The History of Antiquity (Vol. 1-6). Duncker Max

The Israelites had risen from a tribe into a nation, which stood in need of organisation when it was no longer under Egyptian dominion. This arrangement must be founded upon the connection of families and races, on respect for the tie of blood, and reverence for age. No other political division was known but community of family and descent. Affinities and races were in existence which carried back their origin to one patriarch, they followed the head of the oldest family, from whom the rest were derived, or thought that they were derived, and usually obeyed his decision. Some of these races carried their pedigree back to Jacob and his sons. After the pattern of these connections, and by adopting and adding to them, the whole nation was brought into ties of relationship. Strangers and families without a name must have here been in part allotted to the affinities already in existence, and partly formed into new corporations, and new affinities, so that in the total there were some seventy groups of families. Those derived from the old stocks, who carried their origin back to the same son of Jacob, formed together a large community, or tribe, and were accustomed to obey the nearest descendant of the patriarch, the son of his oldest son, from first-born to first-born, and thus the head of the oldest family in the whole community, as their tribal prince and leader by birth. In the same manner, also, the new groups of families became amalgamated into tribes, and older families were put at their head as chiefs of the tribe, in such a manner that from three to ten groups of families formed a tribe.[665] Thus twelve tribes were formed. Even the nations most closely allied to the Hebrews, the Nahorites, and Ishmaelites, were divided into twelve tribes; the Edomites were apparently divided into sixteen. The tribes already in existence were derived from definite progenitors, the sons of Jacob; and also for the new tribes one of the sons of Jacob, the number of whom has thus been fixed, was allotted as a patriarch. Reuben, Simeon, and Judah, were Jacob's eldest sons, borne by Leah his first wife in lawful marriage. From these three the oldest groups were derived. With the tribes of Issachar and Zebulon families were connected, whose antiquity did not go so far back, and thus Issachar and Zebulon were held to be younger sons of Jacob by the same wife. The tribes of Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher, were not considered equally pure; perhaps because additional families had been incorporated in them: hence, as we saw, their progenitors are said to be the sons of Jacob by his handmaids. The tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin, are marked as of later origin by the fact that they are carried back to Jacob and Rachel; and if Joseph begot his sons Ephraim and Manasseh with the daughter of the priest of Heliopolis, this leads to the conclusion that the families incorporated into the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh had grown up in Egypt, and had Egyptian blood in their veins. But Ephraim was at the same time the strongest tribe, which in numbers and bravery outstripped the rest, and the later origin is compensated by the importance of Rachel and Joseph. The Egyptian element which Ephraim and Manasseh introduced among the Hebrews cannot have been of any importance, for neither the language nor the ideas of the Hebrews incorporated elements from Egypt. Only a few external touches in the dress of the priests can be carried back with certainty to Egyptian influence. Of the two sons of Joseph, Manasseh is the elder, Ephraim the younger. Hence the groups of families incorporated into the first, must have been considered the older, or the tribe of Manasseh must at one time have had precedence of Ephraim, which may have been the case about the time of Gideon.

If in the place of Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob, two grandsons are adopted into the number of the patriarchs, room is made by excluding Levi, a son of Jacob's first marriage, from the series of the tribes. Tradition places him among the oldest sons, between Simeon and Judah. But the tribes deduced from this ancestor won no territory like the rest: they were scattered among the other tribes. We may assume that the priestly families, who from antiquity had discharged the sacred duty at the main seats of worship, the race of Kohath (to which belonged the sons of Aaron), with the priestly families of the other altars (the races of Gershom and Merari), and the families of the temple-servants connected with them, were not combined into a tribe till a late period. The name "Levi" may mean "bound," i.e. bound to a shrine, and hence a temple-servant. The separation of this tribe from the rest, and its dedication to the sacred service, is brought forward with great emphasis in the first text, which was composed from the point of view of the priests. Jehovah takes the Levites in the place of the first-born of Israel, and this same text allots to the Levites forty-eight cities of Canaan which they never possessed, and never inhabited either exclusively or in preponderant numbers.[666] But while in this text the adoption of the Levites by Jehovah, and their "possession of the sacrifice" in the place of a territory, is regarded and extolled as a privilege of this tribe, we found above (p. 439) that an old poem spoke of the "division of the Levites in Jacob and their scattering in Israel" as the punishment of the sin which their progenitor had once committed. Hence we must assume that the groups of races, to which the foremost families of the priests belonged, once formed a connected tribe like the rest, and the breaking up of this tribe was brought about after the settlement in Canaan by causes unknown to us.