Q&A: Bible
Bible
Question
A question has been bothering me, and I’m curious how the Rabbi would deal with it:
It stands out in the Torah that at the stage of the nation’s formation there are almost only males. I don’t mean that the men play more central roles, nor that in most cases the women are not mentioned at all (as in the generations from Adam to Abraham). I mean that from Abraham until the generation of the tribal sons, only two daughters were born!
Unlike the period from Adam to Abraham, where it says “and he begot sons and daughters,” with Abraham it does not say so, and likewise with Isaac [regarding Abraham, there is indeed an opinion in the Talmud that he had a daughter]. The same is true of Jacob’s sons—the only daughter is Dinah, and likewise regarding their children—the seventy souls consist almost entirely of males (apart from Dinah, and perhaps Yocheved as well).
[There is, however, an opinion in the midrash that all the tribes were born with twin sisters—and this is brought by Rashi and Nachmanides. And Nachmanides comments that according to this view one would have to say that all the daughters died before they went down to Egypt, otherwise they should have been counted among those who went down to Egypt.]
How does one deal with such a phenomenon, which in the reality familiar to us is inconceivable—three generations of males only (aside from two females) [and even the idea that all the daughters died before the descent to Egypt is not realistic, aside from the sheer improbability that all twelve births were twin births].
Answer
I don’t know. It’s possible that there were daughters and they were not counted for some reason. But it indeed requires further investigation.
Forgive me, but this is the naive question of someone whose way of understanding the Bible is basically through the Rashi Chumash. Daughters most certainly were born; they simply were not counted at all, because from the standpoint of genealogical lists they had no value in a patriarchal society. Those who were counted were exceptional cases, whose names were tied to some mythological event or something unusually important—something that caused their names not to be forgotten over the centuries until the story was put into writing. Dinah was mentioned because of the rape story, though Jacob may well have had other daughters: “And all his sons and all his daughters rose to comfort him.” That was the case, for example, with “Serah daughter of Asher.” By the way, even among the men there were some who were mentioned in the Bible because of famous stories associated with their names: Enoch—“for God took him,” Nimrod—a mighty hunter before the Lord, Anah—he found the hot springs in the wilderness. And so on and so on—must the tanna go like a peddler and count them all?!
And as for the special reason that from Adam to Abraham it does say that they begot daughters too—it was meant to serve the message that the world was gradually becoming settled and increasingly populated from a single pair of human beings.
Let the questioner go open Cassuto’s commentary and find peace for his soul.