Thread by @JoelBaden

#Genesis 49

Jacob’s final speech and death

The poem that is here attributed to Jacob’s final words is, as just about everyone recognizes, an originally independent piece. It’s a collection of tribal sayings, mostly with kind of confusing animal imagery and puns.

It might be pretty old - I think it probably is, at least in some original form - but that’s a separate issue. (I do think it’s been edited to account for the historical rise of Judah - the first few lines are quite different in form than what comes later.)

When we find an originally independent unit that appears in the text, we need to ask at what stage it was inserted. Into the canonical text? Into one of the sources? In this case, it’s pretty clear that the poem, whatever its origins, has been taken up by J.

We can even see how J has used the first few lines of the poem as a basis for some of its narrative. The poem refers to the disenfranchisement of Reuben, Simeon, and Levi, with really vague rationales. Those rationales are given narrative expression in J.

Reuben “mounted his father’s couch.” What does that mean? I don’t know. But J turned it into Reuben sleeping with Bilhah, a tiny plot point that went nowhere in J’s story, but finds its raison d’etre here, in the poem.

Same for the violence attributed to Simeon and Levi in the poem, which J turns into their leading role in the Dinah episode. That also goes nowhere at the time - but comes back here to explain why they don’t get the prime place despite their seniority to Judah.

The poem wasn’t written by J, but it belongs source-critically to J. It’s as if you read a novel in which a parent sings “Rockabye Baby” to a child. The author didn’t write that song, but there it is. It’s still part of the novel, just as this poem is part of J.

But the entire chapter isn’t J. The end is manifestly P: Jacob requests to be buried in the same gravesite as the rest of the family, the site that was purchased by Abraham in Gen 23.

There are further small details, but that’s the general gist of the thing. The poem is J - the burial instructions are P. And thus we have all three final words, along with the blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh from E in Gen 48.