The Origins of the 12 tribes of Israel

Tribal inheritances according to the book of Joshua.

The Christian Old Testament, for the most part, tells us the history of the sons of Israel. Jacob, a grandson of Abraham, leaves Padan-Aram with his wives and children — amongst which were the twelve conflict-prone patriarchs — and settles in Canaan, the land YHWH had promised to his grandpa. Establishing roots in the land, Israel, writ small, had to move to Egypt, where one of them was Vizier, to stave off famine.

Several decades later, the Hebrew-Egyptian prince turned shepherd, Moses, performs several miracles to convince a Pharaoh who had by then taken them for his slaves. A much bigger Israel leaves Egypt and, after forty years of wandering in the desert, marches into their Canaanite inheritance, conquering as they go. Upon the semi-completion of their conquest, the descendants of the 12 sons of Jacob, now organised into 12 tribes by descent, parcel out the land amongst themselves.

A few centuries go by, and the tribes of Israel become a kingdom, ruled first by Saul of the tribe of Benjamin, before settling into nearly half a century of rule by the tribesmen of Judah, in the persons of David, his son Solomon, and his grandson Rehoboam. Rehoboam takes great pains to rent the kingdom, an event foretold by the Prophet Ahijah as punishment for the sins of Solomon. He succeeds, with the larger piece going to Jeroboam of the tribe of Ephraim while retaining the smaller piece consisting of two (or three?) tribes, centred on the Judahite stronghold of Jerusalem.

The larger piece, now known as the Kingdom of Israel (or the Northern Kingdom), undergoes a rapid change of leadership after the death of Jeroboam’s son before settling under the leadership of the Omrides, of which Ahab is the most memorable representative. The Northern Kingdom lasted under increasingly disturbed leadership till the Assyrians under Tiglath-Pileser III decided to put an end to that state in 722 BC, becoming the lost ten tribes of lore. The Southern Kingdom, swerving between piety and worldliness, lasted for more than a century before falling to the Babylonians under the famous Nebuchadnezzar III in 587 BC. Such is the history of the first millennia of Israelite history. Except, well, much of it is not history at all.

A close reading of Genesis through Kings and Chronicles reveals a work created by the (careful or otherwise) stitching and modification of multiple documents over time to form a more or less coherent whole. Some of these less than careful editing and their presence in portions of the Christian Old Testament that are almost universally dated several centuries after the events they purport to describe have brought into question the validity of the “12 tribes of Israel” as opposed to 8 or ten or any other number of constituting parts as a part of ancient Israelite history.

Before I show you these troublesome parts that deal with the idea of twelve tribes, there are a few things you should be aware of:

1. The Bible, especially Genesis through to Kings/Chronicles, is not a description of contemporary events. This is probably obvious to you: Genesis describes the creation of man till the departure of Jacob to Egypt, a span of two thousand years by its own internal chronology, which clearly was not written during any of the periods it describes. The same can be observed for the rest of the books in the Pentateuch, which originally began life as one book in five scrolls( hence the name, Pentateuch), as well as Joshua, whose use of the phrase “so and so can be observed till this day” is a dead giveaway. Also, Judges continuously emphasise that the events recorded took place before there were “any Kings in Israel”, indicating that the writer at the very earliest, lived after the beginning of the Israelite Monarchy. I could go on but you get the point.
2. The “writing” of the bible began well into the Iron Age. This process drew on and incorporated both older and contemporary material of both religious and secular origin — oral and written as well as the imaginations of the courtiers, priests, and scribes whose efforts went directly into its creation. This can be gleaned from a reading of the text. More precisely, this process began in Jerusalem in the 7th Century BC, soon after the fall of the Northern Kingdom. The features of the biblical stories set in and before the bronze age e.g. the flood, sojourns of Abraham, etc, for which vague memories probably existed, are so particular to 7th century BC Judah that their conception during this period is near certain. Examples include:

• The caravan of Ishmaelites who sold Joseph to Potiphar of Egypt: Mature camel herds used in the caravan trade in the lower levant only became common enough to be included as an incidental detail in stories in the 7th Century BC. Also, the Arabian desert trade, under Assyrian protection, began to flourish, making such caravan trips common enough, in the 7th Cen. BC.
• Edom: Esau is called the Father of the Edomites. The 12 tribes, in the Book of Numbers, come in contact with the Edomites as a Kingdom. From both Assyrian records and archaeology, we know that the Edomites only formed a state in the 7th Cen. BC, under Assyrian protection. This was one of the things that made the desert trade flourish during that period — the new state of Edom had an interest in preserving the routes of the trade and so did the Kingdom of Judah.
• Accuracy: The relative accuracy of the bible’s description of events, peoples and geography increases the closer you get to the texts that cover the 7th Century BC period i.e. the reign of Josiah, and after. This indicates that the closer the authors got to using contemporary records, the more accurate and reliable their stories got. The Biblical records from the period immediately around and after the reign of Josiah are much more in line with archaeological as well as contemporary records of neighbouring kingdoms than its records of the times prior.

