Sneak Peek: Chapter Two

Jacob and Israel: the Two Forefathers of the Hebrew tribes

The Family Tree of Hebrews and Their Relatives

Two particularly important moments in biblical history are connected with Jacob’s return from Haran to Canaan. Both incidents deal with the giving of his second name, Israel. The first took place during the night prior to his meeting with Esau and his warriors near a tributary of the River Jordan, the Jabbok. This is how the Bible narrates the incident:

The second incident happened later, when Jacob and his people arrived in Bethel, where the sanctuary of the Hebrew tribes was located. When on his way to Haran from his brother Esau’s, Jacob had prayed at the sanctuary. This time, “God said to him, ‘Your name is Jacob, but you will no longer be called Jacob; your name will be Israel.’ So he named him Israel” (Genesis 35:10).

God likewise repeated the promise he had previously given to Abraham and Isaac – that he would give the land of Canaan to him and his descendants. In this way God twice gave Jacob a new name, ‘Israel’. This giving of the new name and the promise that Jacob would father a great people and that his descendants would be given the land of Canaan are very much reminiscent of the covenant entered into with Abraham at Elonei Mamre. It is possible that initially the point of the episode was a renewal of the vow made between Jacob and the God of his fathers, which was a traditional ritual that was common in Canaan at the time. However, the first compilers of the Bible gave the episode an entirely different character. They did not simply change Jacob’s personal name, as was the case with Abraham; they gave him a completely different second name as well. Moreover, this did not happen at his birth or at his acceptance of a new faith, and not even during a period of dramatic military events, but during a normal period of peace. The Hebrew name ‘Israel’ literally means ‘fighter against god’; of course, at the time the gods that were meant were the pagan gods with whom human heroes had to fight. But what we know of Jacob’s life from the Bible has nothing at all to do warfare or with religious reform. The Bible tells us of no events which could have justified the taking of a new name or a title. The entirely unexpected episode of the fight with an unknown person (a god or divine messenger) does not clarify anything. Rather, it creates the impression that an episode from a different story about a different person was inserted in the oral legend about Jacob at a later date in accordance with considerations that were relevant at this later time.

From the moment when Abram received his new name (Abraham) from the Lord, it completely ousted the previous version and everywhere in the biblical texts only this later modification was used. Something very different, however, happens with Jacob’s second name. In spite of God’s word, “‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel…’” (Genesis 32: 28), the biblical texts make equal use of both names. Moreover, the compilers of Genesis emphasize with suspicious frequency the identity of Jacob and Israel, as if wishing to prove that this was a single, common ancestor instead of the forefathers of two different tribal groups.

The situation with the patriarchs’ wives is similarly interesting. The forefather Abraham had had only one principal wife, Sarah; Isaac likewise had had only Rebekah. But Jacob had two wives simultaneously and both held the same status, something which had never been the case for any of his predecessors. Was not this the device by which the family trees of two groups of Hebrew tribes – the northern and southern Habiru – were artificially united into a single genealogy? Jacob was first given the wife and sons of Israel, the forefather of the northern tribes – and then he was given the latter’s name as well. Undoubtedly, it was by no means every branch of the family descended from Abraham that was included in the official biblical canon. Mention is made only of those which do not call into question the primacy of the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob line. It is likely that the oral tradition of the nomadic Western Semites included many legends associated with the history of the northern group of Hebrew tribes that were later known as Israel. However, only a few of these legends were woven into the genealogy of the southern group, that of Jacob. Jacob’s struggle with God’s messenger during the night before his meeting with Esau was undoubtedly taken from the oral tradition concerning Israel, the forefather of the northern tribes. Jacob’s second wife, Rachel, and their sons, Joseph and Benjamin, also belong to the genealogy of the northern tribes. It is most probable that the northern group of Hebrew tribes came to Canaan from north-western Mesopotamia before Abraham’s time, approximately in the 23^rd century BC, and occupied land that was vacant in northern and central Palestine. Only later, in approximately the 20^th century BC, did Abraham arrive in Canaan with his group of tribes. Unlike their kinsmen from the northern group, Abraham’s tribes, or at least a part of them, had already lived in southern Mesopotamia. So, since they arrived in Canaan later, they were forced to be content with the more arid regions of southern and eastern Palestine. Thus, by the beginning of the second millennium BC, five groups of nomadic Western Semites had settled in Canaan. Two of these groups settled in the western part of the country, and it was from them that the northern Hebrew tribes of Israel and the southern Hebrew tribes of Jacob would subsequently split off. The eastern part of Canaan, the Transjordan, was occupied by two other tribal unions – Ammon and Moab, – who had arrived with the biblical patriarch Abraham. Finally, Edom, settled on his own in the south east. Among the neighboring settled peoples the first two tribal groups subsequently came to be more commonly known as ‘Habiru’ and the other three as ‘Sutu’ or ‘Shasu’, as the Egyptians called them. They were all closely related, had common ancestors, and spoke the same language. But they had separated at different times and so had different degrees of closeness to one another.

If we attempt to construct a model of relations of kinship between the five groups of nomadic Western Semites, we get the following picture: the southern group of Edom was the closest of all the groups to Jacob’s; next in terms of closeness came the two tribal alliances in Transjordan, Moab and Ammon, who were as close to one another as both the southern groups. And finally and however paradoxically, the most distant were the northern tribes who later came to be known as Israel. This model thus complexly inverts traditional ideas of degrees of kinship and closeness among the southern and northern Hebrew tribes. Under the new model Moab and Ammon, not to mention Edom, turn out to be more closely related to the southern group of Hebrew tribes than are the northern tribes.

