Introduction: This technical note discusses a few of the palaeographic clues revealing the original appearance of the Great Stemma document before it became disordered through repeated scribal copying. On a separate page, I have tabulated some 125 anomalies which are worthy of closer study. The analysis, aimed at readers who are already familiar with medieval and antiquity studies, is a necessary preliminary to a broad interpretation of the document as we possess it today. It leads to a second step, in which we will try to single out which clues tell us how a genealogical stemma might have been drawn in antiquity. If you are only interested in reading the conclusions, I suggest you jump straight to the main page.
The analysis which follows concentrates on a section that constitutes about 2 to 3 per cent of the Roda stemma (see the high-resolution image) and is illustrated by a detailed drawing which the reader should look at before taking in the argumentation below.
The section chosen for analysis spans the tops of plates 11 to 13. It displays 16 generations of the ancestry of Christ, running left to right, starting with "Asus genuit Iosafat" (English: Asa fathered Jehoshaphat), culminating in "Azor genuit Sathoc" (Azor fathered Zadok).
This section is typical of the peculiar wiring at the great stemma's upper margin: the connecting line does not proceed directly from father to son in series, with roundels arranged like beads on a string as one might expect. Instead the roundels are arranged in parallel, with the connectors suspended from a single top line or bar.
Whether this pattern is the one devised by the great stemma's author or the result of an error in scribal transmission remains an open question. As far as I know all 19 versions of the great stemma share this defect, but a derivative 11th-century stemma, which is bound into the Codex Amiatinus III in Florence, corrects this, beading the roundels for all the main lines along the same connector.
The father-son succession of Judean kings in this section of the stemma is that stated in the Gospel of Matthew, which conflicts with the father-son sequence set out in 2 Kings and 1 Chronicles since it leaves out a total of four names. Those names are no longer present in the Great Stemma as we know it today, but I can demonstrate that the Great Stemma's author must in fact have written them on the page.
To make this discussion easier to understand, I have added these names in red text to the detailed graphic. I have given the four king names missed from the Gospel of Matthew in their Vulgate Latin spellings: Ahazias, Ioas, Amasias and Ioachim. I have entered some further missing names in red text, using the spellings in Mommsen's edition of the Liber Genealogus.
1: For each king of Judah, a wife is shown in a connected roundel, just below the king's own roundel, for example, "Zazo uxor asus" (Azubah, wife of Asa). (It might perhaps be noted that the concept of uxor is a Christian construct here: the bible merely identifies these persons as the mothers of the next ruler, and does not say if these were harem women, servants or in some other relationship with the previous ruler. But that is not relevant to the palaeographical issues.) The first anomaly to note is a wide blank space in the Roda version beneath the roundels for the first three kings (Asus, Iosafat and Ioran) of plate 11. The wives' names of this trio have been inserted into roundels which are well down the page. Only one of the three, that for Zazo, is connected by a line to its king. One suspects that the Alpha copyist faced some kind of problem interpreting the model and has left that problem unresolved. Most of the Alpha versions, as well as Epsilon, have re-aligned the roundels and closed up the gap, but the Roda scribe has preserved the evidence of this dilemma. As we proceed, we shall understand what this difficulty of interpretation was, and how it is linked to a much larger confusion.
2: All of the 13 remaining kings are shown with wives, but the oddity is that none of those 13 wives conform with the names stated in the bible and the Liber Genealogus. In the drawing, I have noted in red print the female names as they are set out in the Liber Genealogus. Scripture and the Liber do not identify any wives for Iheconias and his five descendants. So where do the false names come from? Careful comparison of the names in red and the content of the roundels reveals that eight of the wife names have simply been transposed four positions to the right from their correct positions on plate 12.
In the drawing, these eight roundels, and their original positions according to the textual sources, are marked by the two large, horizontally elongated grey boxes which overlap. It should be noted that Iosias had multiple wives, of whom Zecchora and Amithal were two. Zecchora has been displaced all the way into what is now Plate 13, suggesting this major corruption must have ocurred while the stemma was copied onto a large scroll, not while it was being copied from the separate pages of a codex. In Epsilon, the same defect is spread across plates 12, 13 and 14, further confirming that the mix-up preceded the division of the stemma into the sections we see today.
3: We must now consider where the copyist found the four names (Coboda, Ioade, Gotolia and Iecelia in the Roda MS) to fill the gap under the names Ocias, Ioatam, Agaz and Ezezias. When we study the Vetus Latina and Septuagint scripture and the Liber Genealogus, this becomes readily apparent. Three of these names, Chobodda, Ioade and Ieccelia, are given as the wives of the Judean kings absent from the genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew. The differences in orthography are too slight to pose any grounds for objection. This provides strong evidence that the original version of the stemma must have commented on the divergence between the Old Testament and the Gospel of Matthew. It almost certainly contained, somewhere on the page, roundels for the absent kings.