3. The Bible is Judah’s way of telling the history of Israel. As soon as the twelve sons of Israel come onto the biblical stage, Judah (and to some extent Joseph, yet another pointer) comes to the forefront. You could interpret it as a prophecy and its fulfilment. Or as we have noted the bible’s 7th Cen. BC origins in Jerusalem, you could see it for what it probably is — -the House of David’s way, starting with Josiah, of telling the history of the Hebrews. This narrative reworked material from multiple sources to make these few points: YHWH is the God of Israel and the Kings of the House of David are his vice-regents. The few texts of the bible that are distinctly Northern in origin, have few things, if any, to say about the South. The Bible, Genesis through Kings/Chronicles, is not so much the history of Israel as it is the Kingdom of Judah’s history of Israel. And unlike how they are viewed today, probably didn’t start out as works of religion.

Now onto the twelve tribes…

In the Hebrew bible (equivalent to the Christian Old Testament for the purposes of this essay), the 12 tribes are listed by name eighteen times. As you now know, most of these mentions occur in portions that are regarded as being added to the 7th-century core of the bible at a much later period (during and after the Babylonian exile) and as such are more likely to be regurgitations of the common idea of the “twelve tribes” than actually being original. The few older sources are as follows:

The Song of Deborah

The victory Hymn found in Judges 5:2–31 tells of the victory of Deborah and of Barak of tribe Naphtali over Sisera, commander of the armies of King Jabin of Hazor. Widely regarded as older than the portions of the text that surround it — -the entire book of Judges, the tale of the battle against Sisera inclusive — — and indeed as one of the oldest parts of the bible, it is curious in more ways than one but you should know these few:

• It is slightly different from the account of the same event in the preceding chapter, which has the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun as the participants in the battle against Sisera. The song itself describes the defeat of Sisera as a pan-Israelite effort.
• More important to us is its mention of the tribes of Israel — those that took part in the war against Sisera and those that didn’t. The full list is thus:

Participating tribes: Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir(A people associated in other parts of the bible with the tribe Manasseh), Zebulun, Issachar and Naphtali

Non-participating tribes: Reuben, Gilead(a more confusing tribe as other parts of the bible associate it with the tribe of Manasseh. Numbers 26:29 even makes Machir the father of Gilead), Dan, and Asher.

Put together, this is only 8(or 9 or 10) tribes. A few tribes short of the Israel you know. One would be hard-pressed to say that it does not intend to to be a comprehensive list of the tribe since it goes out of its way to mention those tribes that “did not come to me against the mighty”. As the earliest example of Hebrew poetry and one of the oldest portions of the Hebrew Bible, it gives strong reason to suspect the idea that Ancient Israel started out with 12 tribes

The Blessing of Moses

Found in Deuteronomy 33:2–27, the body of this poem contains more descriptions of the tribes than blessings. The poem mentions 11 tribes by name, noting that the tribe of Joseph functions as two tribes rather than one. It is clear that it was not written during the lifetime of Moses, nor does it have any relation with the period it is placed beside in the bible.

In terms of style, the blessing of Reuben, Judah, Levi, and Simeon are outliers; while the other eight tribes are described as strong and flourishing, Reuben is described as going into oblivion, Judah as struggling with its security, and Levi, well, a person not a tribe, a person with priestly duties. Simeon is not even present, which probably indicates that when this poem reached its final form, Simeon was a tribe no more.

Given the geographic region of say, Benjamin, one would be hard-pressed to see how it enjoys security in a United Israel, while Judah is in need of help against its foes. All the outlier tribes are southern tribes and it would not be hard for you to imagine that the original version of this poem was from the Northern Kingdom, about the eight northern tribes, and the outlier parts added later at possibly different periods.

The Blessing of Jacob

Genesis 49 tells of Jacob blessing his twelve sons on his deathbed. Yet a look at the text also reveals the hands of an editor(or multiple) reworking whatever older material to give us what we have today. Like the Blessing of Moses, the parts discussing the southern tribes, who are also the first four sons of Jacob, as well as the sons of Leah, appear to be out of place with the rest of the blessing.

