The message of Jacob led him northward by the desert road which ran to the east of Moab and Ammon. It is clear from the story that Jacob knew little about his brother’s power. When news was brought that he was coming with a troop of four hundred men, Jacob’s heart sank within him, and his only thought was how to save himself and at least a portion of his wealth from the powerful robber-chief. The event proved that his precautions were needless. Esau behaved with a magnanimity which it must have been hard for a Hebrew writer to describe, and pressed his brother to accompany him to Seir. Jacob feared to accept the invitation, and equally feared to refuse it. With characteristic caution and craft, he promised to come, but urged that the cattle and children that were with him made it necessary to follow slowly in Esau’s track. So the Edomite chieftain departed, and Jacob took good care to turn westward across the Jordan into the land of Canaan. There, among the cities and fields of the civilised ‘Amorite,’ he felt himself secure from the pursuit of the desert tribes.
Was it fear of Esau which kept him in Central Palestine and prevented him so long from venturing near that southern part of the country where his father and grandfather had mainly dwelt? At all events, while Abraham had bought land at Hebron, the land purchased by Jacob was near Shechem. Moreover, it was the ‘parcel of a field where he had spread his tent,’ not a burying-place for his family. It would seem, therefore, that it was intended for a permanent residence; here the patriarch determined to settle and to exchange the free life of the pastoral nomad for that of a villager of Canaan.[[88]]
The field was bought from Hamor the father of Shechem, the founder of the city which was destined to become the seat of the first monarchy in Israel, and on it was raised the first altar consecrated to the God of Israel. El-elohê-Israel, ‘El is the God of Israel,’ the altar was termed, a declaration that the El whom the Canaanites worshipped was the God of Israel as well. But though the field was bought for one hundred ‘pieces of money’—an expression, be it noted, which is not Babylonian—we are assured also that Jacob had gained land at Shechem by the right of conquest. In blessing Joseph he declared to him that to the tribe of his favourite son there was given ‘a Shechem above’ his ‘brethren which’ he had taken ‘out of the hand of the Amorite with’ his ‘sword and bow’ (Gen. xlviii. 22); and the story of the ravishment of Dinah recounts how the sons of the patriarch massacred the men of the city, how they enslaved their women and carried away their goods. The terrible tale of vengeance was never forgotten; it is alluded to in the Blessing of Jacob (Gen. xlix. 5-7), and the disappearance of Simeon and Levi as separate tribes was looked upon as a punishment for the deed. It would seem that after the Israelitish conquest of Canaan the population of Shechem remained half Canaanite, half Israelite,[[89]] and the Canaanitish population would naturally remember with horror and indignation the crime of the sons of Jacob. That the deed should have been attributed to the ancestors of two of the southern tribes instead of to those of Issachar or some other tribe of the north is evidence in favour of its truthfulness.
The sons of Jacob were twelve in number, like the twelve sons of Ishmael, and corresponded with the twelve tribes of Israel which were called after their names. And yet the correspondence required a little forcing. It is questionable whether, at any one time, there ever were exactly twelve Israelitish tribes. In the Song of Deborah Judah does not appear at all, Ephraim taking its place and, along with Benjamin, extending as far south as the desert of the Amalekites, while Machir is substituted for Manasseh and Gad. Levi never possessed a territory of its own; had it done so, the tribes would have been thirteen in number and not twelve. At the same time, it had just as much right to be considered a separate tribe as Dan, whose cities were in the north as well as in the south, where, however, they were absorbed by Judah; more right perhaps than Simeon, which hardly existed except in name. The territory of Reuben lay outside the boundaries of Palestine, and was merely the desert-wadis and grazing-grounds of the kingdom of Moab; the country can be said to have belonged to the tribe only in the sense that the wadis east of the Delta belong to the Bedâwin, whom the Egyptian government at present allows to live in them. Manasseh, lastly, was divided into two halves, in order to bring the number of tribes up to the requisite figure.