4: Reinforcing proof for this comes from another corruption: the mysterious roundel inscribed "Iosobe filius Ioram". This is attached to a king Jehoram of the Northern Kingdom (Israel). No such relationship is recorded in scripture or any early Christian writings. However the Second Book of Kings presents the history of a ruler in the neighbouring Southern Kingdom (Judah) bearing the same name, Jehoram. 2 Kings 11: 1-3 describes how his daughter, Jehosheba, managed to save and hide her royal nephew, Jehoash, while all his siblings were massacred. The name Iosobe in the stemma closely resembles the Vulgate Latin form of Jehosheba, Iosaba. The transformation from a filia to a filius is probably an error of negligence by a copyist mechanically writing the same word filius hundreds of times on the chart. If the original text was "Iosaba filia Ioram", it is easy to see why a scribe would have then been misled into drawing a connecting line to the Northern Kingdom (Israel) Ioram and relocating the roundel slightly to be directly above that of the putative father.
To a biblical scholar, Jehosheba is an important character for the understanding of the Judaean political succession, because by her authority and courage she restored the old royal line. Her inclusion is not by whim, but makes it plain that her brother Ahazias and her nephew Joash (Vulgate Latin form, Ioas) were present on the chart too and that the great stemma was more than a genealogy. It was also a detailed graphic representation of the political history of the Jews.
All this evidence indicates that the Great Stemma once contained a diagram midway between the segments on the Southern and Northern kingdoms which detailing the exact political succession between Jehoram and Uzziah (Latin: Ozias). This analysis would have surely been one of the most heavily used parts of the Great Stemma in any Late Antique library, logically explaining to the bible scholar the succession within the two Jewish kingdoms which is so confusingly set out in the Books of Kings. The fact that this useful diagram has been lost could perhaps be taken as a sign that it was heavily handled and more quickly destroyed by folding, smudging and the chemical corrosion from secretions on a succession of hands.
The diagram must have been irretrievably lost when a copyist, lacking the authority, the time or perhaps the enthusiasm to restore the correct layout, bodged together the visible scraps into a kind of order to reproduce the stemma yet again in chart form. The sideways displacement of 13 roundels suggests either an extreme lapse in attention, or else that the pieces were only available as torn shreds which could scarcely be recomposed into any intelligent format. By the time that the great stemma was converted into a document divided into sections suitable for a codex, the original must have no longer existed and only the single, very defective reproduction was available. This heavily corrupted state and the difficulty of repairing the text must surely have been a motivation for scholars such as Petrus of Poitiers in the 13th century to discard the Great Stemma entirely and to commence a compilation in chart form starting out anew.
5: We now proceed to discuss clues to other lacunae in this area of the stemma. One of the names here is of enormous interest in the political history of Judah: Gotolia. This is the Vetus Latina name, based on the Septuagint, of a character better known as Athalia. As portrayed in 2 Kings, she was an extraordinarily bloodthirsty ruler who seized power after her son died of war wounds (2 Kings 11:3). It was Athalia who ordered the massacre of her own grandchildren and the rest of the royal family to consolidate her own power, only to be foiled by Jehosheba (above) and be ousted and killed six years later. As might logically be expected, Athalia figures twice in the Great Stemma, firstly as the wife of Jehoram (Gotolia uxor Ioram) and later as a ruler in her own right. The latter mention has been partly erased, but has not been entirely lost, since this annotation has been accidentally shifted by a copyist and converted into an uxor roundel for king Ahaz (Roda: Gotolia uxor Agaz), a person who ruled Judah 100 years later. It is probable that the original annotation was at mid-page and took the form of an arch or a roundel and was part of a timeline of some nature, possibly with a reign duration for the queen, as for example, *Gotolia annos VI.
6: The Gospel of Matthew again skips an ancestral king when it comes to Jehoiakim (Vulgate Latin: Ioiachim; Liber Genealogus: Ioachim). The Great Stemma author evidently included this Judaean king in an additional political succession diagram, which must have been placed below the genealogical succession as given in Matthew. To make the following discussion easier to follow, I have tabulated the kings' names below in the three language versions.
| Liber Genealogus | Vulgate | English | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LG | Ruler | His Parents | Ruler | His Parents | Ruler | His Parents | |
| 1 | 409 | Iosias | Amos & Ieddadida | Iosias | Amon & Idida | Josiah (killed in battle against Egyptians) | son of Amon and Jedidah |
| 2 | 413 | Ioas | Iosias & Amital | Ioahaz (half-brother to Eliachim below) | Iosias & Amital | Shallum (personal name) Jehoahaz (throne name) (taken captive to Egypt) | son of Josiah and Hamutal |
| 3 | 411 | Ioachim | Iosias & Zecchora/Ieccora | Eliachim Ioiachim (half-brother of Ioahaz above) | Iosias & Zebida | Eliakim (personal name) Jehoiakim (throne name) (one account has him taken to Babylon) | son of Josiah and Zebidah |
| 4 | 416 | Iecchonias (ductus est in Babylonia) | Ioachim & [omitted] | Ioiachin alias Iechonias (taken to Babylon) | Ioiachim & Naestha | Jehoiachin alias Jechonias (taken to Babylon as vassal) | son of Jehoiakim and Nehushta |
| 5 | 413 | Sedecia | Iosias & Amital | Matthanias Sedecia | Iosias & Amital | Mattaniah (personal name) Zedekiah (throne name) (the uncle of Jehoiachin, he was blinded and chained, taken to Babylon) | son of Josiah and Hamital |
| 6 | 419 | Salatiel | Iecchonias & ... | Salathihel | Iechonias & ... | Shealtiel | son of Jechoniah |
This is a particularly difficult series to represent graphically using a stemma, given that three of these men are sons of Josiah by two different mothers and that the political leadership then jumps backwards a generation when Zedekiah succeeds his nephew.
