A Syriac List of the Names of the Wives of the Patriarchs in BL Add 14620

The book of Genesis systematically omits the names of the women in the generations between Adam and Eve and Abraham and Sarah, but two different works from antiquity gave names to the women of each of these generations: Jubilees and the Cave of Treasures. The names of the wives of the patriarchs were then extracted and circulated in a number of different historical, linguistic, and manuscript contexts throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, including in list form. This chapter provides an analysis of a Syriac list of the names of the wives of the patriarchs not previously discussed in scholarship, found in London, British Library, Add MS 14620, f. 30. It is argued here that the list in BL Add 14620 is based on a list of the names of the wives of the patriarchs from the Jubilees tradition but is supplemented at several points with knowledge that must ultimately come from Cave of Treasures, making the list especially interesting in discussions of the transmission of the names. From the perspective of lists as a scribal activity in antiquity, this chapter looks at the way in which lists were transmitted as individual units—free from work from which the knowledge was extracted. By viewing the list as its own composition, the function and transmission of the list become clearer. Further, as the list is viewed as a work in its own right, the way in which the scribe interacted with the base text helps allows us to analyse the specific context in which the current list was produced.