealing with possibly Leah's last children, and Zilpah's were going to be kind of counted among Leah's so wouldn't have likely had even a Maternal first born status.  The significance of being a Maternal firstborn isn't about any kind of inheritance.  And regardless if there was no ambiguity on who came out first it wasn't an issue.

Similar logic to what I just argued can be used to say Cain and Abel were twins.  Which of course is a claim that gets used by Serpent Seed theorists but with the intent of saying they didn't have the same father.  The text of Genesis 4:1-2 is if anything the opposite of them on who was definitely fathered by Adam, it directly attributed Cain to Adam more then it does Abel.  I'm certain Abel was also Adam's son however.  I've already refuted the Two Seedline theory.

The births of Joseph's sons, Manasseh and Ephraim are not recorded in a similar manner to these two chapters at all.

Apparently the odds of conceiving twins if you are a twin yourself are not higher for identical twins but are for fraternal twins.  Jacob we know was a Fraternal Twin.  And some rabbinic traditions suggest Leah and Rachel were also twins.

When Mazzaroth theorists are trying to align the Zodiac constellations to the Tribes of Israel, different models get proposed.

The first version I stumbled upon identified Levi and Simeon with Gemini not because of any evidence they were twins but because their role in Genesis 34 can be compared to Castor and Pollux killing Theseus over his abduction of Helen, and because of that incident Levi and Simeon are grouped together in Genesis 49, and Levi had no land allotment or camp surrounding the Tabernacle since Levi had The Tabernacle itself (and Simeon is mysteriously absent from Deuteronomy 33).  If it's Dinah who was a twin that would be interesting, given how Helen is said to be a twin of Clytemnestra.  I have argued for possibly linking Clytemnestra to Athaliah who was a daughter of the house of Omri.  The Tribal identity of the Omrids is never clearly stated in Scripture, but Jezreel was in land originally allotted to Issachar who's often grouped with Zebulun.  Also Omri first appears in the narrative as an army commander of the Issacharite House of Baasha.

I have not seen a version make any of the three sons I have argued could be Twins the Gemini, it seems sometimes Benjamin is Gemeni which I don't get at all.

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