Hershel Shanks: I have heard you speak of Israelite origins but I have not seen in print your belief that the Israelites came out of Egypt and traveled to Canaan via Saudi Arabia. Is that correct?
Frank Moore Cross: [Laughter] You have an uncanny ability to put matters in the most provocative way possible. I should not express myself in the words you have chosen. Let me put my views in words. The land of Midian played an important role in ancient Israelite history, in Israelite origins. The Midianites were West Semites and probably spoke a North West Semitic dialect. The role of the priest of Midian is most extraordinary in Epic tradition,a particularly in view of later tradition, which treats the Midianites as an intractable enemy.
HS: Jethro?
FMC: Yes. Moses married his daughter (Exodus 2:15–22). The priestly offspring of Moses were thus half Israelite, half Midianite according to tradition. This too is extraordinary, and the fact that the tradition was preserved demands explanation.
Although Midian plays a major role in the early traditions of Moses’ life and labors, the Midianites later play a strangely sinister role in other traditions. In priestly lore the Midianites are archenemies who led Israel into gross sin (Numbers 25 and 31). On the other hand, Epic tradition makes Israel’s judiciary the creation of the priest of Midian (Exodus 18:14–27). And an old tradition records that the priest of Midian made sacrifices and joined in a communal feast with Aaron, mirabile dictu, and the elders of Israel (Exodus 18:12).
These bizarre traditions, one might say 024gratuitous traditions, gave rise to the so-called Midianite hypothesis. A major proponent of this hypothesis was the great German historian Eduard Meyer whose Geschichte des Altertums [History of Antiquity]2 is one of the major monuments of ancient Near Eastern scholarship. Scholars in his camp proposed that the god Yahweh was a Midianite deity, patron of a Midianite league with which elements of Israel, including Moses, were associated in the south, and in Transjordan, before Israel’s entry into the Promised Land. So, in part, Israel’s religious origins may be traced to Midian. New evidence has accumulated since Eduard Meyer and his followers sketched the Midianite hypothesis, and I believe we can now propose a new and more detailed Midianite hypothesis.
HS: Where is Midian?
FMC: Midian proper bordered Edom on the south and probably occupied part of the area that became southern Edom in what is now southern Transjordan. It also included the northwestern corner of the Hejaz; it is a land of formidable mountains as well as desert.
HS: In Saudi Arabia?
FMC: Yes. It is in the northwestern border area of what is now Saudi Arabia. I prefer to refer to it by the biblical term “Midian.” Incidentally the Saudis will not permit excavation in this area despite efforts that Peter Parr and I conducted some years ago on behalf of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the British School of Archaeology.
HS: Isn’t Midian traditionally placed in Sinai?
FMC: I should say rather that Sinai is placed in Midian.
HS: Are you saying that all scholars agree that Midian is south of the Jordanian-Saudi border?
FMC: I cannot say categorically all, but the consensus is that ancient Midian was south of Eilat on the Saudi side. Note too that tradition holds that the Midianites controlled routes north through Edom and Moab very much like the later Nabateans, and that Midian in Israel’s earliest poetry is associated with Edom, Mt. Seir and Teman.
The notion that the “mountain of God” called Sinai and Horeb was located in what we now call the Sinai Peninsula has no older tradition supporting it than Byzantine times. It is one of the many holy places created for pilgrims in the Byzantine period.
HS: In the fourth century?
FMC: Yes.
HS: So you would place Sinai in what is today Saudi Arabia?
