Jacob's Journey

Like beautifully layered rock formations lining the walls of a desert canyon, so is the Biblical text. Story is piled upon story until the foundations are invisible. Those foundations tell a different story—one that only a trained geologist can tease from the rock; one that only a Biblical philologist, trained in the dissection of literature, can find in the text. In this earliest version of events that our literary geology will isolate, it is Jacob, not Abraham, who is the father and founder of the Israelite nation. In this and many other respects, the story of Jacob and his seven sons is very different from what those familiar with the canonical text may recall. Jacob’s Journey traces the development of this uniquely divergent account into the canonical text we have today.