Abstract
This article argues that, though Abraham is the principal subject of the first unit in the Terah genealogy, the genealogical structure of Genesis obliges one to take account of the family to which he belonged, its antecedents and its descendants, and therefore not only to look forward to the ethnogenesis of a single people, but backwards into the post-disaster world, the world we still inhabit.
1. The First Family in the Book of Genesis
The book of Genesis is distinctive over against the other four books of the Pentateuch in several respects. In the first place, it is the only one of the five without a collection of laws, since the promulgation of the law about circumcision (Gen. 17.9–14), followed ‘on that very same day’ (םויה םצעב הוה, 17.23) by the self-circumcision of Abraham aged ninety-nine and of Ishmael aged thirteen, stands by itself. It is therefore an integral part of the Abraham story and qualifies, by virtue of greater antiquity, as the etiology of the practice rather than Joshua's mass circumcision at Gilgal (Josh. 5.2–9) or Zipporah's timely intervention to save Moses’ life by circumcising him, or maybe their son, on the way to Egypt (Exod. 4.24–26). The unique character of Genesis is also apparent in the way the temporal dimension is tracked by the schematic ages assigned to the principal characters, Abraham in the first place. These notations are part of a complex chronological schema beginning with creation and the first human being (Gen. 2.4a; 5.1a), and extending throughout Genesis and only sporadically beyond it at several key points: the exodus from Egypt (Exod. 12.40–41), the setting up of the wilderness sanctuary (Exod. 40.1–2, 17), departure from Sinai (Num. 10.11), the death of Moses (Deut. 34.7), and the building of Solomon's temple (1 Kgs 6.1). With the exception of the last, these dates are either attributed to the Priest-scribal source (henceforth P) or closely related to it, and are part of a comprehensive outline of world history perhaps based on a ‘Great Year’ 4000 years of ordinary time in length. 1
Closely tied in with chronology is genealogy. The Genesis genealogies are arranged in two series of five units each introduced with the formula ‘These are the generations’ (תורלות הלא) followed by the name of the first head of family. The first pentad covers the epoch from the creation of the world and the appearance of the first human being to the near-extinction of the deluge, followed by ten generations of Noah's descendants ending with Terah in the tenth postdiluvian generation (Gen. 2.4b/5.1a–11.26). 2 The second, overlapping with the first, begins with Terah in the tenth generation of the post-catastrophe world, continues with an ethnography of ancient Israel, and ends with the death of Joseph, Terah's great-great-grandson in Egypt (11.27–50.26). The two pentads may be set out as follows:
Terah is located at the end of one epoch and the beginning of another, a transitional figure who must therefore be understood in terms of both his past and his future.
The genealogical structure of Genesis dictates the course of the narrative. Dealing as it does with the basic human realities of birth, marriage, posterity and death, the narrative can even be said to be generated by the genealogy. 3 In common with an increasing number of scholars, I subscribe to the view that the story covered by the genealogical structure is an editorial rather than strictly authorial entity, and that its principal component is the Priestly narrative source (P Grundschrift or PG) composed sometime after the dissolution of the Judean state and the subsequent deportations. 4 We might even consider the Genesis toledot structure with its two pentads as the first stage of a larger structuring process which reached its terminus with the emergence of a fivefold Pentateuch/Torah. In the ancient Levant and the Near East there seems to have been a predilection for and, in some circles, for example the Pythagoreans, a veneration for the number five and the pentagram. In the Hebrew Bible five and multiples of five are especially prominent in accounts featuring architectural specifications: Noah's ark (Gen. 6.15), the wilderness altar and tent shrine (Exod. 26–27; 36; 38), Ezekiel's visionary temple (Ezek. 40–41), and Solomon's temple beloved of Templars and Masons, in which the pilasters and doorposts of the ‘Holy of Holies’ were in pentagonal shape (1 Kgs 6–7; 2 Chron. 3–4). It should not be surprising to find structural parallels along the spatial and temporal axis, and the place of worship is, of course, of central importance in the P history.
