Big Ideas · 3 · Deborah

Ten tribes or twelve?

Deborah's song lists only ten tribes; elsewhere Israel has twelve. Numbers like ten and twelve were ways of imagining unity, like 'all fifty states.'

Counting is a political act.

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The twelve-tribe scheme includes Judah, counting its smaller territory as two tribes. The song's ten may insist that Israel was the North alone.

Source: Why the Bible Began, pp. 54

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