Unpicking the Old Testament: The Twelve Tribes of Israel

The Bible is a massively misunderstood text. Many will insist on the literal truth behind the stories, and many more will dismiss the entirety of the text as fantasy. But both sides are wrong.

The Bible is a far more complex and layered text than either of these oversimplifications would allow. This can clearly be seen from a cursory examination of the events and characters depicted within its books.

To show you what we mean, take for example the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III. This Neo-Assyrian relief sculpture celebrates the achievements of an Assyrian king, including the subjugation of Jehu, King of Israel. Here we have external conformation of a Biblical character: Jehu was real.

Compare to earlier Biblical characters such as the Patriarchs, Noah, all the way back to Adam and Eve. These are characters unsupported any additional evidence, figures from earlier in the narrative who were entirely mythical. And somewhere in tracing our way back between Jehu and Adam, history gives way to fantasy.

This is fairly easy to understand when you look at the composition of the Bible. Much of the writings and all of the editing found in the Old Testament date from the period during which the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah were captured by Babylon in exile from Jerusalem, Iron Age scholars piecing together their own history, lest it be forgot.

These scholars wrote about Bronze Age figures, but these came from a time before records and these scholars therefore had to rely on hearsay and legend. This is because of an enormous and disastrous event during which the world of humanity was almost destroyed, but which goes entirely unrecognized in the Bible: the Bronze Age Collapse.

Around 1200 BC the trade network and interconnected world of the Mediterranean and Middle East fell apart in short order. Cities burned, contact between kingdoms was lost, and empires fell within decades. Almost everything we know about the world before this collapse is based on collective memory, or is outright legend.

And it was this upheaval which created the world which saw the rise of the twelve tribes of Israel, the foundational people of the Bible.

The Truth of the Twelve Tribes

The Bible tells us that Jacob, youngest of the three patriarchs (after Abraham and Isaac) had twelve sons, and that each of these founded a tribe of Israel. These tribes were united under King David, ruler of a “united Israel” around 1,000 BC.

However after the reign of Solomon Israel was lost. First she was divided into two, and then the northern portion, with ten of the twelve tribes, was conquered by the Assyrian empire around 722 BC. 

The two surviving tribes were Levi and Judah. the Levites did not own any land, instead taking on the religious duties of the people of Israel. The Judites were rulers or Judah, and both tribes were focused at the capital of that kingdom: Jerusalem.

The problem is that King David lived right at the point where Bronze Age legend meets Iron Age history. Scholars today lean towards the possibility that a united Israel never existed, and amongst the evidence they have gathered in support of this conjecture is the Bible itself.

The twelve tribes are mentioned as a group several times in the Old Testament: twice in Genesis, once in Deuteronomy and once in Judges, twice in Numbers and once in Joshua. And the differences between these passages is very telling.

The passages in Numbers and Joshua give the tribes of Judah priority, mentioning this tribe first and associating Judites with primacy and priority: they are the most important tribe in God’s eyes. This makes a lot of sense: it is after all scribes from the Tribe of Judah who are writing this. 

But this is not the case in the other times the tribes are mentioned. To take the two mentions in Genesis first, known as the “Birth Narrative” and the “Blessing of Jacob”. Both place the tribe of Judah fourth, leaving later editors jumping through logical hoops to ensure Judah gets to the top of the list, either through disqualifying other tribes, of adding later inclusions to the list itself.

The mention in Deuteronomy is the same, with the reference to Judah appearing to be a later addition. At least, it seems that a later editor in this “Blessing of Moses” has rearranged things to give Judah additional prominence.

These problems all have a common cause, that being the Iron Age scribes from the Tribe of Judah applying hindsight to their history and managing the narrative to favor their house. We need something that predates their muddying editorial hand, and in Judges we might just have it.

The passage in Judges 5 is called the “Song of Deborah” and it might be one of the oldest fragments in the entirety of the Old Testament. It tells of a celebrated Jewish victory over the Canaanites, and it mentions the tribes who came together to fight.

The tribes of Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulun, Issachar and Naphtali are mentioned as participating, and these can be matched to six of the twelve tribes of Israel. A further four tribes, Reuben, Gilead, Dan and Asher, are berated for failing to participate. 

Both Ephraim and Machir come from the same tribe, that of Joseph. This leaves three tribes missing, neither present for the battle nor even expected to be by those who wrote the Song of Deborah. And these are the tribes of Simeon, Levi, and Judah. 

These are the southern tribes of the Kingdom of Judah, which supposedly only existed later, but according to the Bible’s own narrative they should at this time be a part of the united Kingdom of Israel. The writers of the Song of Deborah disagree: for them these are not tribes of Israel.

What seems to have happened is that the Iron Age editors who put together the Old Testament during their period of captivity in Babylon took a revisionist pen to history while looking to emphasize the importance of their own, surviving tribes. Their edits, stretching all the way back to Genesis, place Judah at the top of the pile.

This transformed Judah from a small kingdom conquered by the Babylonians to the remains of the great kingdom of Israel, ruled by King David and King Solomon. It allowed the scribes of the Babylonian Exile to fashion a history for themselves.

Top Image: The “Twelve Tribes of Israel” may be an Iron Age invention for a unified kingdom that never existed (Ori229 / Public Domain)