Since structure is an important aspect of meaning in written records, especially in ancient texts, we would be justified in concluding that Terah in the tenth generation after the catastrophic deluge, the first patriarch in the second series of toledot, occupies an important intermediate and transitional position between two epochs, namely, the ancient world damaged and depopulated but still intact and a new dispensation inaugurated with a journey undertaken by members of Terah's immediate family (11.31). It is common practice to take Abraham as an absolute beginning of this new epoch while ignoring his relation to events in the world which preceded it. I propose that we adopt the different strategy of beginning with Terah and his family in keeping with the toledot structure, therefore taking account of the past as well as the future, retrospect as well as prospect, viewed from this axial point. We shall see that we even have biblical warranty for this procedure. First, however, something should be said about the family itself and its individual members.
2. Terah's Family (Genesis 11.27–30)
Terah himself is tenth in line from Noah and ninth from Shem, Noah's first son. His schematic life-span of 205 years even exceeds that of his father Nahor (148 years), as it does all those who come after him, even Abraham at 175, Isaac at 180, and Moses at a mere 120. His age aligns him with the world repopulated with the survivors of the great deluge, while not being entirely out of line with the longevity of his immediate descendants. 5 Terah's name, and the names of his sons Nahor and Haran, 6 correspond to toponyms in northern Mesopotamia near the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris. Terah is connected with til sa turāhi on the Balikh river near Harran, mentioned in Neo-Assyrian records; 7 Nahor is identical with nahur in the same region, known from the Mari correspondence; 8 and Harran (harrānu) was an important center of the cult of the lunar deity Sīn. 9 The name Abram, reformulated as Abraham, is Aramean, and therefore at home in Aram-naharaim, the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris where the cities mentioned above were located. This was Abraham country, the land of his birth and his kindred, to which he sent his majordomo to find a wife for his son (Gen. 24.1–9). Both Isaac and Jacob married Aramean cousins from the same region, and in the liturgy for the presentation of the first fruits Jacob is even described as ‘the Aramean about to perish’ (דבא ימרא, Deut. 26.5). This raises a problem for Ur of the Chaldees (Tell al-Muqayyar, about ten miles from Nasiriyah in southern Iraq) as the starting-point of the journey (Gen. 11.28), since none of the Terahite family has any connection with southern Mesopotamia. If therefore we are to make sense of the narrative at this point we must suppose that the appositional phrases םידשכ רןאב (‘in Ur of the Chaldees’, Gen. 11.28) and םידשכ רןאמ (‘from Ur of the Chaldees’, Gen. 11.31) have been inserted into the account of the journey. If this is so, the intent may have been to associate Abraham with the Judean diaspora settled in that part of Mesopotamia in the early sixth century BCE, a supposition which fits well with Aram-naharaim as the region in which the deportees from Samaria were settled by the Assyrians after the fall of their city in 722 BCE. 10 These locations may have served to emphasize concern for the reunion of Israel and Judah, north and south, often expressed in later prophetic texts. 11
There is also a problem with the destination of the first stage of the journey from Ur. We are told that the final destination was, from the outset, the land of Canaan (Gen. 11.31). To reach that destination they would have had to travel north following the course of the Euphrates, but not as far north as Harran, the site of which is now in south-east Turkey, about forty kilometers from Urfa. To reach the land of Canaan they would have turned west much earlier in the direction of Damascus, then south into Palestine following either the coastal route, the famous Via Maris, or the central ridge, passing through Shechem and Bethel, the route taken by Jacob on his return to Canaan after a twenty-year absence (Gen. 33.18). It was obviously important to reach Harran since it was there that they settled and from there that Abram, Sarai and Lot would eventually depart for the land of Canaan.
