The sagas of Jacob and his sons are presented in the biblical book of Genesis in a series of sometimes seemingly unrelated episodes. In this book, the author undertakes to show that these episodes are all intimately connected and were selected to illustrate the problems faced by Jacob in coping with the sibling rivalries among his dozen sons and welding them into a collective body capable of giving birth to a nation. The focus in Jacob and His Sons is on what the biblical text is telling us, explicitly as well as implicitly, about the world in which they lived and how the historical conditions came into being for them ultimately to become transformed into a nation.