FMC: You haven’t forgotten your skills in cross- (or Cross-) examination. Yes, in the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia, ancient Midian. There is 025new evidence favoring this identification. In the late 1960s and 1970s when Israel controlled the Sinai Peninsula, especially in the period shortly before it was returned to Egypt, the peninsula was explored systematically and intensely by archaeologists. What they found for the 13th to 12th centuries B.C.E.,b the era of Moses and Israel’s entry into Canaan, was an archaeological blank save for Egyptian mining sites at Serabit el-Khadem and Timna (see photos of artifacts from Serabit el-Khadem and Timna) near Eilat. There was no evidence of settled occupation to be found. This proved true even at the site generally identified with Kadesh-Barnea (‘Ein Qudeirat). It was not occupied until the tenth century B.C.E at the earliest, and its fortress was constructed only in the ninth century.c
On the other hand, recent surveys of Midian have produced surprising discoveries of a developed civilization in precisely the period in question, the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, the 13th to 12th centuries.3 At Qurayyah archaeologists discovered a major fortified citadel, a walled village and extensive irrigation works (see photo of citadel at Qurayyah). Characteristic pottery called Midianite ware—usually called Hejaz ware in Saudi journals—radiates out from the northern Hejaz into southern Transjordan and sites near Eilat, notably Timna. Extraordinarily enough, it is absent from the Sinai. In short we have a blank Sinai and a thriving culture in Midian in this era.
Biblical traditions preserve much Midianite lore. At the end of his life Moses is described as going 026north into the district of Mt. Nebo and Mt. Peor in Transjordan. Both an Epic source and the Priestly source in the Balaam cycle in the Book of Numbers record traditions of Midianite presence in this area. Evidently they exercised at least commercial hegemony, controlling the newly developed incense trade. In Israelite sources, this area of Transjordan was assigned to Reuben, but was early lost Moab, and is often called the “plains of Moab” in the Bible. We know from the ninth-century [B.C.E.] Mesha Steled (see photo of Mesha Stele) that there was a sanctuary in the city of Nebo.4 Moses was buried in this valley. Balaam delivered his oracles (Numbers 23:28), we are told, from Mt. Peor; and the notorious orgy in which there was coupling with Midianite women (Numbers 25:1–5) has its locus here as well.
HS: Are you placing Nebo where it is traditionally placed?
FMC: Mt. Nebo, yes. The city of Nebo I have shifted from the Byzantine site on the south of the mountain to an early Iron Age site that is right in heart of the valley over against Mt. Peor.
I think it is fair to say that we can trace a cycle of Midianite lore from the locale of the mountain of God in Midian, and northward to Reuben. The Book of Deuteronomy places Moses’ second giving of the law [Deuteronomy 4:44 through chapter 26] and the renewal of the covenant of the tribes in Reuben [Deuteronomy 29–31]. We are told too that it was in this same district that the rallying of the militia took place and the entry into the Promised Land was launched [Joshua 2–4]: “O my people, remember…what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,” as Micah reminds us [Micah 6:5].
HS: Can you trace the route? The Exodus route would have to go across Sinai, wouldn’t it, if you are leaving Egypt.
FMC: At best we can only speculate. A mountain of paper has been expended in attempting to locate the stations of the Exodus in Numbers 33. There are almost as many views as there are scholars. One of the most persuasive treatments I know is Martin Noth’s.5 He argues that underlying the Priestly document (and the list of stations in Deuteronomy 10:6–7) was a list of pilgrimage stations from Reuben to Midian, secondarily supplemented to cross to Egypt. Pilgrimages to the southern mountain are reflected in the narrative of Elijah’s journey to Sinai. The small site of Kuntillet ‘Ajrude (see photo of Kuntillet ‘Ajrud), from the late ninth century B.C.E., is probably a pilgrimage station on the way to Eilat and south. Pilgrim texts mention “Yahweh of Samaria,” and notably “Yahweh of Teman,” probably a reference to a Midianite shrine either in Midian or on Mt. Seir.
HS: Isn’t the movement of the Israelites into Saudi Arabia just in the opposite direction from what they wish to go?
FMC: That depends on what their goal was.
HS: I am assuming it is the Promised Land.
