What are the 12 Tribes of Israel?

Biblical Origins

According to the Hebrew bible, the 12 Tribes are based off the sons of Jacob, one of the patriarchs of the Jewish people.

Jacob, who was renamed Israel by a divine being, was chosen by G!d to be the patriarch of the Israelite nation. He had thirteen children, 12 of whom were sons. The twelve sons form the basis for the twelve tribes of Israel, listed in the order from oldest to youngest: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin. Jacob was known to display favoritism among his children and so the tribes themselves were not treated equally in a divine sense. Joseph, despite being the second-youngest son, received double the inheritance of his brothers and was treated as if he were the firstborn son instead of Reuben, and so his tribe was later split into two tribes, named after his sons, Ephraim and Manasseh.

Israelites all descended from these 12 brothers, and maintained the identity of their tribe. Following the Exodus, according to the Torah, descendants of Joseph were known as descendants of one of his two sons, Ephraim and Menashe. This made for a total of 13 tribes. Some from the tribe of Levi became the priestly family, known as Kohanim.

According to Joshua 13–19, the Land of Israel was divided into twelve sections corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel. However, the tribes receiving land differed from the biblical tribes. The Tribe of Levi had no land appropriation but had six Cities of Refuge under their administration as well as the Temple in Jerusalem. There was no land allotment for the Tribe of Joseph, but Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, received their father's land portion.

What about the "Lost Tribes"?

After King Solomon died around 922 BCE, the tribes split into two kingdoms as a result of a power struggle. In 722 BCE Assyria invaded Israel, and the northern kingdom was conquered- many of the people who lived in the northern kingdom were exiled. In 586 BCE the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar attacked the southern kingdom, and exiled much of that population to Babylon. Though many lost their Israelite identity in Babylon, plenty of them retained their connection to their heritage, and eventually returned to Israel and rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem. By that point the northern kingdom was lost. Today’s Jews stem from the people of Judah (thus, Judaism).

The lost tribes are one of the biggest mysteries of Jewish history, and have inspired multiple theories.

Over time dozens of theories have come forth about the whereabouts of the tribes of the northern kingdom. It’s difficult to find a region of the world that doesn’t contain a group that has at some point claimed to have descended from the lost tribes. In North and South America, Japan, China, Ethiopia, South Africa, India, Nigeria, New Zealand, England, Ireland, Afghanistan and Burma, there are thousands who claim Israelite ancestry.

Tudor Parfitt of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies has studied the lost tribes for years, and doesn't believe these claims, mainly because they all seem to stem from a sense of being different and persecuted, rather than from any historical evidence. He argues that though these people may identify as Jews their claims are based on legends, not lineage. In some cases, when a minority group was persecuted it was called “Jewish” to denote evil, and the historically-inaccurate label stuck. 

Assuming the lost tribes assimilated fully into other groups around the seventh century BCE, as Parfitt and others argue, these tribes’ descendants are now spread all over the world, scattered in every region without any knowledge of their ancient Jewish lineage. It’s more than likely that these descendants are walking among us today, and some of them may even be part of the groups that associate themselves with the lost tribes.

Beta Israel

The contemporary Jewish community has accepted one group claiming to be descended from a lost tribe: the Beta Israel, or Jews from Ethiopia, who claim to trace their lineage to the tribe of Dan. Their connection to Dan comes from a late ninth century Jew called Eldad HaDani, or Eldad the Danite. Eldad showed up in Tunisia speaking Hebrew and told the Jewish community there that he was a member of the tribe of Dan, who had settled in the land of Cush (modern day Ethiopia). 

In 1973, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, then the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, declared the Beta Israel to be descendants of the tribe of Dan, relying on responsa from the Radbaz and Rabbi Tzemach Gaon. Shortly after Yosef made this ruling, the State of Israel began aiding the members of Beta Israel who were being persecuted and sought to escape Ethiopia. As Jews they were eligible for the Law of Return, and subsequently more than 15,000 members of Beta Israel were airlifted out of their homeland, and into Israel. Though some scholars still doubt the veracity of their claims to lineage, the Beta Israel have been accepted as Jews by nearly all of the rabbinic authorities in Israel today.

Historical Realities

Contemporary historians believe that the "12 Tribes" were never truly united under a "Kingdom of David," and there wasn't really a fixed number of tribes. Instead, the idea that there were always twelve tribes should be regarded as part of the Israelite national founding myth: the number 12 was not a real number, but an ideal number, which had symbolic significance in Near Eastern cultures with duodecimal counting systems.


Translator Paul Davidson argued: "The stories of Jacob and his children, then, are not accounts of historical Bronze Age people. Rather, they tell us how much later Jews and Israelites understood themselves, their origins, and their relationship to the land, within the context of folktales that had evolved over time." He goes on to argue that most of the tribal names are "not personal names, but the names of ethnic groups, geographical regions, and local deities.  This kind of mythological geography is widely known among all ancient peoples.

Sources

  • https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-twelve-tribes/
  • https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-lost-tribes/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Tribes_of_Israel