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This article weighs in on new debates about the affiliation of the tribe of Benjamin between Israel and Judah in the early monarchy. It points to two underappreciated aspects of the Hebrew Bible's account of tribal realities in the books of Kings: the anonymity of the ten tribes attributed to Israel in 1 Kgs 11–12, and how unusual the absence of a complete and detailed account of tribal arrangements in Kings is in the context of a Primary History as a whole. It argues that both of these realities reflect a deliberate effort to obscure Benjamin's northern origins and that, in fact, it is impossible to come up with a plausible list of ten Israelite tribes without Benjamin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new solution to an old problem: Why is the tribe of Reuben first in so many descriptions of the tribes? This question, which was routinely debated in the middle of the twentieth century, has not often been explored in recent years even as the assumptions on which earlier solutions were based have fundamentally changed. Here, I lay out the dimensions of a necessary paradigm shift in dealing with details of this sort very generally and suggest that the tribe of Reuben specifically gained its elevation as a tool of Judahite authors seeking to rewrite the history of tribal Israel on Judahite terms. This is not because Reuben itself was a southern tribe, but quite the opposite--because it could give an Israelite imprimatur to a new version of tribal traditions that otherwise emphasized the importance of the south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The biblical account of Samuel’s career prior to the careers of Saul and David contains an unexamined oddity. In 1Sam 7:13 and 7:15 the reader is told explicitly that the Philistines never again threatened Israel during the life of Samuel and that Samuel remained Israel’s judge for all of his days. Both of these claims are, however, relatively quickly revealed to be untruths: in one of the accounts of Saul’s rise to power it is the Philistine threat that impels Israel to ask for a king, and while Samuel retires in 1Sam 12, he lives on until 1Sam 25:1. This article argues that the bulk of 1Sam 1–7 originally described the career of Samuel the Judge, a figure like Samson, who was not supposed to have a role in the rise of monarchy in Israel. In this narrative, the claims in 1Sam 7:13 and 15 were explicitly true, and were meant to conclude this history of Samuel’s life [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]