Friday, January 7, 2022

Daniel E. Fleming on Genesis 49 Supporting a Differentiation between "El" and "Yahweh"

  

With the Jacob/Israel pairing of verse 24, along with “the tribes of Israel” for Dan in verse 16 and the geographical range indicated by the seven sayings together, I am inclined to locate the text in greater Israel, when the kingdom embraced peoples from north of the Jazreel Valley and east of the Jordan River. Note that Gad is in the list to represent the east, without Reuben and Manasseh (not a son of Jacob), and recalling 9th-century reference to Gad in the Mesha inscription. Maachi dates his set of six to roughly the same period. Note also that Genesis 49 could be invoked to prove that Israel could still identify specially with El rather than Yahweh. If Yahweh came to be “god of Israel” through the greater Israel monarchy, then the role of El in Jacob’s sayings would attach more narrowly to Joseph, who may represent Israel in its older and more modest scope (so “little”). (Daniel E. Fleming, Yahweh Before Israel: Glimpses of History in a Divine Name [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021], 118 n. 17, emphasis added)