Ephraim (; , in pausa: ''ʾEp̄rāyīm'') was, according to the

Book of Genesis The Book of Genesis (from Greek language, Greek ; ; ) is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its Hebrew name is the same as its incipit, first word, (In the beginning (phrase), 'In the beginning'). Genesis purpor ...

, the second son of Joseph ben Jacob and

Asenath Asenath (, ; Koine Greek: Ἀσενέθ, ''Asenéth'') is a minor figure in the Book of Genesis. Asenath was a high-born, aristocratic Egyptian woman. She was the wife of Joseph and the mother of his sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. There are t ...

, as well as the adopted son of his biological grandfather

Jacob Jacob, later known as Israel, is a Hebrew patriarch of the Abrahamic religions. He first appears in the Torah, where he is described in the Book of Genesis as a son of Isaac and Rebecca. Accordingly, alongside his older fraternal twin brother E ...

, making him the progenitor of the

Tribe of Ephraim According to the Hebrew Bible, the Tribe of Ephraim (, ''ʾEp̄rayim,'' in Pausa, pausa: , ''ʾEp̄rāyim'') was one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The Tribe of Manasseh, together with Ephraim, formed the Tribe of Joseph. It is one of the Ten L ...

. Asenath was an

ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower E ...

ian woman whom

Pharaoh Pharaoh (, ; Egyptian language, Egyptian: ''wikt:pr ꜥꜣ, pr ꜥꜣ''; Meroitic language, Meroitic: 𐦲𐦤𐦧, ; Biblical Hebrew: ''Parʿō'') was the title of the monarch of ancient Egypt from the First Dynasty of Egypt, First Dynasty ( ...

gave to Joseph as wife, and daughter of

Potipherah According to the Hebrew Bible, Potiphera (, ) was a priest of the ancient Egyptian town of On (Ancient Egypt), On, mentioned in the and . He was the father of Asenath, who was given to Joseph (Genesis), Joseph as his wife by the Pharaohs in the B ...

, priest of ʾOn (Heliopolis) (). Ephraim was born in Egypt before the arrival of the

Israelites Israelites were a Hebrew language, Hebrew-speaking ethnoreligious group, consisting of tribes that lived in Canaan during the Iron Age. Modern scholarship describes the Israelites as emerging from indigenous Canaanites, Canaanite populations ...

from

Canaan CanaanThe current scholarly edition of the Septuagint, Greek Old Testament spells the word without any accents, cf. Septuaginta : id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interprets. 2. ed. / recogn. et emendavit Robert Hanhart. Stuttgart : D ...

. The

Book of Numbers The Book of Numbers (from Biblical Greek, Greek Ἀριθμοί, ''Arithmoi'', , ''Bəmīḏbar'', ; ) is the fourth book of the Hebrew Bible and the fourth of five books of the Jewish Torah. The book has a long and complex history; its final f ...

lists three sons of Ephraim: Shuthelah, Beker, and Tahan. However,

1 Chronicles The Book of Chronicles ( , "words of the days") is a book in the Hebrew Bible, found as two books (1–2 Chronicles) in the Christian Old Testament. Chronicles is the final book of the Hebrew Bible, concluding the third section of the Jewish Tan ...

7 lists eight sons, including Ezer and Elead, who were killed in an attempt to steal cattle from the locals. After their deaths he had another son, Beriah. He was the ancestor of

Joshua Joshua ( ), also known as Yehoshua ( ''Yəhōšuaʿ'', Tiberian Hebrew, Tiberian: ''Yŏhōšuaʿ,'' Literal translation, lit. 'Yahweh is salvation'), Jehoshua, or Josue, functioned as Moses' assistant in the books of Book of Exodus, Exodus and ...

, son of Nun ben Elishama, the leader of the Israelite tribes in the

conquest of Canaan The Book of Joshua is the sixth book in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament, and is the first book of the Deuteronomistic history, the story of Israel from the conquest of Canaan to the Babylonian exile. It tells of the campaigns of the Isr ...

. According to the biblical narrative,

Jeroboam Jeroboam I (; Hebrew language, Hebrew: ''Yārŏḇʿām''; ), frequently cited Jeroboam son of Nebat, was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the first king of the northern Kingdom of Israel (Samaria), Kingdom of Israel following a Jeroboam's Revol ...

, who became the first king of the

Northern Kingdom of Israel The Kingdom of Israel ( ), also called the Northern Kingdom or the Kingdom of Samaria, was an Israelite kingdom that existed in the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. Its beginnings date back to the first half of the 10th century BCE. It c ...

, was also from the house of Ephraim.

Biblical criticism

The

related the name "Ephraim" to the Hebrew root ''pārā'' "to be fruitful". This referring to Joseph's ability to produce children, specifically while in Egypt (termed by the Torah as "the land of his affliction").Genesis 41:52 The name Ephraim can therefore be translated as "I will be fruitful", with the

prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can b ...

of aleph (א) indicating the first person,

singular Singular may refer to: * Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms * Singular or sounder, a group of boar, see List of animal names * Singular (band), a Thai jazz pop duo *'' Singula ...

future tense In grammar, a future tense ( abbreviated ) is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French ''achètera'', mea ...

. In the biblical account,

Joseph Joseph is a common male name, derived from the Hebrew (). "Joseph" is used, along with " Josef", mostly in English, French and partially German languages. This spelling is also found as a variant in the languages of the modern-day Nordic count ...

