Were There Actually 12 Tribes of Israel?

In 1644 Antonio Montezinos, a Portuguese traveler originally known as Aharon Levi, returned to Amsterdam with an astonishing story about the people he had encountered in the proverbial depths of South America. During his visit a native guide, named Francisco, took him deep into the mountains. A week into the journey he met a community of indigenous people who identified themselves to him as the Lost Tribes of Israel. Montezinos, who was originally known as Aharon Levi, was startled and astonished.

The story might have amounted to nothing had he not passed it along to a prominent rabbi named Menasseh Ben Israel. Ben Israel used it as the basis for his influential work Hope of Israel, a compendium of information about the whereabouts of the Lost Tribes of Israel, which was published in 1650. The book was intended to inspire his fellow Jews who had suffered and would continue to suffer social marginalization, legal oppression, and violent persecution at the hands of antisemitic Christian Europeans. But it was also taken up by Christians: first British colonizers who claimed that Native Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. And, more famously, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who both identify themselves (who, genealogically were the descendants of European settlers) and Native Americans with Israel. For Ben Israel the “Jewish Indian” theory was about hope, for the British it was related to anxieties about linking the “New World” to the “Old.” The idea that America—or any people or nation—could “Become Israel” was enormously popular.

If you have read the Hebrew Bible, saw Disney’s Prince of Egypt, or watched Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat then you almost certainly know about the 12 tribes of Israel. In many ways Israel is sort of synonymous with Jewishness and Judaism, people use it to refer to a nation, an identity, and a central group who share in God’s promises to Abraham and are the favored people of God. What you might not have known is that the history or, rather, histories of Israel are constantly evolving. A new book, Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel: New Identities across Time and Space, by Dr. Andrew Tobolowsky, who teaches at William & Mary, looks set to revolutionize how we think about the traditional story.

As it has come down to us, the biblical narrative is very Israel focused. In Genesis, the patriarch Jacob (the one who steals Esau’s birthright, has a vision of a ladder, and walks with a limp after losing a match to an angel) had 12 sons (and a daughter, but people are fairly disinterested in her). The tribes of Israel are the descendants of these sons. They migrated to Egypt during a famine and were led out of captivity by Moses. They violently conquer the Holy Land with Joshua, and each tribe was given its own portion of land. After that they were governed by first Judges and then monarchs like Saul, David, and Solomon. So far, so united.

After the death of Solomon (ca. 930 BCE), things fractured. The Kingdom of Israel was divided into two Kingdoms: the Northern (which retained the name Israel and was occupied by most of the tribes) and the Southern, also known as Judah. In the eighth century BCE, the Assyrian army captured the Israelite capital of Samaria and carried the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom off into exile. While 1 Kings 11-12 is explicit that there were ten tribes in the Northern Kingdom, it’s unclear both how many tribes were located in Judah and which specific tribes went from the Northern Kingdom into exile. As Tobolowsky put it to me “there actually is no text that says, ‘these are the ten tribes of Israel that were exiled,’ or ‘these are the tribes who survived.’”

The members and descendants of the ten tribes who were forcibly migrated by the Assyrians are now known as the “Lost Tribes of Israel” and, like other lost peoples and things of the Bible –say the Ark of the Covenant, Enoch, or the Holy Grail—the lost tribes of Israel gleam with mysterious significance. Where are they? Will their descendants one day return to their homelands as the descendants of Judah did after the Babylonian exile?

Over the past few thousand years many individuals and groups have claimed either to know where the lost tribes are or to be their descendants. One famous example is Beta Israel, or Ethiopian Jews, who identify with the lost tribe of Dan. Discussions about the identification or histories of the lost tribes are often discarded as fanciful-after-the-fact mythologies that appropriate “real” Israelite identity for something else, while the biblical history of Israel is the “real history.” Dr. Andrew Tobolowsky’s book Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel challenges us to rethink this distinction and explores the multiple histories of Israel that exist outside of Europe and the Middle East.

While Tobolowsky isn’t really focused on the historical problems with the traditional narrative about Israel (nor does it have to be, there are plenty of other histories problematizing everything from the Exodus to the Battle of Jericho, to even the existence of King David), he admits there are some difficult historical details in the story. It’s clear, he told me, that there is some kind of tradition about tribes in ancient Israel. He pointed to Judges 5, a passage that, he said, “many scholars think is the oldest text in the Hebrew Bible” that tells the story of a war between the Canaanites and the tribes of Israel. If you go read Judges 5, he said, you’ll notice that it “doesn’t include 12 tribes…In fact, none of the tribes most associated with the kingdom of Judah even appear in Judges 5.” In other words, the oldest literary layers in the Hebrew Bible may talk about tribes but not in the way that the traditional history does.

