Arrangement 17: Saul

Notes

A stemmatic arrangement that in some ways is similar to an arbor porpyhriana, containing nine roundels. Dimensions: 2 wide by 5 tall. Liber Genealogus counterpart: section 33.

Manuscripts Plutei and Roda (upper left and right) and the Foigny and San Millan bibles (lower).

Commentary

This group is a substemma and is not attached to Filum A, since Saul is not one of the ancestors of Jesus. As will be evident to anyone reading the manuscripts, the connections as drawn below do not match the filiations described by the text in Judges. For the reconstruction below, the erroneous connections are emended according to the sense of the text and Saul's wife and offspring are placed in a 5 x 2 grid.

The exact position of this group on the page is not clear from the manuscript evidence. The left-right alignment that seems most fitting is to place Saul under his filum contemporary, Jesse: the GS designer guessed they would have been roughly the same age. Vertically, Saul would hardly have occupied the top nudging the filum, but would have been placed in row 1 outside the course of the filum, alongside Eli and Samuel, his two predecessors as paramount leaders.

There is a further reason why this should be so. The first wife David married was a younger daughter of Saul, Michal (1 Samuel 18:18-27). This reconstruction allows Michal (Mic) to occupy row 4, on a level with David's other wives, which was likely the Great Stemma author's purpose in adopting this arrangement.

A peculiarity of this structure is that it is not reproduced in the LGG, which only mentions Saul himself, not his offspring, and that it only turns up in the Liber Genealogus L: "Qui Saul habuit uxorem nomine Achima; ex hac genuit Ionatham Iesiul Esbal Memfibos et sorores eorum Merob et Melchol, et filius Ionathae Memfiboste genuit Macca" (Mommsen 534). As in the preceding sections, this edition follows the Ψ hyparchetype.

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The Great Stemma: A Graphic History in the Fifth Century by Jean-Baptiste Piggin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.