Tribes
One of the most visible features of Numbers as a book – conspicuously so in Parashat Naso – is the great attention it pays to tribes. The book begins with the people being counted according to tribe. Then we read about their positioning in the camp around the Tabernacle by tribe. The order in which they travelled in their journeys through the wilderness was also by tribe. In this parasha, at inordinate length we are told of the offerings of each tribe at the dedication of the Tabernacle, despite the fact that each brought exactly the same offering (Num. 7:1–89). Later in the book there is an account of how the land was to be allocated tribe by tribe. The book ends with the second half of the story of the daughters of Tzlofhad, in which the leaders of their tribe bring a case to Moses to ensure that their rights as a tribe are respected.
In no other book of the Torah is there such an emphasis. In Exodus, the story of enslavement, the plagues, and the Exodus is told about the nation as a whole. The division into tribes plays very little part in the narrative. The book Vayikra is known in English as Leviticus, that is, matters pertaining to the tribe of Levi, because of their special duties as Levites and priests, but there is no special attention paid to the other tribes. In Deuteronomy, again the emphasis is on the nation as a whole, this time made sharper by its emphasis on a single, centralised Sanctuary “in the place which God chooses,” that is, Jerusalem. To give a sense of the disproportion, the word matteh, meaning “tribe,” appears eighty-nine times in Numbers but not at all in Deuteronomy.1Deuteronomy uses the word shevet, not matteh, for “tribe.” Even so, it appears only eighteen times, compared to the eighty-nine instances of matteh and six of shevet in Numbers. By contrast, the word am, “people,” appears thirty-four times in Deuteronomy, but only twelve in Numbers.
To be sure, in Genesis we read about the origin of the tribes, that is, the twelve sons of Jacob and the various tensions between them. That family history is essential background to the book of Numbers, because it tells us that there was a story of sibling rivalry. Hence the need to be constantly vigilant in making sure that each tribe felt that justice was being done in matters such as the division of the land. Indeed, the Korah rebellion brought to the surface various resentments that had to do with aspects of relationships between the tribes.
That said, the emphasis is, at least on the face of it, odd. We know from the later history of Israel that tribal identities were more a source of division than unity. During the period of the judges, Israel was an amphictyony, that is, a loose federation of tribes. But it was not a system that worked well in the long run. It becomes increasingly frayed as we reach the later chapters of the book. There were occasions on which inter-tribal war was only narrowly avoided.2There was almost war between the other tribes and those of Reuben, Gad, and half of Menashe (Josh. 22). Later there was actual war between the tribe of Benjamin and the others (Judges 20).
In the end, there was a certain inevitability about the move, in the days of Samuel, from a federation of tribes to a united nation under the leadership of a king.
Even so, the unification was not very successful – at least not for long. Its most brilliant architect was King David, who united the people by making Jerusalem the capital city, and by initiating plans for the building of the Temple. It was this more than anything else that brought the tribes together, especially to celebrate the pilgrim festivals three times a year. Even so, the sheer brevity of the period of unity is astounding in retrospect. It was Solomon, Israel’s third king, who built the Temple, but also he who exposed the political system to stresses and strains that reached their climax almost immediately after his death, resulting in the fateful split between the ten northern tribes under Jeroboam and the two southern ones under Solomon’s son Rehoboam.
In light of all this, the question remains insistent. Why tell the story this way? Why place the emphasis on tribes? Why was Israel not conceived as a united nation to begin with? To be sure, Jacob had twelve sons. But why segregate them geographically? Why orient the entire book of Numbers along the axis of tribal divisions and distinctions? Why tell us the demographics of the tribes instead of what is surely more significant, the population as a whole? Why not place the emphasis on what became Ezekiel’s great hope and vision: “I will make them one nation in the land.… There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms” (Ezek. 37:22)?
It seems that the Torah is telling us something compelling and fundamental, relevant not just then but still today. The Torah conceives of politics and identity from the ground up, not from the top down. It is not the ruler, emperor, or king who represents authority and imposes it on the population. To the contrary, the Torah takes us through the slow growth of Israel as an entity – beginning with one couple, Abraham and Sarah, who become a family, then an extended family, then a tribe, then a series of tribes. They are forged into a nation negatively by the experience of oppression in Egypt, positively by redemption and by the covenant they made with God at Mount Sinai. But those early structures – family, clan, tribe – remain important in the body politic, not just at the beginning but throughout.
