Arrangement 10: Leah

Notes

A ramifying maternal substemma containing 35 roundels in four generations. Dimensions: 6 wide by 9 tall. Liber Genealogus counterparts: section 18 and section 20.

The plots are from the Plutei (left) and Roda (right) manuscripts.

Commentary

Leah (L) has one daughter and six sons. The grandchildren are arranged in pendant chains. Although Leah herself is not attached to Filum A, her son Judah (J) and grandson Perez (P) belong to that filum. To solve this double-entry challenge without creating a graphic tangle, the designer of the Great Stemma has presented J and P twice: once under their mother and again to her right as fetches or doppelganger, as the filum plays out towards Jesus.

The reconstruction above, which is based on the fairly strict Plutei six-column model, docks the twin sons of Perez at the end of their column, occupying rows 8 and 9, in what one can term affiliation without proximity (AWP). This is technically a different solution to the "tail-end siblings" (TES) docking arrangement employed in the Zilpah and Levite sections, where the Great Stemma's designer preferred to insert the younger generation midway in the group, then append a member of an older generation at the bottom of the same column.

This arrangement fills nine rows. Although some manuscripts show Leah pushed up to row one, the original design probably situated her in row two, like the three other mothers who engaged with Jacob.

The principal content issue here which requires further discussion is whether grandsons of Reuben and of Judah were ever appended to his line in Ω, as the Liber Genealogus G implies they were. The reconstruction shows the five additions to the Reuben line (at left) and the son and grandson of Zara (Z) as phantom grey discs. It will be evident that precisely the required amount of space was available for them. It is uncertain why they would have been dropped, beyond a possible fear of cluttering the assembly and harming its clarity.

Next: Jacob's Offspring by Zilpah

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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.