Hi William, Regarding the first vs. third person data point and your objection to it I just asked my wife about LHOTP as she is the literature maven around here. She tells me that LIW’s daughter wrote it with her, and it is a meld of real and made up characters and events, a semi-fictional account of her life co-written by her daughter. I kind of think your example there makes my point.
True but that didn’t stop Daniel from writing his life’s events that way even when giving prophecies about the future of getting information that he was to “seal up” because it pertained to the future.
Me too, their near descendants. Yay, we agree!
To my claim that it was up to a man’s sons (or near descendants) to tell his story (as the norm) you say "
Right. I wasn’t trying to, because it gets tedious in this format. A book is a better place to lay this all out. Let’s give it a brief go here.
Creation and Book of Adam - a special case because the first account isn’t that of a person, but creation itself, and that story and Adam’s together are the “Book of Adam” in Gen. 5:1. In addition, Adam lived a very long time after having sons. Noah didn’t start having sons until he was 500 and recorded lifespans dropped after that. So we might expect the account of Adam to have gained traction over many generations and Adam was around for some of them, thus this is an exception to the rule where one’s legacy or story is told by their sons.
Account of Noah - doesn’t say much about Lamech but does trace the genealogy and says what he claimed about Noah. It doesn’t say much about Noah either though. It describes the times. So Noah didn’t tell his own story, a plus for my view of it.
Account of Shem, Ham, and Japheth- tells the story of Noah and the flood (which they were witnesses to). So we have Noah not telling his own story but his sons mostly telling his story. A plus for my view of it.
Account of the Families of Shem, Ham and Japheth - clearly something that was added to over generations and is not in the same class as the individual accounts. So it is neutral for our father or son arguments purposes.
Account of Shem- deceptive because the Tolodoth can also be used at the beginning of a straight up genealogical account, as it is in Ruth 4:18. It doesn’t have to be at the end (but it is done this way, otherwise Gen 1:1 would be a tolodoth).
Here (the line of Shem) the term isn’t used as a colophon but only to say that this is the genealogy of Shem (leading to Terah). Obviously, Shem didn’t write this, his ancestor Terah or Abraham did, So it is NEUTRAL in respect to our question about whether the account is written by the person named in them or their near descendants, but is evidence for my other point about the tolodoth phrase being used in more than one way, and that it can START the section rather than end it when it is used to head a flat-out genealogy rather than a narrative. It also starts colophons which in my view are not simply but usually include at least a little more information about the person or their family or some descriptors.
The Account of Terah - includes the age of Terah’s death and is what I am claiming is a common exception but an exception and you are claiming is the rule, that men write their own accounts. This is a point at issue.
The accounts of Isaac and Ishmael - They are on the heels of one another and at least one must tell the story of Abraham. So there is another case of the story of the father being told by his sons. Then, if one rigidly followed the tablet theory, you would have the younger brother telling the story of the older. I do not think this is what is happening here, nor does that make any sense. Instead, you have the younger brother, who sort of usurped the place of his warlike older brother, writing the account of his father but sticking his older brother’s name on it too. And actually going further in making his brother’s credits a big deal while making short shift of his own. It is a double colophon with that of the elder brother placed first and made more elaborate to compensate for Isaac taking yet ANOTHER privilege’s and writing the story of their father (or both may have indeed contributed like Shem, Ham, and Japheth and the younger brother went overboard in giving big brother’s family credit, so as to keep them pacified.