One of the best accounts of the emergence of political society as the Torah conceives it was given by the sixteenth-century political theorist Jean Bodin. Societies began initially, he says,
from the love that was betwixt man and wife: from them to have flowed the mutual love betwixt parents and their children: then the love of brothers and sisters one towards another: and after them the friendship between cousins and other kinsmen: and last of all the love and good will, which is betwixt men joined in alliance: which had all at length grown cold, and been utterly extinguished, had it not been nourished, maintained and kept by societies, communities, corporations and colleges: the union of whom have for a long time maintained many people, without any Commonwealth or sovereign power over them.3Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (London: Adam Islip, 1606). See Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), 55–65.
This is an extremely important point – the slow growth of society from basic human groups to an ever-wider radius of concern – and it has often been forgotten in modern times.
Not everything social is political. Not everything we do together as a nation is because of governments, laws, courts, and the potential use of force. Societies are usually held together by a whole series of institutions larger than the individual but smaller than the state: families, communities, neighbourhoods, charities, voluntary associations, neighbourhood groups, and the like. Edmund Burke called them the “little platoons.” Alexis de Tocqueville called them “associations.” Nowadays they are usually called mediating structures, or third-sector organisations, and together they constitute civil society. What makes them important is that they are based not on transactions of wealth (the market) or power (the state) but on a sense of identity, belonging, loyalty, collective responsibility, and trust.
You can see the difference this makes by comparing the four revolutions that created the modern world: the English (1640s), American (1776), French (1789), and Russian (1917). England and America had strong civil societies. They had a rich range of congregations, communities, fellowships, charities, and the like. The French and Russian revolutionaries were, by contrast, essentially distrustful of civil society, believing that as little as possible should intervene between the individual and the state. That is one of the reasons why England and America, despite their internal wars, remained essentially free societies, while France during the reign of revolutionary terror and Russia under communist rule became totalitarian states. To be free, something must stand between the individual and the state. That is why the book of Numbers, charting the final stages of the journey to the Promised Land, speaks about families, clans, and tribes.
The Torah is not anti-political. It recognises the need for a state, which in biblical times essentially meant a king. A sense of collective nationhood needs a degree of centralisation. That is why, as a tribal federation during the era of the judges, Israel became increasingly dysfunctional. Eventually the people came to Samuel and requested a king. This was important militarily; only a nation united under a recognised leader could effectively defend itself against its enemies. It was important religiously as well. There had to be a central sanctuary where the nation as a nation could come together, giving thanks to God for the past and offering collective prayer for the future. But the Hebrew Bible, more than any other document from ancient times, is sceptical about the scope of politics. It knows, with Lord Acton, that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It also shares the scepticism of Oliver Goldsmith: “How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”4The Traveller (London: J. Newberry, 1765), 22.
A free society cannot be built on centralised institutions alone. The Torah is predicated on devolved responsibility. Each person is party to the covenant. Parents are responsible for the education of their children. Every family is charged with including in its festival celebrations widows, orphans, strangers, and servants. Every tribe (except the Levites), and every family within the tribe, is to have its share in the land. Every town should have its local judges. Education, welfare, the provision of charity, and the alleviation of poverty are done best locally, where people know one another and come to one another’s aid. The book of Ruth gives us a vivid picture of how this worked during the era of the judges.
We are tribal animals. That is where we gain our identity and sense of belonging. It is the focus of our loyalty and the source of our pride. In a recent book, Tribe, subtitled On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger draws our attention to some strange phenomena.5Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (London: Fourth Estate, 2016).
In America, many of the early English settlers chose to live with Native Americans, but there was almost no movement in the opposite direction. In London, people who lived through the Blitz, when the city was under nightly attack, speak of that time with nostalgia. Suicide and depression rates often fall in countries at war or at times of natural disaster. In recent years, while the number of American soldiers killed in combat has fallen, rates of post-traumatic stress disorder have risen.
