Walpole
Well-Known Member
Their village called then brothers and sisters, their neighbors, but others had the same names but their village knew them all from childhood
Precisely! For once again, in Jewish antiquity, "brother" had a much wider meaning than we moderns use. You are forcing a modern Westernized concept of a family unit (i.e. a nuclear family) onto an ancient Hebrew / Semitic (tribal) culture. The ancient Hebrews did not view family in this manner.
Here are scholars affirming this...
"The units comprising the village mispahah, or kinship group, were the families of early Israel. Because these families were agriculturists, their identity and survival were integrally connected with their material world - more specifically, with their arable land, their implements for working the land and processing its products, and their domiciles - as well as with the human and also animal components of the domestic group. In many ways, the term family household is more useful in dealing with early Israelite families (although that would not be the case for the monarchical period and later, when domestic unites were more varied in their spatial aspects and economic functions). Combining family, with its kingship meanings, and household, a more flexible term including both coresident and economic functions, has descriptive merit. The family household thus included a set of related people as well as residential buildings, outbuildings, tools, equipment, fields, livestock, and orchards; it sometimes also included household members who were not kin, such as "sojourners", war captives and servants." - Families in Ancient Israel: The Family in Early Israel, Carol Meyers, pgs. 13-14
In describing early archaeological excavation of homes in Israel...
"These dwelling clusters constitute evidence for a family unit in early Israel larger than that of the nuclear family (or conjugal couple with unmarried offspring). Each pillared house in a cluster may represent the living space of a nuclear family or parts thereof, but the shared courtyard space and common house walls of the linked buildings indicate a larger family grouping. Early Israelite dwelling unites were thus complex arrangements of several buildings and housed what we might call extended families. Furthermore, thee compound dwelling unites were not isolated buildings within a settlement of single-family homes." - Ibid, pg. 16
"The family was never so 'nuclear' as it is in the modern West." - Families in Ancient Israel: Marriage, Divorce and Family in Second Temple Judaism, John J. Collins, pg. 106
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