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Reuben (Bible)
Reuben or Reuven (, Standard ''Rəʾūven'', Tiberian ''Rŭʾūḇēn'') was the first of the six sons of Jacob and Leah (Jacob's oldest son), according to the Book of Genesis. He was the founder of the Israelite Tribe of Reuben. Etymology The text of the Torah gives two different etymologies for the name of ''Reuben'', which textual scholars attribute to various sources: one to the Yahwist and the other to the Elohist; the first explanation given by the Bible is that the name refers to Yahweh having witnessed Leah's misery, concerning her status as the less-favourite of Jacob's wives, implying that the etymology of ''Reuben'' derives from ; the second explanation is that the name refers to Leah's hope that Reuben's birth will make Jacob love her, and thus his name means "He will love me". Another Hebrew phrase to which ''Reuben'' is particularly close is "Behold, a son!", which is how classical rabbinical literature interpreted it. Some of these sources argue that Leah used th ...
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Paddan Aram
Paddan Aram or Padan-aram () was a biblical region referring to the northern plain of Aram-Naharaim. Paddan Aram in Aramaic means ''the field of Aram'', a name that distinguishes the flatland from the mountainous regions to the north and east. In the Book of Genesis, Abraham, the patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, describes Aram as "my land" (Genesis 24:4). In the Hebrew Bible Paddan Aram designates the area of Harran in upper Mesopotamia. "Paddan Aram" and "Haran" may be dialectical variations regarding the same locality as ''paddanū'' and ''harranū'' are synonyms for "road" or "caravan route" in Akkadian.Bromiley, Geoffrey W., ''The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia'', Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, p.627, 1915 ...
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Zebulun
Zebulun (; also ''Zebulon'', ''Zabulon'', or ''Zaboules'' in ''Antiquities of the Jews'' by Josephus) was, according to the Books of Genesis and Numbers,Genesis 46:14 the last of the six sons of Jacob and Leah (Jacob's tenth son), and the founder of the Israelite tribe of Zebulun. Some biblical scholars believe this to be an eponymous metaphor providing an etiology of the connectedness of the tribe to others in the Israelite confederation. With Leah as a matriarch, biblical scholars believe the tribe to have been regarded by the text's authors as a part of the original Israelite confederation. The Tomb of Zebulun is located in Sidon, Lebanon. In the past, towards the end of Iyyar, Jews from the most distant parts of the land of Israel would make a pilgrimage to this tomb. Etymology The name is derived from the triliteral root , common in 2nd millennium BCE Ugaritic texts as an epithet (title) of the god Baal, as well as in Phoenician and (frequently) in Biblical Hebrew ...
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Elohist
According to the documentary hypothesis, the Elohist (or simply E) is one of four source documents underlying the Torah, together with the Jahwist (or Yahwist), the Deuteronomist and the Priestly source. The Elohist is so named because of its repeated use of the word ''Elohim'' to refer to the Israelite God. The Elohist source is characterized by, among other things, an abstract view of God, using Horeb instead of Sinai for the mountain where Moses received the laws of Israel and the use of the phrase "fear of God". It habitually locates ancestral stories in the north, especially Ephraim, and the documentary hypothesis holds that it must have been composed in that region, possibly in the second half of the 9th century BCE. Because of its highly fragmentary nature, most scholars now question the existence of the Elohist source as a coherent independent document. Instead, the E material is viewed as consisting of various fragments of earlier narratives that are incorporated i ...
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Yahwist
The Jahwist, or Yahwist, often abbreviated J, is one of the most widely recognized sources of the Pentateuch (Torah), together with the Deuteronomist, the Priestly source and the Elohist. The existence of the Jahwist text is somewhat controversial, with a number of scholars, especially in Europe, denying that it ever existed as a coherent independent document. Nevertheless, many scholars do assume its existence. The Jahwist is so named because of its characteristic use of the term Yahweh ( German: ''Jahwe''; Hebrew: ; English: ''Jehovah'') for God. Background Modern scholars agree that separate sources underlie the Pentateuch, but there is much disagreement on how these sources were used by the authors to write the first five books of the Bible. The documentary hypothesis, that priestly editors wove several independent source narratives into the single text of the Pentateuch, dominated much of the 20th century, but the consensus surrounding this hypothesis has now broken down ...
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Textual Criticism
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons. The objective of the textual critic's work is to provide a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of the text and its variants. This understanding may ...
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Etymology
Etymology ( ) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. Most directly tied to historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, it additionally draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to attempt a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings and changes that a word (and its related parts) carries throughout its history. The origin of any particular word is also known as its ''etymology''. For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts, particularly texts about the language itself, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in meaning and form, or when and how they entered the language. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct in ...
