Origin
According to the Torah, the tribe consisted of descendants of Issachar, the ninth son of Jacob, and a son of Leah, from whom it took its name; however some biblical scholars view this also as postdiction, an eponymous metaphor providing an aetiology of the connectedness of the tribe to others in the Israelite confederation. According to this biblical passage, the name Issachar refers to Leah hiring Jacob's sexual favours at the cost of some mandrakes; this suggests the etymology is ish-sachar, literally meaning man of hire, though some Jewish sources take it instead to mean reward or recompense, in reference to Issachar being the result of Jacob being hired.
A number of people think that some of the Israelite tribes actually originated as part of the sea peoples. Issachar may be one of these, since in Egyptian accounts there is a tribe of sea peoples named Shekelesh; Shekelesh is here believed to be composed from shekel-ish, meaning men of the shekel, a meaning synonymous with Issachar's man of hire. The biblical passage in which Leah is described as Issachar's matriarch is one which is regarded by some textual scholars as having been spliced together from its sources in a manner which has highly corrupted the narrative; Leah as a matriarch is interpreted to suggest that the text's authors believed the tribe to be one of the original Israelite groups, and it is having a handmaiden - Bilhah or Zilpah - as a matriarch that would have indicated a foreign origin. In the ancient Song of Deborah, Issachar is closely associated with Naphtali, which itself does have a handmaiden as matriarch, and at one point the text appears to have been changed by the word Issachar being inserted instead of Naphtali
Read more about this topic: Tribe Of Issachar
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.”
—Neal Cassady (1926–1968)
“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
spillways free authentic power:
dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel
to break the armored and concluded mind.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)