Following the pattern set by Adam and Noah, Terah has three sons, a common motif in traditional narrative and myth. 12 We shall soon learn that Lot, Haran's son, is included as Abraham's heir-apparent in view of the infertility of Abram's wife Sarai. The P source will go on to note how he disqualifies himself in that capacity by settling outside the promised land in a city of low repute (Gen. 13.6, 11b–12) and how, finally, he was rescued from the destruction of that place, thus enabling him, in spite of himself, to become the ancestor of Moabites and Ammonites (19.29). Milcah, the first of two daughters of Haran, became the wife of her uncle Nahor, ancestor of the Arameans. We hear no more of Iscah, but according to an exegetical tradition reported in Gen. R. 38.14 and known to Josephus (Ant. 1.151), Iscah was originally another name for Sarai, Abram's wife. This is one midrash which may be well grounded. It is a rule of traditional narrative of this kind that there be no superfluous characters; each character must have a definite function in the unfolding plot. 13 With Iscah's marriage to the first son and Milcah's to the second, both uncle–niece marriages, the symmetry beloved of the genre is maintained. Furthermore, the names Sarai and Milcah are titular as well as personal: the former signifying ‘princess’ and corresponding to Šarrātu, consort of the god Sīn whose cult at Harran was promoted by Nabonidus, last Neo-Babylonian ruler; the latter signifying ‘queen’ corresponding to Malkātu, a title of the goddess Ishtar co-opted into the pantheon as daughter of the same lunar deity. Such traditions may have been known in some circles in ancient Israel and Judah. In his final address to his followers Joshua recalls that their first ancestors, Terah, Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates and worshiped other gods, one of whom may well have been the Aramean deity Sīn (Josh. 24.2). 14
3. Terah and the Future
As recorded in Gen. 11.27–12.5a, the notice about the characters and events at the beginning of the Terah toledot is not free of problems. The first issue concerns sources. According to the standard source division, the verses 11.27, 31–32; 12.4b–5a are assigned to P, and the remaining verses, 11.28–30 and 12.1–4a, to a different Pentateuchal source. 15 Genesis 11.28–30 reads as follows:
Haran died in the land of his birth [Ur of the Chaldees] during his father's lifetime. Abram and Nahor took wives; Abram's wife was called Sarai and Nahor's Milcah. She was the daughter of Haran, father of Milcah and Iscah. Sarai was infertile; she had no child.
We may accept this last notice about the infertility of Sarai (11.30) as an addition since similar language is used in the non-P versions of the infertility of the wives of Isaac and Jacob, respectively Rebekah and Rachel (Gen. 25.21; 29.31). In addition, the P author will introduce the expedient of a surrogate wife for Abram at a later point in the story with the simple observation that Sarai had borne no children for Abram (Gen. 16.1–3). We may concede this point to the conventional source analysis, but there seems to be no compelling reason to deny the previous two verses to P. Genesis 11.28–29 explains why Haran, after fathering Lot and providing a wife for Nahor—or for both Nahor and Abram if Iscah is another name for Sarai—is absent from the story after this point. More importantly, the purpose of this notice is to introduce the principal dramatis personae, those who will undertake the momentous journey with Terah, and it would be strange indeed if Lot were introduced and not Sarai.
At this point we note the residue of two accounts of the journey to Canaan. Genesis 12.1–4a, in which Abram hears the voice and obeys the command to go on a journey, interrupts the P version of Terah with Abram, Sarai and Lot setting out on a journey and settling in Harran, followed by Abram with Sarai and Lot leaving Harran and setting out for the land of Canaan (11.31–32; 12.4b–5). The insertion is flagged with the resumptive verse (Wiederaufnahme) repeated after the insertion (תכלל ןענכ הצרא, Gen. 12.5, cf. 11.31), and the presence of two narrative strands is apparent from the discrepancy about the destination: in Gen. 12.1 Abraham is told that it is ‘a land I will show you’, in other words, a land as yet unidentified, while in 11.31 the destination from the outset is the land of Canaan. The purpose of the addition in 12.1–4a would seem to be to provide a more explicitly religious motivation for the journey, now to be undertaken in the absence of Terah who remains behind while Abram and his wife, together with Lot, set out from Abram's country in Harran in the region of Aram-naharaim. 16
