Page "Tribe of Manasseh" Paragraph 7

According to the Torah, the tribe consisted of descendants of Manasseh, a son of Joseph, from whom it took its name.

Some critics, however, view this as a postdiction, an eponymous metaphor providing an aetiology of the connectedness of the tribe to others in the Israelite confederation In the Biblical account, Joseph is one of the two children of Rachel and Jacob, a brother to Benjamin, and father to both Ephraim, and his first son, Manasseh ; Ephraim received the blessing of the firstborn, although Manasseh was the eldest, because Jacob foresaw that Ephraim's descendants would be greater than his brother's.