FMC: Matters are much more complicated. The historian has great difficulty in separating history from legend and tradition reshaped in the literary interests of poets and seers. There is some reason to believe that there is a historical nucleus in the tradition that some elements of what later became Israel—the Moses group, we can call them, or proto-Israel—fled from Egypt and eventually (a generation or 40 years later, according to the biblical chronology) ended up invading Canaan from the 028Reubenite area of Transjordan. There is also archaeological evidence that tribal elements moved from east to west occupying the central hill country of Canaan. Certainly there was the movement of other groups of people of patriarch stock into the hill country in this same period who were not of the Moses group. In Deuteronomistic tradition we are told that the Israelites compassed Mt. Seir many days.6
So we cannot think of Israel leaving Egypt and making a beeline for the Promised Land. If the tradition of their long period in the wilderness has a historical basis, then the historian must ask how this tradition survived. Even if the group was small, counted at most in hundreds, rather than in millions as tradition in Numbers [Numbers 1:46] claims, they could not have survived for a generation in uninhabited Sinai—unless one takes at face value the legend of the heavens raining manna and of the migration with miraculous frequency of myriads of quail [Exodus 16:4–36]. No, if the Israelite contingent from Egypt survived long in the southern wilderness, it was because they headed for an area in which there was civilization, irrigated crops, the means of sustenance. Southern Edom and Midian supply this need, and so I believe they headed there. And this doesn’t even mention the alliance by marriage between Moses’ family and the priestly house of Midian. That this alliance had a historical basis is difficult to doubt—since it was profoundly objectionable to many circles in Israel, including the Priestly school, which finally edited the Tetrateuch;f yet it was kept in.
HS: You mentioned in passing “patriarch stock.” Do you mean the descendants of the patriarchs in the Bible?
FMC: More or less. Peoples who spoke the language and bore the personal names that we call patriarchal or, better, Hebrew. Much has been 030written on the terms ‘Apiru and Hebrew (‘ibriÆ) and their relationship. I have long held that the term ‘apiru (not ‘apiµru as some vocalize it) means “client” or “member of a client class.”7 The ‘Apiru in fact had no status in the Canaanite feudal order but attached himself to it in a variety of roles—in military service, as an agricultural worker, etc. Or, since he had no legal status, he could turn to outlawry. This client class, despised by Canaanite nobility before Israel’s appearance in Canaan, became ‘IbriÆm, Hebrews, a class or group—only later did the term carry ethnic overtones—with whom Israel identified and who had special status in early Israelite legal lore. Surely in the consolidation of the Israelite league, serfs (hupsûu who became freemen, hopsûi, a linguistic development much like that of ‘apiru becoming ‘ibriÆ), clients and slaves were, readily absorbed into the nation, imprinting Israel with the consciousness of being of lowly origins, outsiders in Canaanite society.
The ‘Apiru are mentioned often in inscriptions from the Late Bronze Age in Syria and Egypt, and especially in the Amarna letters, correspondence from the 14th century B.C.E., chiefly between 031Canaanite vassal kings and their Egyptian overlord.8 From these letters we learn that a group of ‘apiru headed by a certain Lab’ayyu actually seized the important city of Shechem, and terrified the kinglets round about, who in turn urged the pharaoh to come to their aid.
The Amarna letters reveal that the feudal system in Palestine was breaking down, and that dissident elements were making all kinds of trouble. Egypt under the pharaoh Akhenaten was weak and losing control of the empire, which included Canaan.
George Mendenhallg and Norman Gottwaldh have promoted the view that Israel came into being in the land as the result of a social revolution. I think this view is not without some merit. But I don’t think this single (for Gottwald, Marxist) explanation of Israelite origins in the land is the whole story. Israel also moved from the east into the hill country of central Canaan, a country largely uninhabited.9 Albrecht Alt, and most recently Israel Finkelstein, have argued that Israelite elements, small groups of nomadic pastoralists, peacefully infiltrated uninhabited areas in Cisjordan and slowly began to settle down in the course of the late 13th and early 12th centuries B.C.E. This model too, I believe, has some validity, but again I find it overly simple. The biblical tradition of a systematic, all-encompassing military conquest is, no doubt, much overdrawn, and there are some contradictory elements even in the conquest tradition as we have it in the Bible.10 But I do not believe that Israel moved into the land without any conflict. Tribal people are almost by definition warriors as well as keepers of small cattle (chiefly sheep and goats in mixed flocks in this period).11 And the rapid and aggressive formation of the league must have led to military confrontations. I am bemused by the fact that, given the widespread evidence of destruction in Canaan at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, some scholars are inclined to attribute the violence to various people, despite the lack of written records, to almost anyone—except to Israel, for whom we have elaborate written records of warfare. The notion of conquest, largely discredited these days, and properly so in its stereotyped, Deuteronomistic version, is not without testimony, archaeological and literary. Israel’s premonarchical hymns, “Songs of the Wars of Yahweh,” testify to early wars and conquests.
