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Concept
Issachar
Summary
Issachar () was, according to the Book of Genesis, the fifth of the six sons of Jacob and Leah (Jacob's ninth son), and the founder of the Israelite Tribe of Issachar. However, some Biblical scholars view this as an eponymous metaphor providing an aetiology of the connectedness of the tribe to others in the Israelite confederation.
Two different etymologies for the name of Issachar have been proposed based on the text of the Torah, which some textual scholars attribute to different sources—one to the Yahwist and the other to the Elohist. The first derives it from ish sakar, meaning man of hire, in reference to Leah's hire of Jacob's sexual favours for the price of some mandrakes. The second derives it from yesh sakar, meaning there is a reward, in reference to Leah's opinion that the birth of Issachar was a divine reward for giving her handmaid Zilpah to Jacob as a concubine. Scholars suspect the former explanation to be the more likely name for a tribe, though some scholars have proposed a third etymology—that it derives from ish Sokar, meaning man of Sokar, in reference to the tribe's perhaps originally worshipping Sokar, an Egyptian deity.
In the Biblical account, Leah's status as the first wife of Jacob is regarded by biblical scholars as indicating that the authors saw the tribe of Issachar as being one of the original Israelite groups; however, this may have been the result of a scribal error, as the names of Issachar and Naphtali appear to have changed places elsewhere in the text, and the birth narrative of Issachar and Naphtali is regarded by textual scholars as having been spliced together from its sources in a manner which has highly corrupted the narrative. A number of scholars think that the tribe of Issachar actually originated as the Shekelesh group of Sea Peoples - the name Shekelesh can be decomposed as men of the Shekel in Hebrew, a meaning synonymous with man of hire (ish sakar); scholars believe that the memory of such non-Israelite origin would have led to the Torah's authors having given Issachar a handmaiden as a matriarch.
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