Kinship

We have explored in this chapter how national kinship is fictive - an artificial construction for political purposes. Kinship itself is more messy and has been a key topic within social anthropology throughout the 20th century. A key issue is to decide who is in our 'in' group and who is in the 'out' group. In some societies, anyone in the 'out' group is an enemy and can be killed, so this is a crucial concern throughout human evolution. Blood ties, (consanguinity) can be augmented by marriage ties (affinity) so kinship systems use intermarriage (exogamy, marriage out) as a means of widening kinship relations. Political marriages are examples of the same idea as ways of minimising conflict. Cousin marriage (endogamy, marriage 'in') consolidates the clan but narrows the kinship range. It is a feature in circumstances where there is lack of mobility to meet outsiders. There are advantages - the productiveness of daughters is retained, and their safety more easily assured. The main disadvantage is a higher risk of birth defects, so most groups ban sex between siblings or parents with their children through incest rules.

The current interest in research one's ancestors to build a family genealogy is mirrored in many societies, and is found in the Bible. We have the benefit of paper records, not usually the case in less technological communities. Word of mouth with families covers a few generations back, but is not totally reliable. In pre-bureaucratic and pre-literature communities, oral tradition is said to be more reliable than in the modern day, because there are presumed to be checks on accuracy between tradition-tellers. I do not find arguments convincing, since people in positions of power can change emphases and even invent propaganda deemed to be politically useful. True, when a story is well established and the audience know it in detail, divergence is difficult and corrected; but storytellers tend to be artists who give stories their own emphases and smart turn of phrase. We would need to find a pre-literature community whose oral tradition has been collected and studied to illuminate this point. Such a people are the San or Bushmen of the Kalahari about whom I will write later.

The new Israelites returning from exile had no continuity with the past or their new land. They arrived with no remembered history of place. The land had been given to them, although it was not an empty land, it could be gifted at the whim of a despot. Gift may be too strong a word, for their sending there may have been an exile rather than a return. The concepts of return and gift may be construction rather than reality, for some at least. Given the three or four generation time gap between exile and return, Palestine as a former home lay before living memory. All the "returners" had been born and bred in Babylon and had experienced nothing else. So, the circumstances in Palestine required the creation of an identity which the political and intellectual elite were determined to fill.

This is the context of our consideration of genealogies. They are socio-political documents which needed to be accepted even if inaccurate. They served a social purpose; the enhanced people's understanding of their status and identity. They needed to be believable, even if untrue or at least uncheckable.

The Genesis genealogy (I express this in the singular as overarching) traces Isralelite identity back to the first couple, and thence to God through the notion of God's image. There are key bifurcations - farmers versus pastoralists; Noah's family versus the rest; Shem favoured over Ham and Japheth; in turn, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob favoured as ancestors rather than the eponymous ancesters of neighbouring tribe. Real life is not so simple. Eponyms suggest that the genre is folktale and not history. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not eponyms so there may have been legends in which they featured.