In short, I prefer a complex explanation of the origins of Israel in the land to any one of the simple models now being offered.
To return to our thesis: There is embedded in the biblical tradition historical evidence of a migration or incursion from Reuben of elements of Israel who came from the south with ties to Midian, whose original leader was Moses.
HS: Did they come from Egypt?
032
FMC: Moses has an Egyptian name, and tradition early and late puts him in the house of pharaoh. His descendants, too, sometimes exhibit Egyptian names. I have no reason to doubt that many who eventually reached Reuben (or the “plains of Moab” as the area is more frequently called in the Bible) came north from southern Edom and northern Midian, where the Midianite league flourished, and where, in my view, the mountain of God was located. They were refugees from Egypt or, in traditional terms, patriarchal folk who were freed from Egyptian slavery.
HS: Do you have any guess as to what mountain might be Mt. Sinai?
FMC: I really don’t. There are several enormous mountains in what is now northwestern Saudi Arabia. Jebel el-Lawz is the highest of the mountains in Midian—8,465 feet—higher than any mountain in the Sinai Peninsula; but biblical Mt. Sinai need not be the highest of mountains. There is some reason to search for it in southern Edom, which was Midianite terrain before the expansion of the Edomites south. Archaic poetry in the Bible describes Yahweh as coming from Edom. For example, in Judges 5:1–31, the oldest of the biblical narrative songs (late 12th century B.C.E.), we read:
“When Thou Yahweh went forth from Seir, When Thou didst march forth from the highlands of Edom, Earth shook, mountains shuddered; Before Yahweh, Lord of Sinai, Before Yahweh God of Israel” (Judges 4–5).
And in the Blessing of Moses (Deuteronomy 33:2–29), which is also very old, we read:
“Yahweh from Sinai came, He beamed forth from Seir upon us, He shone from Mount Paran” (Deuteronomy 33:2).
The name “Seir” refers of course to a mountainous district of Edom. The following verses are found in Habakkuk 3:3–7 (one of the oldest and most primitive hymns in the Hebrew Bible):12
“Eloah (God) came from Teman,
The Holy One from Mount Paran.
His majesty covered heaven,
His praise filled the earth,
He shone like a destroying fire…
He stood and he shook earth,
061
He looked and startled nations.
Ancient mountains were shattered,
Eternal hills collapsed,
Eternal orbits were destroyed.
The tents of Kushan shook,
Tent curtains of the land of Midian.”
I would argue that these archaic songs that locate Yahweh’s movements in the southeast—in Edom/Seir/Teman/Midian/Cushan—are our most reliable evidence for locating Sinai/Horeb, the mountain of God. The search for origins, and reconstruction of history from material that arises in oral tradition, is always a precarious task. The singers of narrative poems—I speak of them as Epic sources—follow certain traditional patterns that include mythological elements. They do not contain what we would call history in the modern sense of that term. We are dealing with epic, which does not fit easily into either the genres of fiction or of history.
How can the historian ferret out valid historical memory in such traditional narrative? Perhaps he cannot. I am inclined to think, however, that when we can 062isolate old traditions that have no social function in later Israel, or actually flout later orthodoxy, that such traditions may preserve authentic historical memories, memories too fixed in archaic poetry to be revised out or suppressed.
HS: Can you give me an example?