In this reworking, we see a particularly Judahite influence — Judah is exalted above his uterine brothers(actually above all Israel, with the possible exception of Joseph), and is made their ruler. The first four blessings fit the setting of Jacob pronouncing a blessing(or curse) on his children, but it is apparent that the person speaking in the curses of Simeon and Levi is not Jacob. The same is apparent in the blessings of Joseph, which alone out of the blessing of the Northern tribes stands in the same setting of Jacob speaking as the first four blessings.

While it is not easy to separate the reworked parts from the original version, it is clear that the parts that do not fit the setting of Jacob blessing his sons are the text describing the northern tribes. Likely, a description of the northern tribes of Israel in a completely different context was reworked into a narrative framework of these tribes, with their southern brethren, being Jacob’s sons and receiving a blessing from him.

These mentions of the tribes of Israel from sources earlier than the second temple period(after the exile at Babylon) show a few characteristics:

• There were tribal identities in Israel, however, this identity was not fixed, nor was there a particular number of tribes
• The southern tribes of Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah are either excluded or
• Appear to have been edited into materials that originally excluded them

As you now know, the remaining tribal lists in the bible are from sources written after the Jewish elites(Judahites elites) had returned from exile in Babylon. You might wonder, why this pattern of excluding Southern tribes in these earlier sources?

Well, it probably has to do with the real origins of Israel and Judah…

The Late Bronze Age collapse was a cataclysm for the people of the Levant. Cities destroyed and trade routes disrupted, it would take several centuries for the region to recover.

At the end of this time, a new order starts to evolve from the ashes of the old; Canaanites of the hill country began to rebuild old cities along the coast, and some of the sea peoples (themselves a prominent feature of the late bronze age collapse) began to settle in Canaan, most prominently the Philistines and as some evidence seems to point, the tribe of Dan.

Other groups, like the Shasu who were probably the original worshippers of YHWH, the Habiru, a word used to describe people who lived outside the domains of more recognised states, and possibly some erstwhile Egyptians (slaves? migrants? priests?) also came to settle in Canaan. All these peoples had their stories, histories, founding myths, and religions, and the interaction between all these groups and ideas laid the foundation for strongholds, multiple confederacies, and eventually states in Canaan.

This regrowth began as small villages and strongholds, some of which exerted control beyond their immediate vicinity. Few of these strongholds succeeded at becoming Kingdoms, one of the more successful ones being the Tirzah polity. Its rulers, who later moved to Samaria, successfully unified a majority of the Hebrew people into the Kingdom of Israel, one of the most prosperous states of the region.

This Israel was undoubtedly made up of “tribes” — just not a fixed (or known, to us) number of them, nor did they share descent from the twelve sons of a single man at some point in the bronze age. Nor did these tribes include those associated with Judah. The very name “Benjamin” seems to indicate that it was the southernmost part of the Kingdom of Israel( Benjamin means Son of the south, it only became part of the Kingdom of Judah after the fall of Israel).

Another stronghold that became successful at transforming itself into a Kingdom was Davidic Jerusalem, albeit at a much later time than Samaria. The kingdom established around Jerusalem was the Kingdom of Judah, and it first reached statehood with the fall of the Kingdom of Israel in 722 BC. The fall of Israel led to a large exodus of people from the territory of Israel into Judah, bringing with them their northern traditions(which were never part of a single narrative), and provided an opportunity for the Judahite state, now a client state of Assyria like Edom we mentioned earlier, to expand its territory.

Judahite authors incorporated some of these traditions, legends, memories, and records with theirs, and probably more than a pinch of creativity, reworking them into different stories and it is not hard to conceive that some of these stories might not have had a religious character. Later, Second Temple Jewish editors still reworked these stories, incorporating their ideas of true worship, of the cause of their country’s woes, hope for the future as well as new Persian and later, Hellenistic religious and literary ideas into creating a “linearish” history of their people.

In this particular case of Jacob and his sons, you might see a means of connecting the disparate traditions and peoples of Israel just as descent from Hellen did for the Greek peoples. In fact, you could probably call it one of the Hellenistic influences in the Hebrew bible, knowing as you now do, that all but three listings of the twelve tribes are traceable to the Second Temple Period of Judaism.

Sources:

• Did Israel Always Have Twelve Tribes? By Dr.Andrew Tobolowsky
• The Real Origins of the Twelve tribes By Matt Baker of Useful Charts
• NIV Bible.
• Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman
• Archaeology of Northern Israel by Israel Finkelstein