I was originally planning to write about Joseph and Benjamin, and the family of Jacob, but it was such a big family I’ve cleft the episode in twain. Today is about the family in general. Tomorrow will be about the youngest son, and about the musical!

Let’s start with some sweeping context. It’s the book of Genesis, it’s 2000 BC. The flood was yonks ago. It’s the bronze age. Most people you meet around this era are farmers with big tents and big family businesses. If the family gets big enough, and hires enough servants and spreads out enough, they might accidentally become a small country. I imagine Abraham or his brood as settlers, like in Civilization: The Test of Time - one wagon train that can roam across the land and set up camp, but a small enough settlement that it could be put back on the wagon and relocated, if push came to shove.

So, pottery, bronze working, monotheism. People have horseback riding but no glass. There is no written scripture, though some say the people of the family of Abraham may well have kept to the Noahide law, the seven instructions which, according to the 2nd Century Jewish Talmud, were given to Adam and again to Noah:

- No idols
- Don’t curse God
- Don’t murder
- Don’t commit adultery or other sexual immorality
- Don’t steal
- Don’t eat flesh from a living animal, and
- Establish courts of justice

The first five of these will be pretty familiar from the Ten Commandments, but they’re later on. Certainly there was some law followed, as through the generations people are variously praised for doing what is right or doomed for doing its opposite. Fifteen chapters into the book of Genesis, and we’re up to Abraham and Sarah and Melchizedek. It’s the same era as Job, and of Sodom and Gamorah, infamously inhospitable cities.

As I’ve suggested, there were a few petty kingdoms around, and it’s interesting that Abraham doesn’t try founding a city or setting himself up as a ruler. He’s clearly in his own territory. And the path of monarchies, and of God’s chosen people are both things that interest me, because the idea of inheritance has always seemed strange - the idea that the eldest child inherits power, property, blessing and so on. I’ve never been an eldest child. Perhaps if I had, I’d view the idea of primogeniture more favourably. But actually looking into this era of the Bible, it’s remarkable how often the eldest child, or the expected child, doesn’t inherit.

It’s eleven generations since the Great Flood. If we take the Bible’s comments about Noah’s age very literally, he could actually have met his descendant Abraham, but they probably wouldn’t have understood each other.

Abraham had no family, and then, thanks in large part to his faith in God, he had a big family. His sons Ishmael and Isaac go separate ways and in the long run they founded different nations and different religions, with Judaism and Islam hailing from their descendants. Then Isaac has sons, Jacob and Esau, who also fall out and go their separate ways. Jacob was smooth and capable and was also known as Israel, and his much hairier brother Esau begat the Edomites. Esau was older, and was meant to inherit his father’s blessing, and presumably God’s with it, but not for the first or the last time, the order of succession was eventually decided by character, and trickery, not by birthright. The middle part of Genesis is full of generations, marriages, births, tussling over inheritance, and the family dividing into siblings who can’t stand each other. There are a lot of warring patriarchs.

And then Jacob has an absolute ton of sons. There are twelve of them, and you can probably name between two and ten of them. Reuben is the eldest, so ought logically to inherit, but he messes things up contemptibly. Joseph is the favourite, and once he’s dead, or dead-passing, Benjamin is the favourite, but in practical terms, Judah is Jacob’s capital son. The favouritism once again leads to division and destruction.

If you know Joseph from the musical, you might think this all happens in quite a rush, but between Joseph being sold in Genesis 36 and working for Potiphar in Chapter 38, his brother Judah has two sons who both grow to adulthood. Everyone is much younger at the start of the tale than the end, and I tend to assume Joseph was in his mid teens at the latest when he got thrown in a pit, and quite an adult by the end of the story.

In the Bible, the Joseph narrative is rather abruptly set aside for a chapter of sex problems. There is a lot of sex involved in producing a big, big family, but in chapter 38 it’s much more recreational. In short, Judah has sex he shouldn’t have - when a relative of his plays a cunning trick on him - and then Joseph’s nephew Onan doesn’t have sex he should have. It’s complicated, it’s messy. It’s a sticky situation. If you’re reading Genesis for the familiar tale of Joseph, this chapter sticks out like a sore protuberance. Some observers have suggested it’s rather bizarre that Genesis interrupts the flow of Joseph’s tale with two tonally jarring sexploits, but I read a fascinating book called The Art of Biblical Narrative, by Robert Alter, which argued that the interruption is deliberate, to contrast Judah’s sexual incontinence - being unable to help himself - and Joseph’s sexual continence, when Mrs. Potiphar attempts to woo him. This struck me as interesting - not least because it was the first time I’d seen ‘continence’ used to mean self-control in non-bathroom-related situations. But it gets into something the whole book reiterates — that surprising changes of direction or tone in the Bible aren’t the result of sloppy editing together of tales, but of deliberate juxtapositions, from which we’re meant to infer meaning. That when things happen in the Bible, sometimes there’s no judgement made, no ‘and this was bad’, or no ‘and they was punished’, but context given to let us make our own estimations and connections.

We see quite a few examples of people having favourite wives, or heirarchies of wives and children valued at different rates, and it’s never explicitly ruled against or condemned in the old testament, but every time, we see it wind up in jealousy, division, and decades of war ensue between the family’s branches. If you’re thinking of forming a polycule, try to arrange it amicably and equitably, so that jealousy won’t set your seeds at one another’s throats.

There’s an extent to which the story of Jacob’s sons is the happy ending to Genesis. It’s unlike what came before, in that the brothers don’t fragment into completely separate families. It ends - after a lot of drama and incident - with Joseph forgiving his brothers, who have mended their fratricidal ways, and the whole family sticks together as a cohesive whole, paving the way for them to actually become a nation. I almost slipped and said ‘a kingdom’, but Israel didn’t actually get a king for another thousand years. That’s another story for another day.