he stood the rods he had peeled in the troughs . . . opposite the
flocks, which went into the heat. The mechanism of Jacob’s ingenious scheme has long perplexed
commentators. At least on the surface, it appears to involve the age-old belief
that sensory impressions at the moment of conception affect the embryo—here,
the peeled rods, with their strips of white against the dark bark, would impart
the trait of spots or brindle markings to the offspring conceived. (The same
effect would then be achieved for the sheep by making them face the flocks of
speckled goats during their own mating time.) Yehuda Feliks, an authority of
biblical flora and fauna, has proposed that the peeled rods are only a dodge, a
gesture to popular belief, while Jacob is actually practicing sound principles
of animal breeding. Using a Mendelian table, Feliks argues that the recessive
traits would have shown up in 25 percent of the animals born in the first
breeding season, 12.5 percent in the second season, and 6.25 percent in the
third season. Jacob is, moreover, careful to encourage the breeding only of the
more vigorous animals, which, according to Feliks, would be more likely to be
heterozygotes, bearing the recessive genes. It is noteworthy that Jacob makes
no mention of the peeled rods when, in the next chapter, he tells his wives how
he acquired the flocks. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols.
[New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:110-11)