What’s interesting, he said, is that most of our biblical stories about the 12 tribes were written in a much later period by Judahite authors. This might lead us to be skeptical of the historical accuracy of these stories. “It’s a possibility,” he added “that the 12 tribes tradition was developed by Judahites, in a relatively late period.” But even if these traditions grew “out of an older, and genuinely historical Israelite tribal tradition… the vast majority of tribal descriptions we have are from a much later period, by mostly Judahite authors, and mostly in a world where even the Hebrew Bible tells us not all the tribes were still around.” In other words, and “regardless of anything else, we still have to ask… why are all late Judahite authors so interested in describing and redescribing [the tribes of Israel]. Why does [this history] matter to them, and what are they trying to do with it?”

This is the gap that Tobolowsky fills in his book. Whether you’re the kind of person who thinks that the 12 tribes are a complete fiction or the sort who thinks that they actually existed as discrete groups, people haven’t really been asking why ancient Judahites suddenly got interested in them hundreds of years later. The curious part is that it’s not just biblical authors who are fascinated by the 12 tribes: “all over the world”, said Tobolowsky, “people have been doing the same thing with the same tradition.” Why is that? Why are people interested in retelling this history and interweaving their personal and communal histories with it?

For the authors who wrote the Hebrew Bible, said Tobolowsky, this particular version of Israel’s history and identity had to do with positioning Israel against the Samaritans. The Samaritans were likely descended from the original Israelites (those who were not carried off by the Assyrians). Narratively clearing Samaria of legitimate descendants of Israel does some work in legitimizing Judah. “For these [Judahite] groups, their stories are about claiming a sort of local legacy and history, and you can sometimes see that in how their visions are designed to compete with each other.” What this means, though, is that the Israel of the Hebrew Bible, is, in fact, Judah’s Israel. It’s not, he said, “some sort of neutral, ‘original Israel’ it’s one of many versions of what Israel was” and just like other versions of Israel’s history it had real-world power.

For other groups, from antiquity to the present day, who claim this lineage “it’s more about the prestige ancient Israel has as the ‘chosen people,’ or it’s about positioning yourself as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.” The 12 tribes of Israel have a certain kind of divine cache, pedigree, or role to play in the end times. “From the medieval period on,” said Tobolowsky, “a lot of these visions are about the end of the world, bringing about the restoration of Israel by recovering the lost tribes and so on. In these cases, it’s about describing your group as one tasked with a sacred mission in the cosmic scheme. Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament imbue Israel with a lot of significance, and all the world’s Israels understand themselves as heirs to that significance.”

The number of different social, political, and religious groups who root their identities in Israelite history is surprisingly large. Tobolowsky told me that whenever he talks about his book someone will tell him about a new group he previously hadn’t heard about. One of his favorites, however, were the House of David baseball teams. These were semi-famous “Harlem Globetrotter-esque squads that traveled the country in the 1910s and ’20s and did all kinds of tricks and often wore big, fake beards… They would do things other teams of that time wouldn’t necessarily do, like play some of the great Negro Leagues teams. But it turns out their main goal was to serve as a kind of fundraising arm for a new religious movement, the ‘House of David.’ This was headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan and had among its goals the ‘ingathering’ of the 12 tribes of Israel.”

As bizarre as it sounds, this isn’t a one-off of a story, there are plenty of examples of groups using the idea of Israel to do particular kinds of political, religious, fundraising, and social work.

For some readers all of this might seem iconoclastic, if not anti-Israel, or even antisemitic but that isn’t the case. Tobolowsky, who is Jewish himself, said that “one of the major points of the book is that lots of people besides the Jews think they’re descendants of Israel, too.” In some of these cases, he added, those who identify as descendants of Israel, “are marginalized groups who enjoy sometimes precious few rights by virtue of their perceived descent, and any time you talk about identity that’s something you should be very, very careful about.”

Equally important, he added, is that scholars are thinking in more complicated ways about identity: “We now know ‘national’ identities change all the time, whether you’re biologically descended from some original group or not, so if presenting that identity differently from the original group means you’re not ‘really’ them – well, every identity is fake then.” In other words, Tobolowsky isn’t saying that more traditional understandings of Jewish identity are somehow fraudulent, he is saying that identity is constantly in flux and constantly being built out of inherited notions of the past. “We can set aside questions of who that past really belongs to in order to dig into what is being built and how that is happening.”

The question of what’s historically true, he said, is sort of beside the point. It’s tempting to distinguish between the “biblical story” and the story of the “Lost Tribes” but, whatever their histories, “all of all these groups are using the exact same tradition in the exact same ways for many of the same reasons.” The story of the Israels of the world is fantastic and arguably brings people together to think about their commonalities and shared traditions. But that will not happen if we can’t see that history and insist on policing a single vision of Israel’s history.

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