The Bible says the nation of Israel consisted of twelve tribes, and it often lists all of those tribes. Or tries to. But those lists of tribes are very inconsistent. All of these lists agree that the twelve tribes included Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Asher, Naphtali, and Benjamin. But beyond those six, the various lists of tribes in the Bible can’t agree on what the rest of the tribes of Israel were.
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Discrimination by tribe
Here’s what the Bible says about how people were, or should have been, treated based on which tribe of Israel they were part of:
Levi
Moses set the Levites apart as God’s special favored tribe, to reward them for murdering thousands of their fellow Israelites. The Levites were exempt from military duty, but they had their own special duties, taking care of God’s stuff. And only Levites were supposed to do that kind of thing.
The law allowed Levites to do things that other people weren’t allowed to do. It even required them to do things that other people would be executed for doing. God personally killed people who touched his stuff if they weren’t Levites. And a king who let people be priests even though they weren’t Levites is labeled as evil in the Bible. If you’re not a Levite, God doesn’t want you to be a priest, except maybe if you’re Jesus.
A lot of the stuff that the law of Moses required other Israelites to tithe “to God” actually went to the Levites. Moses was a Levite, by the way. Moses kept claiming that God wanted the people to give Moses’s family and tribe free food and money. You don’t get that kind of treatment if you’re not a Levite, except maybe if you’re Melchizedek.
The Israelites were required to preserve their original tribal land divisions. Any marriage that would have resulted in people of one tribe inheriting land from another tribe was forbidden. The Levites didn’t get to inherit any land, though. They lived in the other tribes’ land. All the other tribes were required to set aside towns and pasturelands for the Levites. So… actually the Levites did get their own land, even though God said they couldn’t.
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The Story of the Levite’s Concubine—
The Most Pointlessly Evil Story in the Bible
A Levite man’s girlfriend broke up with him and went back to live with her parents. But then he followed her to her parents’ house and took her back. On the way back to the man’s home, they stopped for the night in Gibeah, a city of the tribe of Benjamin, and stayed in an old man’s house.
Some of the Benjamite men from that city came and surrounded the house. They told the old man to send the Levite man out so they could have sex with him. The old man said he couldn’t let them have sex with his guest, because that would be outrageous and vile. So he offered to let them rape his daughter and his guest’s girlfriend instead.
The Levite man thought that was a good idea, so he sent his girlfriend outside. The men of Gibeah spent the whole night gang-raping her to death. Then the man went home, and he chopped up his girlfriend into a dozen pieces and had them distributed all over the country.
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Which tribe was Huram’s mother from?
In 1 Kings, the Bible says Solomon hired a skilled craftsman named Huram to make a bunch of bronze stuff for the temple. It says Huram’s father (who was also a skilled craftsman) was from the Phoenician city of Tyre, and his mother was from the Israelite tribe of Naphtali.
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