It is plain that Jehoiakim/Ioachim must have been present in early versions of the Great Stemma, since the name of his mother Zebidah can be found on the extant manuscripts in the somewhat corrupted form Zeccora [*]One of the Liber Genealogus manuscripts offers the spelling Zecchora, so it is plausible to suggest that this was a current Vetus Latina form. The Septuagint's form of the same name is even more distant from Zebidah: Ieldaph.. She plays no other role in the biblical account except as a giver of birth, so her son must have been mentioned in the Great Stemma. The copyist has given her in marriage to Eliacim, a person from the post-Babylon period.
7: The presence of Hamital (here: Amitaal) offers similar though weaker evidence that her son Jehoahaz was included on the chart in its original form. She has been given in marriage to a post-Babylon figure, Abiut. If the Liber Genealogus is any guide, Jehoahaz would probably have been termed Ioas in the stemma (the name should not to be confused with the first Ioas, who is mentioned in the Vetus Latina at 2 Kgs 2:1). Hamital is also mother of Zedekiah (here: Sedecia). A gloss on the chart not only reminds us that Zedekiah was dragged to Babylon in chains but also contends that he was the same person as Jechoniah: Ieconias qui est Sedecius dedactus in Babiloniam or Hiechonias qui est Sedechius ductus in Babilonia.
The Great Stemma appears to be in conflict at this point with the Liber Genealogus, which correctly identifies these men as two different characters in the 2 Kings story. Both were forcibly taken to Babylon, but one went as a vassal with his courtiers, while the second was tortured and dragged away in the most abject disgrace. A possible origin, or at least a parallel, for this confusion is found in the Hippolytus, who in his Chronicon states: Sedechias, qui et Iechonias, and again: Iosias genuit ... Sedeciam, qui et Ieconias dictus est [*]Hippolytus, and Adolf Bauer and Rudolf Helm. Die Chronik. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1955. See entries 678 and 718.. The hypothesis that Zedekiah used the alternaitive name Jechoniah might have arisen by analogy with other kings whose throne names were different from their personal names.
8: Nehushta, mother of Jehoiachin is also present. She has been falsely attached to Azor as Nastha (beta) or Nasta (sigma). This orthography is fairly close to the Vulgate Latin form Naestha and the Septuagint Nestha. Though we cannot appeal in this case to the Liber Genealogus (this mother is not listed in extant manuscripts of that book), the similarity is already so striking that we do not require any additional documentary support to make this connection.
9: The break point: Zedekiah and Babylon: these are part of a distinct universal chronicle layer, not of the genealogy layer of the document .... [to be continued, noting that Sigma appears to have a priestly-history layer as well (the work of a later editor?), and that a more explicit reference to the start of the fifth age must have been once present]
What happened next: As we noted above, a 10th-century manuscript, the Codice of Roda, at least preserves a certain awkwardness of layout that an alert reader might pick up as a sign that all is not right. But no copyist was ever able to penetrate the mix-up and restore the correct order.
Later manuscripts only compound the corruption. The kings always remain connected to the wrong wives. Sigma repeats the same king-wife misconnections all the way to Eliachim/Zechora and Azor/Nasta. The Delta manuscripts (I have not seen the Calahorra bible, but presume it is no different) adopt their own unique layout, but the content is just as misconnected as in all the other Spanish manuscripts. The Beta manuscripts attempt to smooth over the difficulty by aligning all the wife roundels in a neat row on the same height, but only make the problem worse. Facundus for example, adds an extra roundel for the wife of Saddoc ("uxor Saddoc") so that there will be no untidy gap at the end of the row.
In the 20th century, this anomaly was noticed and described by Yolanta Zaluska, but she was unable to offer any explanation for it. In her article on the stemma in 1985, she speculated, correctly as it turns out, that the the author of the stemma would surely have wanted to mention the four kings of Israel which are omitted from the Gospel of Matthew. She pointed out that non-scriptural wives for the period the Babylonian exile were named in the document. But her only suggestion towards a solution was the observation that the names seemed biblical in type and must have somehow been drawn into the document by an unexplained process. The mystery of how has now been solved at last.
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