This wide world is full of many things, but one of those is Israels. That is—strange as it may seem—there are peoples even today who understand themselves not just as the descendants of the ancient Israelites, but as Israelites in every corner of the globe. Most, though far from all of these take as their starting point the biblical narrative in 2 Kings 17 in which most of the tribes of Israel were taken away into Assyrian exile. From here they became the “Lost Tribes of Israel,” which makes it plausible that Israels might turn up anywhere at all. And this is, in my opinion, a totally unparalleled phenomenon. There were, in the ancient world and even into the medieval, those who claimed descent from the heroes of the Trojan War, and there have always been those who connected their genealogies to Noah’s Ark. I feel, however, very confident in saying that no identity in the history of the world has been assumed so often, in so many places, and for so long a time as Israel.
In The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, I have attempted to produce a new kind of study of this generally understudied but not never studied phenomenon in one key respect. In a nutshell, I argue that the various efforts to, as I put it, “become Israel” throughout the world and throughout history are not so very different from the biblical effort to describe an Israelite past and identity as scholarship generally supposes. Crucially, this is not because of any radical reassessment of the biblical narratives themselves, but because of three different recognitions that are widely acknowledged — but have simply never before been combined in a way that makes the commonalities between biblical and non-biblical efforts to tell Israel stories unavoidable.
First, the simple fact of the matter is that generally, scholarship on ethnicity has an increasingly difficult time distinguishing between what used to be called “invented” identities and “genuine” ones. Likely enough, from a historian’s perspective, most “Lost Tribe” stories would fit in the former category – as Tudor Parfitt notes, “plenty of evidence of different sorts has been presented as proof of the continuing existence of the Lost Tribes,” but none of it is really “satisfactory.”[1] For that matter, so might the Hebrew Bible’s own story of Israel be considered “invented” in some senses—there are quite a number of scholars, including myself, who now wonder whether early Judahites really thought of themselves as Israelites, or whether that only happened later on. In that scenario, the Judahites would have to “become” Israel as literally as anyone else, adopting an Israelite identity only after Israel was conquered by Assyria in 722 BCE.
Still, it is, again, not any radical revision of the history of Israel and Judah – or of Israel in Judah – that makes the biblical narrative similar to extrabiblical accounts of Israel, but new developments in how we think about identity itself, whatever is true about this specific narrative. Basically, we now realize that there would have been multiple different versions of Israelite identity over time, regardless of the origins of the ethnic concept, and that it, like all identity concepts, would respond constantly and dynamically to changing circumstances and, for that matter, the changing needs of the authors of any given vision. That means that the biblical vision of Israelite identity is a constructed and historically contingent one, regardless of the biological relationship between its authors and the early Israelites, which means in turn that we can indeed benefit from studying that construction through the lens of others, from other places and times, even when we are pretty confident no biological relationship exists.
Second, and relatedly, biblical scholars increasingly acknowledge the importance of recognizing that the Hebrew Bible itself is largely the work of a series of relatively late, Judahite authors and editors. This is by no means news – our understanding of the chronology of biblical composition has not changed that much, in most of the important respects, since the late nineteenth century. But in light of new ways of talking and thinking about memory, tradition, and again, identity itself, there just is no longer any good reason to deny that this chronology means that what we have is fundamentally “Judah’s Bible” as Daniel Fleming put it, and really of particular Judahites in a particular time and place.[2] As a result, the biblical vision of Israel is also Judahite, even if it is to some extent constructed from older visions of Israel and older traditions about Israel, some of them from Israel itself.
In fact, here is an early fruit of the comparison I am proposing because, after all, all visions of Israel are to some extent constructed from the same traditions, and still fundamentally their own. Thus, all surviving visions are indeed constructed somewhere else than ancient Israel, after the heyday of ancient Israel, across a gap of time and space even if those building the bridge over this gap in the biblical case really were descended from Israelite ancestors. That this gap is smaller than it is elsewhere matters for some questions, but the fact that it did not have to be bridged – that Judah, an independent kingdom from Israel by at least 900 BCE could, in 400 BCE have decided it was just Judah, or something else altogether–matters too.
Finally, there is the Twelve Tribes tradition itself, in many respects the centerpiece of the book. This tradition is what is sometimes called a “segmented” genealogical tradition, and my interest in it originally came via my comparative forays into the study of ancient Greek traditions. Segmented genealogies are those that follow multiple lines of descent at once – like the twelve tribes of Israel or the three sons of Noah – while linear genealogies follow one line, e.g. x begot y begot z. There are many examples of segmented genealogical traditions in ancient Greece, very few in ancient Mesopotamia, and in many ways this book comes out of my previous work to show that a failure to understand how they work, and how they’re used, has inhibited understanding of the Twelve Tribes tradition in the Hebrew Bible specifically. My first book, The Sons of Jacob and the Sons of Herakles especially explored this problem.
