Exodus chapter 6

[gib65]

I've done some research and came across some answers to my questions about the genealogy of Jacob's descendants and the slaves in Egypt. My sources may be questionable but these are the answers I derived from them. Again, my questions were:

Yes, that's interesting. God only ever reveals his name YHWH to Moses and not to any of the previous patriarchs. Why is this? Why does God decide that Moses is the one to whom to reveal his name?

Well, according to https://www.quora.com/Why-does-God-say-h...h-to-Moses, God didn't reveal his name YHWH to Moses only but there are several quotes in Genesis where YHWH is referenced by human characters in the story. The author of the article above, Glenn Brotherton (any relation to Glenn2020?), suggests that what God was revealing was not so much his name but the meaning of his name (I will be what I will be... or whatever the proper translation is).

Yet, the question can be deferred to "Why did God decide to reveal this to Moses and no one before him?" (after all, he did make a point of making this explicit). I wonder if it has anything to do with God wanting to reveal his intentions of, or justifications for, becoming eventually the universal God to which all man would worship? The phrase YHWH connotes both a sense of being intricately intertwined with existence itself and being above all other gods. To say "I will be what I will be" (or more colloquially, "I am that I am") is sometimes (perhaps erroneously) translated as "I am existence" (at least by me). How much more universal, and above all other gods, can you get? This would be a very convenient interpretation since this is the moment when God finally begins to fulfill his promise to the patriarchs to deliver the Israelites to the promise land (and beyond that, to global dominance through Christianity and Islam) and so it seems the appropriate time to reveal to Moses his connection to universality and existence itself.

On the question of "Why would God's name be translated to English without any vowels?" the best answers I could find are a combination of "the ancient Hebrew language didn't have any vowels" and "God's name is too sacred to pronounce"--which in combination sort of answers the question saying essentially that no one wanted to risk translating it with vowels in case they used the wrong vowels, thereby causing readers to mispronounce God's name (or even misrepresent it in writing).

On the question of the generations of Hebrews who were in Egypt after Joseph, I stumbled across a good source by Larry Pierce (https://answersingenesis.org/bible-timel...-question/). He says this about the initial 70 Hebrews who came to Egypt:

When Jacob went down into Egypt his first and second generation went with him, and they totaled a mere seventy souls, including Joseph and his family who already were in Egypt.

So it would seem the original Hebrews in Egypt were all descendants of Jacob after all (though this passage doesn't say they were all slaves).

(And I must confess, this reminded me that Jacob and his descendants did arrive in Egypt after Joseph took rule... I had forgotten that little tid bit from the story.)

BTW, it also mentions that a lot of this genealogy is covered in Numbers, so a lot of my confusion might be cleared away by reading Numbers.

We're also given a graph of Levi's family tree:



One thing this tells me is that I made another mistaken assumption. I assumed that the "heads of the fathers' houses" were all heads of separate lineages. But this graph tells us that Amram (one of the heads) was the son to Levi (another head). Immediately, I thought, "why not?" Why couldn't some of the heads be sons of other heads? It also completely obliterates my other assumption that these 12 heads are the 12 sons of Jacob. Though they might still represent Jacob's 12 sons. This is where I need the expertise of the really smart people here. Was the tradition to always have one representative of Jacob's 12 sons, one head of the 12 tribes, comprising the leaders of the Israelites? If so, it means each such representative need not be a descendent of that particular son of Jacob, for if Levi and Amram, being descendants of the same son of Jacob (or maybe Levi was a son of Jacob) were both heads of houses, then either they both represent the same son of Jacob (in which case there is a 12th son of Jacob not represented), or two members from the same family lineage could represent different sons of Jacob. <-- The latter seems to make more sense at this point in my research.

Another great article that answers many of my questions is https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-st...jacob.html by Lisa Loraine Baker. In it, she says:

Leah gives birth to (1) Reuben, (2) Simeon, (3) Levi, and (4) Judah. Then Rachel gives Bilhah, her servant girl to Jacob, “so that she may give birth on my behalf” (Genesis 30:3). Bilhah bore (5) Dan and (6) Naphtali. When Leah realized she ceased bearing Jacob’s sons (for the moment), she gave her servant, Zilpah to Jacob and she bore him (7) Gad and (8) Asher.
After this, Leah again conceived (twice) and gave birth to (9) Issachar and (10) Zebulun. Rachel finally received the blessing of conception (God has taken away my reproach—Genesis 30:23) and gave birth to (11) Joseph and (12) Benjamin, whom she bore as she died.

