Friday, October 29, 2010

Ezra 1-3

The Facts (Chapter number: Verse)

Ezra 1 - No mention of any women.

2:61 - Of the descendants of the priests: the descendants of Habaiah, Hakkoz and Barzillai (who had married one of the daughters of Barzillai the Gileadite, and was called by their name).
2:65 - The male and female servants, of whom there were seven thousand three hundred thirty-seven; and the had two hundred male and female singers.

Ezra 3 - No mention of any women.

My Comments

And still nothing. -_- How boring. Guess I'll have to go back to just reading till I hopefully hit something interesting.

Monday: Ezra ?-?

4 comments:

  1. So Barzillai took his father-in-law's name. There's got to be some story to that. Maybe for inheritance rights, maybe dad-in-law was that cool or bad-ass, or it was more unique than whatever name he'd had before, who knows? It is, though, more information than we get for the woman who is referred to only because she links the two Barzillais. Standard.

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  2. Another possibility is Barzillai took his father-in-law's named because his father-in-law had no sons. We only hear about Barzillai the Gileadite's daughter's, no mention of sons, so this is a possibility. A man passing on his name was one of the most important things, so it's possible that since Barzillai already had other brother's to pass on his father's name that he went ahead and took his father-in-laws's name to keep his family line going.

    Of course we can only speculate. If the genealogies were so damned important that they are just about every other book you'd think they'd be a bit more detailed with weird out of the box stuff like that. But I have realized I shouldn't expect the Bible to make any sort of logical sense in it's narrative. God is no Shakespeare.

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  3. Are there women in the bible who renamed themselves after a mother-in-law who had the misfortune to be daughterless and missed the chance to pass on her name? How would we know? One would be the wife of X and another the mother of X, and neither mentioned by name.

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  4. That question is moot since women do not pass on family names. Lineage is traced through fathers and sons, which I think is a funny way of doing it since there was no way of knowing a child was definitely the father's back then. The only sure parent was the mother, so it would make more logical sense for such low tech people to trace lineage through mothers. Buuuuuut there I go again assuming the Bible and misogynistic cultures of that time period would use logic to do things.

    So the only way a daughter can help pass on the family name is by marrying a man and having that man take on the family name. The only story I can remember that vaguely touches upon this is the story of Zelophehad's daughters. I swear there was another law or story that dealt with a man taking the father-in-law's name in order to keep the line going, but I can't think of it at the moment. Maybe there wasn't and I just imagined there was...

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