Terah, then, is the proto-ancestor, the Urvater, and is so acknowledged by Joshua in his valedictory address to the all-Israelite assembly at Shechem which begins as follows:
Long ago your ancestors—Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor—lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. (Josh. 24.2)
This summary statement does no more than reproduce the historical beginnings as presented in Gen. 11.27–28. Haran, presumed dead, is not mentioned in it. Once he had provided his two brothers with wives and fathered Lot, he had fulfilled his function and could be removed from the narrative. He will be recognized as the ancestor of Moabites and Ammonites (Gen. 19.36–38) only through Lot's inadvertent fathering of the eponymous Moab and Ben-ammi (Gen. 19.36–38). Nahor, named for his grandfather (Gen. 11.31), is with his wife Milcah progenitor of the Arameans whose close relations with Israelites is indicated, inter alia, by the cross-cousin marriages of Isaac and Jacob (Gen. 24; 29–30) and the peace treaty between Jacob and Laban (Gen. 31.43–54). 17 In the brief Aramean genealogical list in Gen. 22.20–24 Kemual is the father of Aram, Arameanpar excellence, and Bethuel is the father of Laban and Rebekah visited by Abraham's majordomo in search of a wife for Isaac (Gen. 24.1–67). 18 We are told that the majordomo's destination was the city of Nahor (24.10), which could refer either to Harran or to Nahur on the Upper Balikh river in Aram-naharaim. 19
In the course of the only revelation received by Abram in the Priest-scribal source (Gen. 17.5) his name is given a new significance by the addition of one letter, changing it from Abram to Abraham (from םרבא to םהרבא). The new name is taken to mean ‘father of a multitude of nations’, in effect internationalizing the bearer of the name. 20 The vision report in which the name change occurs (Gen. 17.1–8) is modelled on the similar revelation to Jacob, from the same source (Gen. 35.9–13). In the latter the name change, from Jacob to Israel, makes the bearer unequivocally the eponymous and primary ancestor of the Israelite people. The situation is different with Abraham. With Sarai, now Sarah (Gen. 17.15), he will be venerated as ancestor of Israelites by extension of the genealogical chain backwards beyond Jacob and Isaac; with Hagar he will be ancestor of Ishmaelite Arabs through Ishmael, his other beloved son; and with Keturah he will be acknowledged as progenitor of Midianite and other Arabian tribes, on into the distant future.
4. Terah and the Past
Terah is the first link in a long genealogical chain extending Israelite ethnography back into the world which survived the near-extinction of the deluge. These continuities are made fully apparent in the way the story is told in these early chapters of Genesis. As Noah fills the tenth place in the antediluvian history of humanity beginning with Adam (Gen. 5.1–2), so Terah occupies the tenth place among the postdiluvian generations. Like Adam and Noah, Terah has three sons, and Terah's family, like the family of Noah, numbers eight individuals. Both families receive a blessing, and do so in the name of the damaged world which survived the catastrophe (Gen. 9.1; 12.2–3). However we construe the blessing on Abram in the supplementary source, it is to be shared in some way with ‘all the families of the earth’ (המראה תחפשמ לכ, 12.3b). In the social context of the kind of society envisioned for the story of Israel's ancestors, the term החפשמ generally refers to the clan, the unit intermediate between the household (בא־תיב) and the tribe (טבש, הטמ), but in the so-called ‘Table of the Nations’ (Gen. 10.1–32), the nations of the then-known world, including major powers such as Babylon, Assyria and Egypt, are listed as ‘families’ (10.6, 20, 31, 32). When read in context, the Abrahamic blessing on all the families of the earth would refer to these nations in the damaged but still intact post-diluvian world.