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Torah
The Torah ( , "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Torah is also known as the Pentateuch () or the Five Books of Moses. In Rabbinical Jewish tradition it is also known as the Written Torah (, ). If meant for liturgic purposes, it takes the form of a Torah scroll ( '' Sefer Torah''). If in bound book form, it is called '' Chumash'', and is usually printed with the rabbinic commentaries (). In rabbinic literature, the word ''Torah'' denotes both the five books ( "Torah that is written") and the Oral Torah (, "Torah that is spoken"). It has also been used, however, to designate the entire Hebrew Bible. The Oral Torah consists of interpretations and amplifications which according to rabbinic tradition have been handed down from generation to generation and are now embodied in the Talmud and Midrash. Rabbinic tradition's underst ...
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Tribe Of Reuben
According to the Hebrew Bible, the Tribe of Reuben () was one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Unlike the majority of the tribes, the land of Reuben, along with that of Tribe of Gad, Gad and half of Manasseh (tribal patriarch), Manasseh, was on the eastern side of the Jordan and shared a border with Moab. According to the biblical narrative, the Tribe of Reuben descended from Reuben (son of Jacob), Reuben, the eldest son of the patriarch Jacob. Reuben, along with nine other tribes, is reckoned by the Bible as part of the Kingdom of Israel (Samaria), northern kingdom of Israel, and disappears from history with the demise of that kingdom in c. 723 BC. Tribal territory The Book of Joshua records that the tribes of Reuben, Tribe of Gad, Gad and half of Tribe of Manasseh, Manasseh were allocated land by Moses on the Transjordan (Bible), eastern side of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. The Tribe of Reuben was allocated the territory immediately east of the Dead Sea, reaching from th ...
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Israelite
Israelites were a Hebrew language, Hebrew-speaking ethnoreligious group, consisting of tribes that lived in Canaan during the Iron Age. Modern scholarship describes the Israelites as emerging from indigenous Canaanites, Canaanite populations and other peoples.Mark Smith in "The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities of Ancient Israel" states "Despite the long regnant model that the Canaanites and Israelites were people of fundamentally different culture, archaeological data now casts doubt on this view. The material culture of the region exhibits numerous common points between Israelites and Canaanites in the Iron I period (c. 1200–1000 BCE). The record would suggest that the Israelite culture largely overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture ... In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature. Given the information available, one cannot maintain a radical cultural separation between Canaanites and Israelites for the Iron I period." (pp. ...
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Tiberian Vocalization
The Tiberian vocalization, Tiberian pointing, or Tiberian niqqud () is a system of diacritics (''niqqud'') devised by the Masoretes of Tiberias to add to the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible to produce the Masoretic Text. The system soon became used to vocalize other Hebrew texts as well. Tiberian vocalization marks vowels and stress, distinguishes consonant quality and length, and serves as punctuation. While the Tiberian system was devised for Tiberian Hebrew, it has become the dominant system for vocalizing all forms of Hebrew. It has long since eclipsed the comparatively rudimentary Babylonian and Palestinian vocalization systems for writing Biblical Hebrew. Consonant diacritics The sin dot distinguishes between the two values of . A '' dagesh'' indicates a consonant is geminate or unspirantized, and a ''raphe'' indicates spirantization. The ''mappiq'' indicates that is consonantal, not silent, in syllable-coda position. Vowel diacritics The seven vowel qualities of ...
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Hebrew Language
Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language until after 200 CE and as the liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. The language was revived as a spoken language in the 19th century, and is the only successful large-scale example of linguistic revival. It is the only Canaanite language, as well as one of only two Northwest Semitic languages, with the other being Aramaic, still spoken today. The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date back to the 10th century BCE. Nearly all of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as '' ...
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Rachel
Rachel () was a Bible, Biblical figure, the favorite of Jacob's two wives, and the mother of Joseph (Genesis), Joseph and Benjamin, two of the twelve progenitors of the tribes of Israel. Rachel's father was Laban (Bible), Laban. Her older sister was Leah, Jacob's first wife. Her aunt Rebecca was Jacob's mother. After Leah conceived again, Rachel finally had a son, Joseph (son of Jacob), Joseph, who would become Jacob's favorite child. Children Rachel's son Joseph (Genesis), Joseph was destined to be the leader of Israel's tribes between exile and nationhood. This role is exemplified in the Biblical story of Joseph, who prepared the way in Egypt for his family's exile there. After Joseph's birth, Jacob decided to return to the land of Canaan with his family. Fearing that Laban would deter him, he fled with his two wives, Leah and Rachel, and twelve children without informing his father-in-law. Laban pursued him and accused him of stealing his teraphim. Indeed, Rachel had taken ...
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