Arrangement 11: Zilpah

Notes

A ramifying maternal substemma containing 17 roundels in four generations. Dimensions: 2 wide by 9 tall. Liber Genealogus counterpart: section 18 and section 21.

The plots are (from left) from the Plutei, Roda and San Juan bible manuscripts:

Commentary

Genesis attributes two sons to Zilpah, a slave wife of Jacob. The manuscripts consistently dock the grandchildren in pendant chains.

The reconstruction fills nine rows and would have reached to the bottom of the page, since Zilpah must be placed in row number two to leave sufficient headroom for the top filum.

Most of the manuscripts omit the fourth son of Gad, Ezbon, although he is included in the Liber Genealogus G text, which emphatically states that Gad had seven sons. Ezbon has been reinserted in the Beta group manuscripts by an editor who noticed the lack of concordance with Genesis. Since there is a gap in the nine-high pattern, it is prudent that we rely on the LGG and re-insert Ezbon too.

The sole open issue here attaches to the offset roundel for "Serah daughter of Asher and sister of Beriah". It is odd that a separate column should have been created for her, and indeed it is likely that this is an alteration by the scribes. The likeliest original layout is the "tail-end sibling" (TES) pattern which we find used to accommodate Zincria in the Levites arrangement: the Great Stemma clearly allows generational mixing to happen within a single pendant chain and appears to have no rule forbidding the resumption of an older generation after a younger one at the tail end of a column. Accordingly, Serah is placed in the edition at the end of the column. No bypass loop is required in the Great Stemma's logic.

Next: Jacob's Offspring by Rachel

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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.