Noah and Abraham are also the beneficiaries of a promissory covenant guaranteed by a sign, both in the manner of the Priest-scribal source (9.8–17; 17.1–14). 21 The covenant with Noah—a kind of peace treaty between God and humanity—was a response to the fear of extinction, a fear which was understandable in the aftermath of the deluge, but which must have been widespread among Judeans in Judah and abroad after the dissolution of the state, the executions and deportations. Hence the emphasis throughout the Genesis story on the command to be fruitful and multiply—in other words, to repopulate the world. 22
Terah's family is also favored with a new initiative of God who speaks after long silence. The call to Abram to undertake a journey is the first time the voice of God has been heard since the covenant with Noah's family (Gen. 9.8–17). In the paradigmatic fable of the building of Babel and its ziggurat (11.1–9), the builders talk among themselves and Yahweh soliloquizes, but there is no communication. In defiance of the previous affirmation of the spread of languages in the ‘Table of the Nations’ (10.5, 20, 31), the author of the Babel story makes creative use of the phenomenon of linguistic differentiation as symbolic of non-communication. At the social and political level the result is dispersion, disgregation, hostility, all of which is represented as happening in the generation of Peleg, the fifth generation, half-way between Noah and Terah (11.18–19; cf. 10.25). 23
Abraham is, of course, the principal subject of the first unit in the Terah toledot (Gen. 11.27–25.11), but the genealogical structure of Genesis invites the reader insistently to take account of the family to which he belonged, their antecedents as well as their descendants, and therefore to look not only forward to the ethnogenesis of a single people but backwards into the post-disaster world, the world we still inhabit, in which and for which, in the dispensation of God, the family existed.
Footnotes
1.
On this ‘search for the structure of time’, see, among recent publications, Jeremy Hughes, Secrets of the Times: Myth and History in Biblical Chronology (JSOTSup, 66; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990); Joseph Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible (ABRL; New York: Doubleday; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 47–50; idem, Creation, Un-Creation, Re-Creation: A Discursive Commentary on Genesis 1–11 (London: T&T Clark International, 2011), pp. 107–11.
2.
The heading to the second unit of this first pentad, ‘This is the book of the generations of Adam’ (Gen. 5.1), reads as if it were the introduction to the entire genealogical series, as is the case with the corresponding series in 1 Chron. 1.1–26. If this was in fact the case, Gen. 2.4a would presumably have been added, probably to maintain the fivefold structure, as proposed by Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction (trans. Peter R. Ackroyd; Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), p. 204.
3.
On the relation between genealogy and narrative, see Otto Eissfeldt, “Biblos geneseōs“, Gott und die Götter’, in Festschrift für Erich Fascher zum 60. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1958), pp. 31–40, reprinted in Kleine Schriften III (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1966), pp. 458–70, and The Old Testament, pp. 204–208; J. Scharbert, ‘Der Sinn der Toledot-Formel in der Priesterschrift’, in H.-J. Stoebe (ed.), Wort–Gebot–Glaube. Beiträge zur Theologie der Alten Testaments (Zurich: Zwingli, 1970), pp. 49–50; Naomi Steinberg, ‘The Genealogical Framework of the Family Stories in Genesis’, Semeia 46 (1989), pp. 41–50; B. Renaud, ‘Les généalogies et la structure de l'histoire sacerdotale dans le livre de la Genèse’, RB 97 (1990), pp. 5–30; Joseph Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch, pp. 58–59, 99–100; Thomas Hieke, Die Genealogien der Genesis (Freiburg: Herder, 2003); Matthew A. Thomas, These Are the Generations: Identity, Covenant, and the ‘Toledot’ Formula (New York: T&T Clark International, 2011).
4.
A useful contribution to this dating for the P Grundschrift (PG) is that of Albert de Pury, ‘Le choix de l'ancêtre’, TZ 57 (2001), pp. 105–14; idem, ‘PG as the Absolute Beginning’ in T.C. Römer and K. Schmid (eds.), Les dernières rédactions du Pentateuque, de l'Hexateuque et de l'Ennéateuque (BETL, 203; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 2007), pp. 99–128. For other references see my ‘Abraham as Paradigm in the Priestly History in Genesis’, JBL 128 (2009), pp. 225–41.
5.
Terah's age according to MT is supported by LXX, Syriac and Vulgate, but the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Targum, and Philo (Migration of Abraham 177) have him dying aged 145. The MT should be retained, however, since the alternative results from combining his age at the birth of Abraham, i.e., 70, and his age at Abraham's departure from Harran, i.e., 75. The lower age also had the advantage of avoiding the embarrassment of Abraham leaving his old father behind when departing for Canaan.
6.
To avoid confusion, the more correct form Harran will be used for the place name and Haran for the personal name.
7.
Richard S. Hess, ‘Terah (Person)’, in ABD, VI, pp. 387–88.