Same thing for Jacob and Esau and their colophons. If you go by a rigid adherence to the “rule” they want to impose then Esau writes the story of Isaac until his death (which story necessarily includes all of his conflict with his brother while alive) and Jacob write’s Esau’s story. It makes more sense to look at what is going on with the characters. Jacob was in a similar situation as Isaac, with the clan of the older brother being warlike and looking for offense. So Jacob makes it a double-colophon, they share credit for writing the story of Isaac (which includes their early years) and Jacob goes overboard making Esau’s colophon elaborate and listing the name of all the clans that he hopes will be flattered out of raiding his flocks! Either way in at least one of the cases, or both of them if this is a double colophon, you have the name on the colophon being that of the son but the story is the life of the father (it just includes a part of the life of the sons). (EDIT: I want to point out that I think material was added to Esau’s “colophon” over time. It mentions that “this was before Israel had any king”, indicating that it was a scribal note put in much later. Common sense applies, as with the table of nations, it was meant to be looked at as an ongoing section of the text which each generation could contribute to as more happened. Later, at some point, it all got “frozen”.
So we have the pattern with 1) Noah not writing his own story 2) Shem, Ham and Japheth writing Noah’s story 3) One or both of Isaac and Ishmael writing Abraham’s story and 4) One or both of Jacob and Esau writing Isaac’s story.
The exceptions are 1) Adam’s name is on his own story, but it tracks his line several generations (seven in the case of Cain’s line) and so it looks like a case where the father’s name is on the colophon and the account is his story (so either line could carry it forward?) and the same thing happens with 2) Terah. Terah’s name stays on the account and it isn’t about Terah’s father as is the norm (on the rest except for Adam if you take my view on the double colophons).
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Again, pure conjecture. Imagine if Jacob’s sons had each written a document “These are the toledoth of Jacob”. There would be 12 identically identified documents each with unique content. I think as a convention, that would be really confusing.
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I hope you can see now that it isn’t “pure conjecture” but rather “tainted” by the structure of the accounts and what is happening in the narratives. IOW, shaped by the textual evidence rather than rigidly following a uniform rule. I bash the scholars a lot, but I am not one of those many non-scholars who insist that the text is so simple that we need no experts to help us understand it. We need believing scholars to help us understand it.
Joseph may have written an account, it just would not be in tablet form or share the tolodoth structure they brought with them from Mesopotamia. He was Egyptian educated and it is a point for the tablet theory that this is just when the phrases disappear. But if he did, it would be from a position of strength and so would not need to share the credit like Isaac and Jacob did. Even if there was a tradition that the brothers did it together (or it was the right of the eldest) the gross disparity in their status at the end of their father’s life would make it obvious who was supposed to be the chronicler.
He may have done so. The document would just be lost to us. IN that case Terah’s account would just be in the line. And again, Abraham would vanish from the story because he would be without descendants. That Lot didn’t have any male descendants at the time is all the more reason to keep it open by keeping the account in the father’s name rather than putting the name of a specific descendant on it that would wind up a “dead end”. It would jack with tracking the future descent of the line if some of the accounts were named for dead ends. The rest of your points concern what happened with Abraham and Lot long after the death of Terah, and thus would not be a factor if Abraham wrote the account before he even left Haran or shortly afterward.
I think it is impossible to make the case that the word is always used in the same sense and invariably concluded or began the accounts. There are exceptions in the text either way, so instead of trying to make one way of looking at it fit all the text, why not consider that the word was used more than one way? Instead of just looking at the “rule”, look at what the narrative or text around the tolodoth is saying in order to context for how it is being used. Our English word “account” can also be used in more than one way. And Hebrew had far fewer words and very many of them had multiple senses.
Are Sewell and I saying anything much different on the Ishmael and Esau “sub-tablets”? I think it is mostly semantics there. I am saying that all of their “accounts” are really just elaborate colophons where they are being given credit as part tellers of the stories. I think he believes that their family records were inserted into the larger accounts as sub-accounts. It amounts to the same thing but the way I do it has the colophons at the end of accounts more consistently. The reason the tolodoth phrase is at the START of the Esau and Ishmael “accounts” is that those were not really “accounts” or narratives so much as a genealogy-like record of their families OR the beginning of an elaborate colophon. Some think the colophons are “bare bones”, consisting of only a fragment of one verse of scripture. I think they are more than that, just like a colophon is more than the author’s name. Maybe this is the crux of the different viewpoints and the next topic that needs to be discussed?
This is exhausting.