FMC: In later Israel, the Midianites, as we have seen, were the bitter enemies of Israel according to one stratum of tradition. One need only read the Priestly account of the episode of Ba‘al Peor and the war in which the Midianites were annihilated by Israel.13 Moses is described as standing helpless and allowing the orgy and apostasy to proceed without reprimand, according to the Priestly source; the hero is the Aaronid Phineas, who, as a reward for his interventions, is given an eternal priesthood. The fertility rites include what may euphemistically be called sacral marriage between a Midianite woman and an Israelite man, both of exalted lineage. Phineas spears the couple, whom he catches in flagrante delicto.
Alongside of such traditions are the older accounts of the priest of Midian assisting Moses at Mt. Sinai, of a scion of Midian guiding Israel in the desert, of the marriage of Moses to a Midianite woman, of Moses siring mixed offspring, of Miriam being turned pure white with leprosy for objecting to Moses’ marriage to a dark-skinned Midianite. Indeed as we search the JE traditions,14 Epic traditions as opposed to the later Priestly source, there is no hint of polemic against Midian. On the contrary, in this stratum of tradition, it is the Levites, not the Aaronids, who receive an eternal priesthood for slaughtering 3,000 of the participants in the affair.
In the accounts of the stay in the wilderness of Sinai, there are a series of “conflict stories,” especially between Moses and his allies including Midian, and, on the other hand, Aaron, Miriam and their allies.15 Israel’s epic singers did not preserve these traditions in order to sully the reputation of Moses. Evidently the Midianite traditions were too firmly established in the old sources to be forgotten or suppressed—and hence are probably historical in nucleus. Nor were traditions of Aaron’s dreadful exploits preserved to tarnish gratuitously his dignity and authority. The cultic aetiology of Aaron and the bull probably has its roots in Israelite traditions of Aaronic priests in Bethel who, in the ninth to eighth centuries B.C.E. after the united monarchy split the two, claimed Aaron as the creator of the iconography that adorned their temple: the young bull, which from their point of view was no less orthodox than the cherub iconography of Jerusalem, the capital of Judah. The expression “Behold your god(s) O Israel who brought you up from the land of Egypt” appears both in the account in Exodus 32 and in 1 Kings 12:28 when Jeroboam, king of the northern kingdom, set up his cultus in Dan and Bethel. The legend concerning Aaron was then turned backward into angry polemic by non-Aaronid priests—to be precise, by priests who traced their lineage to Moses, and whose traditions are found in the Elohistic Epic source.
The conflict stories are inexplicable unless they arose in historical conflict and rivalry between a Moses group and an Aaron group, more precisely in the rivalry and conflict between Israel’s two priestly houses, one the Zadokite family stemming from Aaron, the other a Mushite or Levitic family that claimed descent from Moses.
There is evidence of rivalry as late as the time of David when he chose two joint high priests for his national shrine and cultus—a remarkable phenomenon unless answering to a political need in David’s attempt to unify his realm and legitimize his new shrine in Jerusalem. The high priest Zadok can be traced to the Aaronids of Hebron, the site of an important, ancient shrine in Judah; the high priest Abiathar, to the old Mushite priesthood of the shrine at Shiloh in the north. Eventually, the Levites of Mosaic descent lost their rights to be altar priests in Jerusalem and became a second-class, subservient clergy. The evidence of the bitter conflict between the priestly houses survives in our biblical traditions. The priestly tradent, belonging to the Aaronids (i.e., Zadokites), when bringing into final form this mass of Tetrateuchal traditions, dared not suppress the stories of conflict, despite the fact that in his day the Aaronids were wholly dominant. The stories had already become part of a well-known and authoritative Epic tradition.
