Comentario sobre Génesis 46:17

וסרח אחותם, “and their sister Serach.” Some commentators claim that seeing the Torah did not use the customary “and Search, his daughter,” as for instance “and Dinah his daughter,” but defined her as someone’s “sister,” that this is proof that Serach had not been sired by Asher at all, but had been born to his wife. This view is also held by Onkelos in his translation of our verse, where he adds the word: “his wife.” I fail to understand the validity of such a commentary as how could she then have been included in what were specifically described in verse 5 of our chapter as “the names of the descendants (biological) who made up the Children of Israel who arrived in Egypt?” The end of the chapter repeats “all the people who were biologically related to Yaakov’s offspring, etc.” We can only explain all this by again referring to the style of the Torah when narrating such details, i.e. that daughters are lumped together with their brothers when the Torah relates family relationships. Another prominent example of the style of the Torah in this regard is the line:ואחות לוטן תמנע, “Lotan had a sister named Timna.” The Torah does not describe Timna’s father as having a daughter by that name. Rashi writes that according to the view of the sage that the brothers all married half sisters who were born as twins with their male counterparts, that now, at the time when the family moved to Egypt, they were not enumerated in the list of seventy descendants as they had all died before this point in time. Nachmanides writes that we do not need to fall back on such an unlikely scenario as the brothers all having married half sisters by the father who had died before they could have reached the age of 40 or so, but that the meaning of Rabbi Yehudah (Bereshit Rabbah 84,21) who claims that Yaakov’s sons married their “sisters” who had been born as twins of their brothers, is that their names had not needed to be listed, except with the words מלבד נשי בני יעקב, “not including the wives of Yaakov’s sons,” adequately covered the subject. If the sons of Yaakov had indeed married Canaanite women, why would the Torah in Genesis 37,33 mention these women as Yaakov’s daughters? Unless they had been biologically related to Yaakov, such as being twin daughters, there would have been no point in referring to them in this entire chapter. Their names were not mentioned in this chapter just as they had not been mentioned at the time they had been born. The main purpose of the Torah listing the incredibly small number of people who came to Egypt with Yaakov, i.e. 70, was to show that these formed the nucleus of a great nation which developed into millions, counting wives and children who were minors, by the time they left Egypt 210 years later. It was in order to alert us to this miraculous population explosion of the Jewish people while they were on Egyptian soil. Man and wife are considered as one unit, as only as a pair can they sire offspring.