So this tells us exactly who the sons of Jacob were, and only the first three are listed as the heads of the fathers' houses (noting also they are listed first and in the same order).

All this assuming that when a name is mentioned in the Torah, it refers to the same characters as elsewhere mentioned (after all, we in the West are used to knowing several "Johns" or "Margos"--it can be hard to keep track).

Larry also tells us this:

The first census Moses took of the children of Israel when they left Egypt totaled to 603,550 males over twenty years of age (Numbers 1:2; 2:32). They had increased from seventy to a mighty nation in just two hundred and fifteen years from the time Jacob entered Egypt to live. During the almost forty years of wilderness wanderings, their population actually decreased slightly to 601,730 (Numbers 26:51)

...confirming my assumption that the number of liberated slaves was roughly 600,000.

As to the question of whether Jochebed is Jacob's sister, the source below says this:

Amram was the son of Kohath and the grandson of Levi, while Jochebed was the daughter of Levi, and therefore his aunt. The Talmud discusses this relationship in the context of the incest prohibitions in Lev. 18:12–14 (BT Sanhedrin 58b).

Source: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/joc...20took,The

Clearly, I was wrong to assume that the heads of the fathers' houses are Jacob's sons.

On the question of when the Hebrews were enslaved and where they came from, Jacob Isaac (Wow! What a name!) has this to say:

Old King Pharaoh died, too, and a new king ascended the throne. He had no sympathy or love for the children of Israel, and chose to forget all that Joseph had done for Egypt. He decided to take action against the growing influence and numbers of the children of Israel. He called his council together, and they advised him to enslave these people and oppress them before they grew too powerful.

Source: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_c...vement.htm

So as soon as a new Pharaoh came to power, the enslavement started. And it seems the victims consisted of those who had gained prominence in Egypt at the time (i.e. those over whom Pharaoh had jurisdiction), as this passage, also by Jacob Isaac, suggests:

Joseph and his brothers died, and the children of Israel multiplied in the land of Egypt. They held important positions and played an important role in the political, cultural, and economic life of the country. It is not surprising that they stirred the jealousy of the native Egyptians who felt outshone by the "foreigners."

And finally, I asked: "And finally, who are the 'Levites' in Exodus 6:25: "these are the heads of the fathers' [houses] of the Levites according to their families."? I assume this label is not named after Levi, one of the 12 mentioned, as he is listed as just one among the 12, not the father of them all."

The Wikipedia articles gives this answer:

According to the Torah, the tribe is named after Levi, one of the twelve sons of Jacob (also called Israel).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe_of_Levi

And it also provides a great family tree starting with Levi and Adinah at the root:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/udxb9h7mg...2qngem4akd&dl=0

This *sort of* answers my question. Levi is the father (or ancestor) of some of the heads of the fathers' houses, but not all. Out of the 12 fathers listed in Exodus 6, I see the following in the tree:

Levi
Gershon
Kehath (Kohath?)
Merari
Amram
Izhar
Uzziel
Aaron

But these are left out:

Reuben
Simeon
Korah
Elerazar

As far as Korah and Elerazar are concerned, they may be from a different mother than Adinah or are descendants further down the tree but not shown in the graph (did Miriam, for example, have children?). Reuben and Simeon, however, are Levi's siblings (as made clear in Baker's quote above), which raises the question of why they are considered among the heads of the fathers' houses of the Levites (they are siblings of Levi, not descendants).

So given that my assumption that the 12 heads of the fathers' houses are Jacob's sons is obviously wrong (though some of them are), and that some fathers can be sons of other fathers (and apparently siblings), it is indeed possible for Levi to the be the father (or ancestor) of the others (though I still question why they wouldn't all be listed in the tree from the Wikipedia article).

Though I haven't found answers to all my questions, I think this suffices for Exodus 6. So on to Exodus 7. Stay tuned!