Arrangement 5: Terah

Notes

A sub-stemma of 25 roundels, not counting Terah itself, a roundel which belongs to Filum A. Dimensions: 5 wide by 9 tall. Liber Genealogus counterpart: section 11.

Top: Foigny bible (left), San Juan bible (right); Bottom: Roda (left), Plutei (right). In three witnesses, there is a sharp turn at NB, highlighted here in green.

Commentary

The fundamental dimensions of this section are determined by the fact that it fits beneath five filum roundels, from Falech to Terah. Assuming that the entire Great Stemma was consistently ten rows high, the space available for this group must necessarily measure five by nine units.

Thara was the father of Abraham and it would appear that this section was built in such a way that Thara's roundel was relatively close to Abraham's, with the rest of his descendants unfurling down and leftwards.

Examining the recensions, we see that many have a bottom row of five which is fairly consistently present. The column of Regma and her four sons is always to the left of the column of Melcha's sons.

Notable errors include the frequent omission of Iscah daughter of Haran (AI). She was clearly present at the start, but has only been preserved in the Alpha and Beta recensions. Iota rearranges Batuel and his children and granddaughters and unaccountably attaches Regma to the wrong Nachor. All the recensions name the daughters of Lot (using the names of the prostitutes in Ezekiel), but this does not seem to be a feature of the ur-Stemma, as there is no mention of this in any version of the Liber Genealogus.

The reconstruction broadly follows what we find in the Roda manuscript. The chief difference is that the wife of Nachor is placed where Roda offers a wife of Thara, a person not in the rest of the diagram tradition. The loop around Rebecca (NBR) at the bottom is suggested by Epsilon. Spaces for the daughters of Lot (maior, minor) indicate where they were later inserted.

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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.