All these things, argues Junger, have to do with our deep instinctual need to belong to a group. “The earliest and most basic definition of community – of tribe – would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend.” He adds, “A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly in these ways isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own.”6Ibid., 109–110.
That is what the early English settlers were drawn to when they encountered Native Americans: their strong tribes. That, he says, is why rates of post-traumatic stress disorder have risen: soldiers fail to find, when they return to contemporary American society, the intense camaraderie they had with their fellow combatants in the unit in which they served. The exception, he says, is Israel, “arguably the only modern country that retains a sufficient sense of community to mitigate the effects of combat on a mass scale.”7Ibid., 96.
Tribes have received bad press in the modern world. The European Enlightenment was a response to a century of tribal wars between Catholics and Protestants following the Reformation. Its answer was universalism: a world of universal humanity based not on religion but on the power of reason and observation in the form of philosophy and science. Its supreme expression was the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its words from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”: Alle Menschen werden Brüder, “All men shall become brothers.” For Enlightenment intellectuals, everything tribal was primitive. It was one of the great moments in the history of the West. But it failed, not because its dream was anything less than noble, but because it ignored human nature.
The nineteenth century witnessed the return of the repressed. Tribal identities returned to Europe in three forms: the nation, the race, and the socioeconomic class. In the twentieth century, worship of the nation led to two world wars; worship of the race led to the Holocaust; and worship of the class led to the Soviet Union, Stalin, the Gulag, and the KGB. That is what happens when you try to eliminate the tribe.
Following the Second World War and the Holocaust, another attempt was made by the West to abolish tribes. This time the solution was not universalism but individualism. There would be no more consecration of marriage, family, and community, and no universal moral principles except one, the right of the individual to choose to live as he or she wishes so long as others are not harmed. Tribalism would be confined to soccer matches or baseball games. This too will fail, and it has already begun to do so.
Already in 1975, Harold Isaacs, a professor of political science at MIT, warned that the tribes were returning. They never really went away. This fact was “well known to great masses of people for a long time but not to generations of elite, humanistic scholars and strivers for human perfectibility: namely that our tribal separatenesses are here to stay.” The good news is that “these diversities are the wealth of humanity.” The bad news is that “with all the beauty goes all the blood.” Tribes are the primal source of identity, but they are also a source of conflict, violence, and war.8Harold Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 216.
Hence the wisdom of the Torah, so profoundly different from the Enlightenment universalism of the eighteenth century and the radical individualism of the contemporary West. The Torah is about a form of ethics and politics that goes with the grain of human nature. So it begins, in Genesis, with the most basic forms of relationship: husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings and their rivalries. In Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, it turns to the nation, formed negatively by slavery in Egypt, positively by the covenant at Sinai. But it preserves the tribes as fundamental social units, just as America did when it formed itself as a federation of states.9There were originally thirteen states, exactly as in biblical Israel, the twelve landed tribes plus the tribe of Levi. Though Jacob had twelve sons, he gave a double portion to Joseph, whose two sons, Ephraim and Menashe, became tribes in their own right.
Indeed, the early motto of America was E pluribus unum, “Out of the many, one.”
This is a difficult balance to maintain, based as it is on sustaining diversity within a framework of overarching unity, and it can easily split apart, as biblical Israel did after the death of Solomon and as America might have done over the issue of slavery. Yet despite the fact that the northern kingdom with its ten tribes was defeated, Jews and Judaism have shown a repeated tendency to divide into other tribes: Ashkenazim and Sephardim, hasidim and mitnagdim, and the myriad edot and ethnicities that make up the contemporary State of Israel.
The bad news is that this leads to internal strife. The good news is that Jews, “the fewest of all peoples” (Deut. 7:7), continue to be one of the most diverse groups on the face of the planet, yet capable nonetheless of coming together at times of crisis to help and defend one another as well as to provide relief and assistance to any other nation suffering from humanitarian disaster.
We are not one thing. We have multiple identities, as members of this family, that neighbourhood, this congregation, that religious faith, this ethnicity, that nation, and ultimately the human family itself, brothers and sisters under the parenthood of God. The insistence on one identity to the exclusion of all others is the mark of a potentially totalitarian regime. Hence the insistence of the book of Numbers on the continuing significance of the twelve tribes even when Israel is one nation under the One God.