Traditions about Reuben also yield evidence of Israel’s early religious and social, history. Reuben effectively disappeared from its tribal territory—and probably from any serious role in later Israelite history—in the course of the 11th century B.C.E.16 The tribal allotment ceased to be called Reuben, and this area is usually referred to, as we have observed as the plains or steppes of Moab. In the 11th-century Blessing of Moses (Deuteronomy 33) we find the plea: “Let Reuben live and not die, Although his men be few.” Yet strangely, Reuben is called the firstborn of Jacob. Genealogies in ancient Israel—and indeed, more widely, among tribal groups that create segmentary genealogies—always reflect some sociological and historical reality. The Chronicler reflects, if not bewilderment at Reuben’s place in the genealogy, at least the clear judgment that Reuben was unworthy of the birthright, and that, in fact, it went to Joseph, though Judah became preeminent.17 Chronicles notes, however, that one must write genealogies with Reuben as the firstborn. I contend that Reuben’s place in the genealogy is evidence that Reuben once played a major role in Israelite society, even a dominant one, either political or religious or both. So important was the role of Reuben that it could not be eradicated or forgotten. Pursuing this line leads to the conclusion that the cycle of traditions rooted in the plains of Moab, in ancient Reuben, in which Moses plays a dominant role, and in the related Midianite tradition, rest on historical memories, very early epic memories. This does not mean that the modern historian can treat these memories uncritically as history. Traditional memories may have distorted, telescoped or reshaped the core, This happens to orally transmitted narrative, even when it is preserved in the formulas and themes of oral poetry. But in pursuing his critical task, the modern historian can often ferret out important material for the history of Israelite religion and society.
Hershel Shanks: I have heard you speak of Israelite origins but I have not seen in print your belief that the Israelites came out of Egypt and traveled to Canaan via Saudi Arabia. Is that correct?
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Professor Cross speaks of the Epic tradition as embodying the JE strand of the Pentateuch. Scholars divide the pentateuch into four principal authorial strands: J for the Yahwist (Jahwist in German) because Yahweh is the customary appellation of God in this strand; E for the Elohist because Elohim or a form of that name is the customary appellation if God in this strand; P for the priestly code and D for the Deuteronomist. J and E were combined at an early time. In addition, Professor Cross and some other scholars have been able to detect a first and second edition of D. Finally, the whole was put together by redactor often referred to as R.—Ed.
2.
B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), used by this author, is the alternate designation corresponding to B.C. often used in scholarly literature.
Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums (J.G. Cottäsche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, Stuttgart and Berlin 1921).
2.
See Peter J. Parr et al., “Preliminary Survey in N.W. Arabia, 1968,” Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology 8–9: 1968–1969 (1970), pp. 193–242; 10 (1972), pp. 23–61; Parr, “Contacts Between Northwest Arabia and Jordan in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages,” Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, ed. A. Hadidi (Amman: Department of Antiquities, 1982), pp. 127–134; M.L. Ingraham, T.J. Johnson, B. Rihani and I. Shatla, “Saudi Arabian Comprehensive Survey Program: Preliminary Report on a Reconnaissance Survey of me Northwestern Province,” Atlal 5 (1981), pp. 59–84.
3.
Located, I have argued near the waterfall, in the present-day valley of ‘Uyun Musa (“the springs of Moses”), the biblical “valley over against Beth Peor.”
4.
Martin Noth, “Die Wallfahrsweg zum Sinai,” PalästinaJahrbuch 36 (1940), pp. 5–28; cf. Frank M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 308–317.
5.
See Deuteronomy 2:1. The “Red Sea” here and in Numbers 14:25 (as well as in 1 Kings 9:26 and Jeremiah 49:21) is certainly a reference to the Gulf of Aqabah as generally recognized by critical scholars. See, for example, Noth, Numbers: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), p. 110.
6.
For the linguistic evidence, see Cross, “Reuben, Firstborn of Jacob,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 100 (1988), Supplement: Lebenndige Forschung im Alten Testament, p. 63, n. 54.
7.
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).
8.
See Israel Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988).
9.
One need only examine the problems of fragments of tradition in Judges 1.
10.
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.”
11.
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).
12.
See the Priestly portions of Numbers 25 [Numbers 25:6–18] and Numbers 31.
13.
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.
14.
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.
15.
Cross, “Reuben, First-born of Jacob.”
16.
“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).
