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

Myths of the Founders 155
The main distinctions between the biblical and Greek stories are:
1. Jacob and Hamor are not brothers, let alone twins; and
2. the biblical story lacks a counterpart to the two groups of fifty children in the
Greek story.
As to the first point, we have already observed that Hamor/“red ass” stands in as a
substitute for Esau/“the hairy red” man, and both substitute for the red-skinned donkey
god Set. Since Hamor substitutes for Esau, and Esau is Jacob’s twin, we have eliminated
the first distinction. As to the second objection, we can show that Genesis, too,
has a family of fifty children.
Genesis divides the family of Jacob into two main factions—a Rachel group consisting
of the two sons of Rachel and the two sons of her handmaid Bilhah, and the
Leah branch, consisting of her six sons and the two sons of her handmaid Zilpah.
Genesis 46 gives a list of all the sons and grandsons born to each of Jacob’s wives before
they came into Egypt. In that list, Leah has thirty-four sons and grandsons and her
handmaid has sixteen more, a total of fifty. Since the biblical authors generally count
grandsons among the sons of a family, the Leah branch has fifty sons. And not only do
we have fifty children of Jacob, both Genesis and Apollodorus divide the fifty children
into eight subgroups.
Because Leah is the mother of Dinah as well as of the two sons who avenge her,
Simeon and Levi, we can conclude that this story originated within the Leah branch
of Israel.