The southern group of Jacob consisted of only four tribes: Judah, Reuben, Simeon, and Levi. The largest of these was the tribe of Judah, while the smallest was Levi. It would therefore hardly be incorrect to identify this southern Hebrew group as Jacob-Judah, all the more so since the Southern Kingdom took its name from this largest tribe. Unfortunately, until the 12^th century BC we know nothing about the northern Hebrew tribes since all the biblical history known to us from before that time was, in fact, only the history of the southern Hebrew group of Jacob-Judah to which the genealogy of the northern tribes was subsequently added. The combined history of these two groups began only in the 12^th century BC, when the southern group returned from Egypt and a part of it joined the already existing tribal union of Israel in central Canaan. The basis of the biblical canon that we have today concerning the family of Abraham-Isaac-Jacob and the twelve sons of Jacob-Israel was most likely written during the United Monarchy, in the reigns of David and Solomon. It was then, following the political interests of the United Monarchy of Israel and Judah, that the keepers of the tradition – namely the Levites and the Aaronites – unified the genealogy and history of the two different Hebrew groups. The northern tribes were written retrospectively into the biblical history of the southern group, Jacob-Judah, even though they evidently had an even more interesting and dramatic history than the southern tribes. And it is their history that can help us better understand what happened in Canaan and Egypt in the 18^th–13^th centuries BC, a period about which the Bible remains largely silent.

The basis of the northern Hebrew tribes consisted of the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin. The first two of these tribes were the larger and stronger, tracing their genealogy directly to the legendary Joseph, which is why they were known as the ‘house of Joseph’. The third tribe was significantly smaller and had special relations of kinship with the first two. Given that Joseph himself was considered the favorite son of Israel, the father of the northern tribes, this entire group may be identified as ‘Israel-Joseph’. The ‘house of Joseph’ not only occupied a privileged position within the group of northern tribes, but was also the founder of the tribal union Israel, established in central Canaan in the 13^th century BC. Other tribes such as Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher played a secondary and subordinate role – something which is reflected in the biblical canon: these tribes’ founding fathers were also considered the sons of the patriarch, but by women of a lower social status. The tribes of Zebulon and Issachar were on an intermediate level between the first and the second groups. At the same time, all these tribes, including both the ‘house of Joseph’ and the secondary tribes, traced their origins to a common patriarch, Israel.

Sometime at the end of the 18^th century BC the Israel-Joseph group abandoned northern and central Palestine and left for the Nile Delta in Egypt. This is most likely to have happened in the time of the biblical patriarch Isaac and during a period of drought and famine in Canaan. The Bible says as follows:

Thus Isaac and his southern tribes did not leave for Egypt. The fact that the compilers of the Bible emphasize this, however, is indirect evidence that the other part of the nomadic Western Semites did leave Canaan for the Nile Delta.

It was usually the southern part of Palestine that suffered most from drought, and it was here that the two related southern groups of Jacob and Edom settled. However, if they did not leave, then why did the northern tribes? After all, there was more water in central Canaan than in the south. Evidently, the reason for the departure of the northern tribes, or some of them, was not so much drought as civil strife. The legend about Joseph and his brothers can shed some light on this problem. There is no doubt that the compilers of Genesis took this legend from the oral history of the northern tribes, but they considered it necessary to add to it the founding fathers from their own southern group in order that the new version of the legend should confirm the single genealogy they had created for the two groups. Above all, our attention is drawn by a geographical misunderstanding: the forefather Jacob is situated in the valley of Hebron, i.e. on the ancestral land of the southern tribes, but sends his sons to pasture cattle right in the middle of the territory of the northern tribes – in the region of Shechem and the Dothan Valley. Anyone familiar with the geography and natural environment of Palestine would find it difficult to understand why it was necessary to drive the cattle such a distance, even onto land that belonged to other people, if pasture of the same quality existed near Hebron. Secondly, it is striking that only the forefathers of the southern tribes, Reuben and Judah, act as Joseph’s saviors. It is possible that this legend is founded on a real historical fact – an internal conflict within the northern group of Israel-Joseph. Such a conflict could have broken out between the ‘house of Joseph’ and the other northern tribes. It may also be that the Jacob-Judah southern group adopted a neutral position at a key moment and allowed the ‘house of Joseph’ safe passage through their territory into Egypt. It would then be clear that the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh arrived in Egypt first and that the reproaches they directed against their fellow tribesmen might have been well-founded. It may also have been possible that it was not drought or famine but the privileged position of the ‘house of Joseph’ in Egypt in the time of the Hyksos that subsequently led the other northern tribes to come there. By contrast, the southern group of Jacob came to the Nile Delta much later, only in the second half of the 17^th century BC, and its life in Egypt took a different course than that of its northern brothers.

There can be no doubt that the biblical narrative about the family of Abraham-Isaac-Jacob is the oral narrative of the two nomadic Western Semite groups – the southern group of Jacob and the northern group of Israel. The compilers of the earliest part of the Pentateuch did not simply set down oral legends transmitted over many centuries; they went much further: they wove these legends together to create a single genealogy. In order to understand to what extent the compilers were able precisely to transmit the history of the days long gone by, it is important to know when this history was set down and how much time had elapsed since the events themselves.

Read more in: 'Early Israelites: Two Peoples, One History'