(from Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann, translation by John E. Woods)
". . . They set out with seventy souls - which is to say: they regarded themselves as seventy in all; this was no numbered count, but more an emotional count by considered agreement-that is, determined by a moonlit accuracy that, as we well know, is no longer suitable for our own era, but was perfectly justifiable and held to be correct in theirs. Seventy was the number of nations of the world listed in God's tables, and therefore as the number of progeny to emerge from patriarchal loins it was subject to no recount by the light of day. But since it is Jacob's loins we are dealing with here, the wives of his sons should not have been included in the count, should they? But they weren't. If there's no counting to begin with, nothing can be included in the count, and given a result based on the lovely bias of sacred foregone conclusions, the question of what is or is not included in the count is moot. It is not even certain whether Jacob himself was counted, whether the others included him as part of their number, that is seventy, or excluded him as the seventy-first. We must simply accept the fact that this era allowed for both possibilities at once. . ."
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