8.
Richard S. Hess, ‘Nahor (Person)’, in ABD, IV, pp. 996–97.
9.
‘Harran’, in Piotr Bienkowski and Alan Millard (eds.), Dictionary of the Ancient Near East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2000), p. 140. On the cult of the god Sīn at Harran in the late Neo-Babylonian period, see Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus King of Babylon 556–539 B.C. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 43–65.
10.
Harran is near Gozan (Guzāna, Tell Halāf) on the River Khabūr where these northern deportees were settled (2 Kgs 17.6; 18.11; 1 Chron. 5.26), and Israelite names have come to light in the same region; see M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB, 11; New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 197; Lawson Younger Jr, ‘The Deportations of the Israelites’, JBL 117 (1998), pp. 201–27.
11.
Jer. 3.18; 23.5–8; 30.3; Ezek. 34.11–31; 37.15–28; Zech. 11.7–14.
12.
As, for example, the three sons of the first parents (Gen. 4.1–2; 5.3) and of Noah (6.10) and, further afield, Dorus, Ion and Aeolius, sons of Deucalion the Greek Noah. Deucalion's sons are ancestors of the three branches of the Greek-speaking peoples: Dorians, Ionians, Aeolians.
13.
On functions of characters in traditional narrative, see the work of the Russian Formalist Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austen: University of Texas Press, 2nd edn, 1968).
14.
See n. 9 above.
15.
For ready reference see Eissfeldt, The Old Testament, pp. 188–89; Martin Noth, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions (trans. Bernard W. Anderson; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), pp. 263–64.
16.
The inclusion of Lot in the interpolated notice (12.4a) would already have been explained on the assumption that 11.30, informing the reader that Sarai was infertile, is from the same supplementary source, and the reason for his presence will become more apparent as the story unfolds. On Gen. 12.1–4a much has been written; in addition to the commentaries, see Friedrich Dietrich, ‘Zur Literarkritik von Gen 12,1–4a’, BN 8 (1979), pp. 25–35; Eberhard Ruprecht, ‘Vergegebene Tradition und theologische Gestaltung in Genesis xii 1–3’, VT 29 (1979), pp. 171–88; idem, ‘Der traditionsgeschichtliche Hintergrund der einzelnen Elemente von Genesis xii 2–3’, VT 29 (1979), pp. 444–64; Patrick D. Miller, ‘Syntax and Theology in Gen xii:3a’, VT 34 (1984), pp. 472–76.
17.
As witnesses to and guarantors of the agreement Laban appeals to ‘the god of Abraham and the god of Nahor’ (Gen. 31.53). The phrase ‘the god of their fathers’ which follows, absent from some LXX mss, was probably added.
18.
Laban is later identified as the son of Nahor (Gen. 29.5), but ‘son’ must be understood to mean ‘grandson’. His father Bethuel, son of Nahor, seems to have died before the majordomo's visit since Rebekah's brother and mother take the lead in the important pre-marital arrangements. Most commentators therefore take the mention of his name at Gen. 24.50 as a misguided addition.
19.
Hess, ‘Nahor (Person)’, and ‘Nahor (Place)’.
20.
The word ןומה, ‘multitude’ in םיוג ןומה בא is intended to suggest the new name by assonance. The point is clearly made but the method is a bit opaque.
21.
The bow in the clouds (9.12, 17) may have been borrowed from Marduk's Bowstar set in the sky after the defeat of Tiamat in Enuma Elish (6.87–91). The circumcised body is the sign for Abraham (17.11).
22.
וברו ורפ, Gen. 1.22, 28; 8.17; 9.1, 7; also 26.22; 35.11; 47.27.
23.
The name Peleg is from the verb גלפ (Niphal), meaning ‘to be separated, divided’. The statement in the ‘Table of the Nations’ that ‘in his days the earth was divided’ (10.25) probably refers to the Babel story. See John Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2nd edn, 1930), p. 220; Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (trans. Mark E. Biddle; Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), p. 93; Claus Westermann, Genesis I-II: A Commentary (trans. John J. Scullion, SJ; Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1984), p. 526.