's other son is

Manasseh Manasseh () is both a given name and a surname. Its variants include Manasses and Manasse. Notable people with the name include: Surname * Ezekiel Saleh Manasseh (died 1944), Singaporean rice and opium merchant and hotelier * Jacob Manasseh ( ...

. Joseph himself is one of the two children of

Rachel Rachel () was a Bible, Biblical figure, the favorite of Jacob's two wives, and the mother of Joseph (Genesis), Joseph and Benjamin, two of the twelve progenitors of the tribes of Israel. Rachel's father was Laban (Bible), Laban. Her older siste ...

and

, the other being

Benjamin Benjamin ( ''Bīnyāmīn''; "Son of (the) right") blue letter bible: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h3225/kjv/wlc/0-1/ H3225 - yāmîn - Strong's Hebrew Lexicon (kjv) was the younger of the two sons of Jacob and Rachel, and Jacob's twe ...

. Biblical scholars regard it as obvious, from their geographic overlap and their treatment in older passages, that originally Ephraim and Manasseh were considered one tribe – that of ''Joseph''. According to several biblical scholars, Benjamin was originally part of the suggested Ephraim-Manasseh single "Joseph" tribe, but the biblical account of Joseph as his father became lost.''Peake's commentary on the Bible''. Several biblical scholars suspect that the distinction of the ''Joseph tribes'' (including the

Tribe of Benjamin According to the Torah, the Tribe of Benjamin () was one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The tribe was descended from Benjamin, the youngest son of the Patriarchs (Bible), patriarch Jacob (later given the name Israel) and his wife Rachel. In the ...

) is that they were the only Israelites who went to Egypt and returned, while the main Israelite tribes simply emerged as a subculture from the

ites and had remained in Canaan throughout.

Israel Finkelstein Israel Finkelstein (; born March 29, 1949) is an Israelis, Israeli archaeologist, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the head of the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa. Finkelstein is active in the a ...

, ''The Bible Unearthed''. According to this view, the story of Jacob's visit to Laban to obtain a wife originated as a

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide, or obscure, clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are usually meant to cr ...

for this migration, with the property and family which were gained from Laban representing the gains of the Joseph tribes by the time they returned from Egypt; according to textual scholars, the

Jahwist The Jahwist, or Yahwist, often abbreviated J, is one of the most widely recognized sources of the Pentateuch (Torah), together with the Deuteronomist, the Priestly source and the Elohist. The existence of the Jahwist text is somewhat controver ...

version of the Laban narrative only mentions the Joseph tribes, and Rachel, and does not mention the other tribal

matriarch Matriarchy is a social system in which positions of power and privilege are held by women. In a broader sense it can also extend to moral authority, social privilege, and control of property. While those definitions apply in general English, ...

s at all.

Richard Elliott Friedman Richard Elliott Friedman (born May 5, 1946) is an American biblical scholar, theologian, and translator who currently serves as the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia. Life and career Friedman was born in ...

, ''Who Wrote the Bible?'' In the Torah, the eventual precedence of the tribe of Ephraim is argued to derive from Jacob, half blind and on his deathbed, blessing Ephraim before

.Genesis 48:1 The text describing this blessing features a

hapax legomenon In corpus linguistics, a ''hapax legomenon'' ( also or ; ''hapax legomena''; sometimes abbreviated to ''hapax'', plural ''hapaxes'') is a word or an Fixed expression, expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written re ...

– the word שכל (''sh-k-l'') – which

classical rabbinical literature Rabbinic literature, in its broadest sense, is the entire corpus of works authored by rabbis throughout Jewish history. The term typically refers to literature from the Talmudic era (70–640 CE), as opposed to medieval and modern rabbinic w ...

has interpreted in esoteric manners;''Jewish Encyclopedia'' some rabbinical sources connect the term with ''sekel'', meaning ''mind''/''wisdom'', and view it as indicating that

was entirely aware of who he was actually blessing; other rabbinical sources connect the term with ''shikkel'', viewing it as signifying that Jacob was ''despoiling'' Manasseh in favour of Ephraim; yet other rabbinical sources argue that it refers to the power of Jacob to ''instruct'' and guide the

Holy Spirit The Holy Spirit, otherwise known as the Holy Ghost, is a concept within the Abrahamic religions. In Judaism, the Holy Spirit is understood as the divine quality or force of God manifesting in the world, particularly in acts of prophecy, creati ...

. In classical rabbinical sources, Ephraim is described as being modest and not selfish. These rabbinical sources allege that it was on account of modesty and selflessness, and a

prophetic In religion, mythology, and fiction, a prophecy is a message that has been communicated to a person (typically called a ''prophet'') by a supernatural entity. Prophecies are a feature of many cultures and belief systems and usually contain divin ...

vision of

, that Jacob gave Ephraim precedence over Manasseh, the elder of the two; in these sources Jacob is regarded as being sufficiently just that God upholds the blessing in his honour, and makes Ephraim the leading tribe.

References

External links

* A painting by J Franklin of , engraved by G Presbury for Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1839 and with a poetical illustration by

Letitia Elizabeth Landon Letitia Elizabeth Landon (14 August 1802 – 15 October 1838) was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L. Landon's writings are emblematic of the transition from Romanticism to Victorian literature. Her first major b ...

. {{Authority control Book of Genesis people Founders of biblical tribes Joseph (Genesis) Tribe of Ephraim Ancient Egyptians th:เผ่าเอฟราอิม

Biblical criticism

See also

References

External links