Yesterday I posted a question, asking why we refer to ourselves as “Members of THE tribe” instead of “Members of the TRIBES”. In doing so I completely ignored/forgot a basic lesson from my intro to Jewish history class in college (apologies to Dr. Resnick!).
Many thanks to David for refreshing my memory.
So today, in case anyone else has forgotten (or never learned), I thought I’d explain briefly. About the tribes.
Once upon a time, there were a bunch of tribes. 12 to be precise. They were named for the 12 sons of Jacob, Asher, Benjamin, Dan, Gad, Issachar, Joseph, Judah, Levi, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, Zebulun.
But the story gets a little complicated, because when the tribes are granted land in Israel, the tribe of Levi becomes the tribe of priests instead, and the sons of Joseph (Mannaseh and Ephraim) each get their own tribe. So in a way there are 13 tribes. But when we talk about the tribes, we usually talk about the second set of 12, and consider the Levites to be “priests”. Cool?
At any rate, then things get political and complicated. I hope I can explain this clearly, because I’m going somewhere with this…
10 tribes split off and become the Northern kingdom (one of them is a portion of the Levites, the non-landed dudes), and two tribes (Judah and Benjamin) form the Southern kingdom of Judah (along with some more Levites). (Somewhere in here, the tribe of Simeon disappears altogether) Finally, Assyria crushes the North, leaving Judah to become the Jewish nation we know today (in some sense, though it got a lot of crushing of its own over the years of course). Judah gets booted from the land by Nebuchadnezzer, and we all end up in Babylon, man.
But now let’s do the math. WHO is in Judah when the Babylonians get there? Members of at least three tribes—Judah, Benjamin, and Levi (at least some of them). They’re all hanging around in the South.
Which means that although David was right in drawing my attention to the fact that we’re all descended from members of the Southern nation of Judah, we’re not all from one tribe.
Which leads me to believe that when we say we’re “Members of the Tribe” we’re using the term loosely, generally. We’re all Jews. But in fact, we’re members of the “Tribes”. Plural. Have to be, since anyone named Levy or Cohen (the Kohanim are Levites too) cannot, by definition, be from the tribe of Judah.
Eh?
Eh?
Anyone want to argue?
Thanks for the sensible critique. Me and my neighbor were just preparing to do some research on this. We got a grab a book from our area library but I think I learned more clear from this post. I’m very glad to see such great information being shared freely out there.