Jacob had twelve sons, and his descendants were accordingly divided into twelve tribes.  But the division was an artificial one; it never at any time corresponded exactly with historical reality.  Levi was not a tribe in the same sense as the rest of his brethren; no territory was assigned to him apart from the so-called Levitical cities; and he represented the priestly order wherever it might be found and from whatever ancestors it might be derived.  Simeon and Dan hardly existed as separate tribes except in name; their territories were absorbed into that of Judah, and it was only in the city of Laish in the far north that the memory of Dan survived.  The tribe of Joseph was split into two halves, Ephraim and Manasseh, while Judah was a mixture of various elements—­of Hebrews who traced their origin alike to Judah, to Simeon, and to Dan; of Kenites and Jerahmeelites from the desert of Arabia; and of Kenizzites from Edom.  Benjamin or Ben-Oni was, as a tribe, merely the southern portion of the house of Joseph, which had settled around the sanctuary of Beth-On or Beth-el.  Benjamin means the “Southerner,” and Ben-Oni “the inhabitant of Beth-On.”  It is even questionable whether the son of Jacob from whom the tribe was held to be descended bore the name of Benjamin.  Had the name of Esau not been preserved we should not have known the true name of the founder of Edom, and it may be that the name of the tribe of Benjamin has been reflected back upon its ancestor.

In Goshen, at all events, the tribes of Israel would have been distinguished by the names of their actual forefathers.  They would have been “the sons” of Reuben or Judah, of Simeon or Gad.  But they were all families within a single family.  They were all “Israelites” or “sons of Israel,” and in an inscription of the Egyptian king Meneptah they are accordingly called Israelu, “Israelites,” without any territorial adjunct.  They lived in Goshen, like the Bedawin of to-day, and their social organisation was that of Arabia.

The immediate occasion of the settlement of Israel on the outskirts of Egypt was that which has brought so many Bedawin herdsmen to the valley of the Nile both before and since.  The very district of Goshen in which they settled was occupied again, shortly after their desertion of it, by nomads from Edom who had besought the Pharaoh for meadow-land on which to feed their flocks.  The need of pasturage from time immemorial has urged the pastoral tribes of the desert towards the fertile land of the Nile.  When want of rain has brought drought upon Canaan, parching the grass and destroying the corn, the nomad has invariably set his face toward the country which is dependent for its fertility, not upon the rains of heaven, but upon the annual overflow of its river.  It was a famine in Canaan, produced by the absence of rain, which made Jacob and his sons “go down into Egypt.”