The thing is, the segmented structure of the Twelve Tribes tradition makes it an excellent tool for redescribing identity in two different dimensions, both of which stem from the fact that it crystallizes a set of relationships that is by no means natural or inevitable. Many different things are, somehow, simultaneously one thing as well. First, it instantiates the position that—in this case— any story about a part of Israel is also a story about Israel. Typically, participants in segmented systems use this fact to compete with each other, where a story about how Judah is the most blessed tribe, or Joseph the most favored son of Jacob translates to an attempt to normalize hierarchies within Israelite identity that favor one participant over others. But, even absent competitions, the simple fact of the e pluribus unum structure of the whole is what allows for the necessary explanations for both biblical and extrabiblical articulations of Israelite identity. Israel can be divided—between two kingdoms, between the Levant and Assyria, between oceans, continents, and “great gulfs of time”— and remain Israel, because Israel was born divided. It hardly matters how far.
Second, the same aspect of the same tradition allows participants in the system to explain how they are different from each other, but still Israel. Again, the capacity for explanation is built into the system itself. Reuben is not Simeon, but both are Israel – so if Reuben goes to Assyria, to Africa, or to America, the fact that it is different from other Israelite groups, or becomes even more different, does not pose a problem. Obviously, this explains the premise behind the implicit claim in so many Israelite traditions that they are Israelites even though they are clearly different from biblical Israelites in some respects: that they came to America, experienced new revelations, and became the Mormons, that they went to Africa, kept their ancient traditions, and became the Beta Israel, and so on and so forth. But this tradition was already explaining why Judah was still Israel even in the ancient world.
Finally, it is the same features of the shared tradition that allow for both the redescription of Israelite identity in any given context over time, and for the construction of new visions of Israel in different contexts. The ability to argue that Judah is the most blessed tribe, or that Joseph is, by re-organizing and re-interpreting the details of tribal Israel in different biblical passages is also the capacity to explain how part of Israel went somewhere else, experienced something else, and became something else. And,, of course, more or less every story of Israel goes the same way, even the biblical—that there were twelve tribes of Israel, that they were part of the same community, that they experienced many things together. That, one day, they split, they lived in different places, they had different experiences, and they went on being Israel. In other words, as I put it in the book, the Twelve Tribes tradition is not a description of ancient Israel that we can evaluate primarily as either accurate or inaccurate, it is the “fertile soil in which new visions of Israel grow” – a phenomenally plastic source for the construction of new visions of Israel, and accounts of its fate. It provides this service both in any given context, and across contexts.
So, along all of these axes, biblical authors are indeed doing the same thing, with the same tradition, as non-biblical authors. They, too, are building a bridge across the gap to ancient Israel, from wherever they are. There may have been, in ancient Judah, reasons to build this bridge that are historical, and even ethnic in nature. But the design of the bridge was still theirs to determine. And this is just as true of later visions of Israel and its tribes. A bridge might look like anything at all, any story about where Israel went and what it transformed into, so long as it did the work of erasing this gap between Israel and its heirs. The question of course is why does this matter – what work does demolishing the siloes between the study of biblical and nonbiblical Israels do? And the answer I propose in this book has precisely to do with bridge-building.
Essentially, most studies of the Twelve Tribes tradition in the Hebrew Bible are focused on the history of ancient Israel. Their authors want to know if the tradition reflects a historical reality, and if not, what the historical reality was. In fact, even those scholars who now believe that the Twelve Tribes tradition was a Judahite invention are still far more interested in when the concept itself was invented, and why, than in how it was subsequently used in the very many stories about the tribes and their history within biblical traditions. And in the study of Lost Tribe traditions, the same trends hold sway. For analysts, the important question seems to be whether these are really Israel, the sought-for answer either yes or no.
This question of whether a bridge needs io exist, however— whether there really is a gap between some surviving Israel and ancient Israel—is only one question we can ask. Another is how bridges are built, and what the main techniques of construction are. A third is how many different things can be done with essentially the same materials. A fourth is what we can learn about how one bridge was constructed by studying multiple acts of construction in comparison, a fifth, how we can learn about the bridge-builders themselves from the hints they leave behind in what they built. Of these, all but the first requires us to acknowledge that all of these builders are indeed engaged in essentially the same task. In this book, I have tried both to explain that this acknowledgement should be made, and to show what it helps us see, and learn.
[1] Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (London: Phoenix, 2003), 1.
[2] Daniel Fleming, The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012).