It is clear that the scheme is an artificial one. Israel, after its conquest of Canaan, could indeed be divided into twelve separate parts, but such a division was theoretical only. There were no twelve territories corresponding to the parts, while the parts themselves could be reckoned as thirteen, eleven, or ten, just as easily as twelve.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is obvious. History credited Jacob with twelve sons, and it was consequently necessary to bring the number of Israelitish tribes into harmony with the fact. Modern criticism has amused itself with reversing the history, and assuming that the twelve sons of the patriarch owed their origin to the twelve tribes. It has accordingly drawn inferences from the fact that some of the sons of Jacob are said to have been the offspring of concubines, and not of his two legitimate wives, and that Joseph and Benjamin were the youngest of all. But such inferences fall with the assumption that in the twelve sons we have merely the eponymous heroes of the twelve tribes. It is a cheap way of making history, and, after all, what we know of the tribes does not fit in with the theory. There is nothing in the history of Dan and Naphtali, or Gad and Asher, which would have caused them to be regarded of bastard descent, if that bastard descent had not been a fact; indeed, in the Song of Deborah, which is almost universally allowed to go back to the early age of the Judges, Naphtali and Zebulun are placed on exactly the same footing. The distinction between the sons of Leah and those of Rachel does not answer to the real cleavage between the tribes of the south and those of the north of Palestine: Benjamin, after the age of Saul, followed Judah and Simeon, while the sons of Joseph were joined with Zebulun and Issachar. Moreover, had the sons of Jacob been mere reflections of the tribes, it would be difficult to account for the existence of Joseph, or to understand why Machir takes the place of Manasseh and Gad in the Song of Deborah.
The critical theory is the result of introducing Greek modes of thought into Semitic history. The Greek tribe, it is true, traced its origin to an eponymous ancestor, but that ancestor was a god or a hero, and not a man. Among the Semites, however, as the history of Arabia may still teach us, the conception of the tribe was something wholly different. The tribe was an enlarged family which called itself by the name of its first head. It began with the individual, and to the last styled itself his children. The Greek tribe, on the contrary, began with the clan, and its theoretical ancestor, accordingly, was merely the divine personage whose common cult kept it together. In the Semitic tribe there could be no cult of its ancestor, for the ancestor was but an ordinary man, who worshipped the same form of Baal and used the same rites as his descendants after him.
Nevertheless, there may be an element of truth in the ‘critical’ assumption. The names of the ancestors of some of the Israelitish tribes may have been the reflex of the later names of the tribes themselves. It does not follow that the name by which one of the sons of Jacob became known to later generations was actually the name which he bore himself. Had Jacob been uniformly called Israel by the Hebrew writers, we should never have known his original name. And it is possible that the name of Asher is really a reflex of this kind. The Travels of the Mohar, written in Egypt in the reign of Ramses II. before the Israelitish conquest of Canaan, speak of ‘the mountain of User’ as being in the very locality in which the tribe of Asher was afterwards settled. And in the case of one tribe at least there is evidence that its name must have been reflected back upon that of its progenitor.
This is the tribe of Benjamin. In the book of Genesis (xxxv. 18) Benjamin is represented as having received two different names at his birth. The statement excites our suspicion, for such a double naming is inconsistent with Hebrew practice, and our suspicion is confirmed when we find that both names have a geographical meaning. Benjamin is ‘the son of the South’ or ‘Southerner’; Ben-Oni, as he is also said to have been called, is ‘the son of On,’ or ‘the Onite.’ On, or Beth-On, it will be remembered, was an ancient name of Beth-el, the great sanctuary and centre of the tribe of Benjamin, while ‘the Southerner’ was an appropriate title for the lesser brother tribe which lay to the south of the dominant Ephraim. It is of Ephraim that Deborah says, in her Song of Triumph, ‘Behind thee is Benjamin among thy peoples’ (Judg. v. 14).
The etymology suggested in Genesis for the name of Ben-Oni is a sample of those plays upon words in which Oriental writers have always delighted, and of which the Hebrew Scriptures contain so many illustrations. They all spring from the old confusion between the name and the thing, which substituted the name for the thing, and believed that if the name could be explained, the thing would be explained also. Hence the slight transformations in the form of names which allowed them to be assimilated to familiar words, or their identification with words which obviously gave an incorrect sense. Hence, too, the choice of etymologies which was offered to the reader: where the real origin of the name was unknown or uncertain, it was possible to explain it in more than one way. Isaiah (xv. 9) changes the name of the Moabite city of Dibon into Dimon in order to connect it with the Hebrew dâm, ‘blood,’ and the writer of Genesis gives two contradictory derivations of the name of Joseph (Gen. xxx. 23, 24). The latter fact is of itself a sufficient proof of the true value of these etymologies, or rather, popular plays upon words, and the sayings in which they are embodied can still be matched by the traveller in the East. Similar embodiments of popular etymologising are still repeated to explain the place-names of Egypt.[[90]]