uses in the earlier portions of Gn. Not only are there omissions in P's narrative to be supplied from the other sources, but transposition seems to have been resorted to in order to preserve the sequence of events in JE.—The rest of the material is taken from the composite JE, with the exception of ch. 34, which seems to belong to an older stage of tradition (see p. 418). But the component documents are no longer represented by homogeneous sections (like chs. 16. 18f. [J], 20. 22 [E]); they are so closely and continuously blended that their separation is always difficult and occasionally impossible, while no lengthy context can be wholly assigned to the one or to the other.—These phenomena are not due to a deliberate change of method on the part of the redactors, but rather to the material with which they had to deal. The J and E recensions of the life of Jacob were so much alike, and so complete, that they ran easily into a single compound narrative whose strands are naturally often hard to unravel; and of so closely knit a texture that P's skeleton narrative had to be broken up here and there in order to fit into the connexion.
To trace the growth of so complex a legend as that of Jacob is a tempting but perhaps hopeless undertaking. It may be surmised that the Jacob-Esau (A) and Jacob-Laban (B) stories arose independently and existed separately, the first in the south of Judah, and the second east of the Jordan. The amalgamation of the two cycles gave the idea of Jacob's flight to Aram and return to Canaan; and into this framework were fitted various cult-legends which had presumably been preserved at the sanctuaries to which they refer. As the story passed from mouth to mouth, it was enriched by romantic incidents like the meeting of Jacob and Rachel at the well, or the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau; and before it came to be written down by J and E, the history of Jacob as a whole must have assumed a fixed form in Israelite tradition. Its most remarkable feature is the strongly marked biographic motive which lends unity to the narrative, and of which the writers must have been conscious,—the development of Jacob's character from the unscrupulous roguery of chs. 25, 27 to the moral dignity of 32 ff. Whether tradition saw in him a type of the national character of Israel is more doubtful.
As regards the historicity of the narratives, it has to be observed in the first place that the ethnographic idea is much more prominent in the story of Jacob than in that of any other patriarch. It is obvious that the Jacob-Esau stories of chs. 25, 27 reflect the relations between the nations of Israel and Edom; and similarly at the end of ch. 31, Jacob and Laban appear as representatives of Israelites and Aramæans. It has been supposed that the ethnographic motive, which comes to the surface in these passages, runs through the entire series of narratives (though disguised by the biographic form), and that by means of it we may extract from the legends a kernel of ancient tribal history. Thus, according to Steuernagel, Jacob (or Ya'ăḳōb-ēl) was a Hebrew tribe which, being overpowered by the Edomites, sought refuge among the Aramæans, and afterwards, reinforced by the absorption of an Aramæan clan (Rachel), returned and settled in Canaan: the events being placed
