Texts in Conversation
Deuteronomy 32 ties the seventy nations to the divine council and the people of Israel. Jubilees makes the parallel explicit, counting seventy descendants of Jacob and setting them among those seventy nations.
Share:
2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Deuteronomy 32:8
Hebrew Bible
7 Remember the ancient days; bear in mind the years of past generations. Ask your father and he will inform you, your elders, and they will tell you. 8 When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided up humankind, he set the boundaries of the peoples, according to the number of the heavenly assembly. 9 For the Lord’s allotment is his people, Jacob is his special possession.
Jubilees 44:34
Pseudepigrapha
33 All the persons of Jacob who entered Egypt were 70 persons. So all of these sons and grandsons of his were 70, and five who died in Egypt before they married. They had no children. 34 Judah’s two sons, Er and Onan, had died in the land of Canaan. They had no children. The sons of Israel buried those who died, and they were placed among the 70 nations.
Search:
Notes and References
... In effect, their deaths removed them from the family line that led to Israel so that they were considered like the nations—another group totaling seventy in number: as there were seventy members of Jacob’s family, so there were seventy nations of the world. ...
VanderKam, James C.
Jubilees 2: A Commentary on the Book of Jubilees Chapters 22-50
(pp. 1101-1102) Fortress Press, 2018
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
Your Feedback:
Leave a Comment
Anonymous comments are welcome. All comments are subject to moderation.