101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

yths of the Founders
AN OVERVIEW
he founders of ancient Israel were Abraham, his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob,
collectively known as the Patriarchs. Jacob, who on two occasions changed his name to
Israel, had twelve male children, the most important of whom were Joseph and Judah,
and each of the sons founded one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
The story of the Patriarchs begins with a call by God to Abraham (initially called
Abram) to leave the anachronistically named city of “Ur of the Chaldees” in
Mesopotamia and go to Canaan:“In the same day the LORD made a covenant with
Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the
great river, the river Euphrates:” (Gen. 15:18).
The primary purpose of the patriarchal history is to trace the transmittal of this
covenant from generation to generation. While Genesis frequently says or implies that
the covenant passed from Jacob to Joseph, and then from Joseph to his son Ephraim,
in a portion of the story known as the Blessing of Jacob, there is an indication that the
covenant passed into the hands of Judah. This inconsistency, one of many, shows how
the later feuds between the kingdom of Israel (under the leadership of Ephraim) and
the kingdom of Judah heavily influenced the telling of the patriarchal history.
Biblical chronology places the patriarchal period in approximately the first half of
the second millennium B.C. but we have no direct contemporaneous proof in the historical
record for the existence of either the Patriarchs or the twelve sons of Israel.
Many of the places and relatives of Abraham, however, have names that point to the