I9I3-] OF THE PATRIARCHAL NARRATIVES. 189 



meant " sons of the south " or " southerners," and was given them 

 because they were the southernmost of the Rachel folk. This 

 southern position they occupied in Palestine, but could hardly have 

 held as a nomadic tribe. The tradition that Benjamin is the young- 

 est of Jacob's sons is a recollection of the late development of the 

 tribe. 



Similarly, the name Joseph seems to have been attached to the 

 tribes of Ephraim and Manesseh after the settlement in Canaan. 

 The name itself has had an interesting history. A Babylonian busi- 

 ness document of the time of the first dynasty of Babylon (2225- 

 1926 B.C.) had for one of its witnesses Yashub-ilu,* or Joseph-el. 

 Thothmes III, who conquered Palestine and Syria between 1478 and 

 1447 B.C., records as one of the places which he conquered in Pal- 

 estine Ya-sha-p'-ra,^ which Eduard Meyer many years ago recog- 

 nized as Joseph-el. This equivalence is doubted by W. Max Miiller, 

 but is, so far as I can see, possible. How did the name of a Baby- 

 lonian man become attached to a Palestinian city ? There was at the 

 time of the first dynasty frequent intercourse between Mesopotamia 

 and Palestine. Documentary evidence of this will be cited below 

 in connection with Abraham. Is it too much to imagine that a 

 Joseph-el migrated, and that his name became attached to a Pal- 

 estinian city? Not only have we in our own country many places 

 named for men, but modern Palestine afifords an example of a vil- 

 lage that lost during the nineteenth century its name, Karyet el-' I neb, 

 and substituted for it the name of a famous sheik, Abu GJiosIi.'^ If 

 in some such way Joseph-el made its way into Palestine and Rachel 

 tribes afterward settled in the region, the shortened form of the name, 

 Joseph, might naturally become the name of their supposed ancestor. 



The principle of interpretation gained from Genesis 10 compels 

 us to suppose that the name Joseph came in in some such way, for 

 in the historical period no tribe of Joseph appears. If the investi- 



*" Cuneiform Texts, etc., in the British Museum," 11., 23, 15. 



' Mittheilung der Vorderasiatische Gesellschaft, 1907, p. 23. Muller 

 thinks it equivalent to Yesheb-el, " God dwells." The Babylonian might also 

 be so interpreted. The phonetic equivalence between Babylonian and Hebrew 

 points rather to Joseph-el, and the Babylonian form may account for the 

 Egyptian spelling. 



' See Baedeker's " Palastina," 1910, p. 16. 



