Ancient Names and the Stories They Tell
As I build the world of biblical-era Israelites for my historical novel retelling the Exodus based on modern climate science and epidemiology, I’ve realized that a major social factor in the ancient Jewish world seems to be tribal affiliation. This is clear in many parts of the Hebrew Bible; pretty much every major character is described with reference to a tribe.
Some of the earliest Bible stories mythologize the beginnings of this organizational principle. According to the Book of Genesis, Jacob — whose name became Israel after he wrestled with an angel — had twelve sons, most of whom were patriarchs of the Twelve Tribes. (It’s a little more complicated than that, but essentially all the tribal patriarchs were branches from Jacob’s “seed.”) Collectively, these tribes called themselves the “Children of Israel,” and they are known by this epithet throughout the text. But individually they seem to have had particular characters, as we learn when Jacob on his deathbed blesses each according to his unique personality (Genesis 49).
Part of my research into these personalities has included a fairly recent article about a slightly later period of biblical history, the time of the divided monarchy when the tribe of Judah ruled the highlands around Jerusalem and a confederation of other tribes calling themselves the Kingdom of Israel stretched from today’s Syria to the Mediterranean coast. Although this era is a few hundred years after the time of the original Exodus stories, and much better substantiated by archaeology than the Exodus itself, I am assuming that ancient tribal stereotypes might have lingered. Just as we consider Italians to be a bit more hotheaded than Norwegians, or Irish more garrulous than Germans, Benjaminites might have been seen as excellent warriors and Zebulunites as good sailors even centuries after the chapter on Jacob’s blessings was written down.
Since it was the Judahites who ended up surviving the 60-year Babylonian exile long enough to return to Jerusalem and assemble much of the Hebrew Bible as we know it today, less is known about life in the much larger Kingdom of Israel. A 2025 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences applies statistical analysis to a list of all the names found inked on pottery shards or impressed on clay seals in 8th century BCE Israel, in order to lift some of the obscurity surrounding the differences between these two polities.
The goal of this analysis was to find patterns in names that had not been encountered in an inscription. Even if we don’t know exactly what those names were, we can reach a conclusion about how large the set of unknown names most likely is, along with some of the characteristics of those names. Through the miracle of statistics — a phrase I use advisedly, since I avoid the miraculous in my fiction — the authors of the PNAS article were able to tell how many names were in circulation during the 8th century BCE in both kingdoms, and also how much all of the names (including the unknown ones) had in common with each other.
The Israeli researchers started with about 1,000 names that had probably belonged to members of the upper classes — those who were literate and possessed seal rings that made ID tags out of wet clay for goods such as jugs of oil or wine. By applying a statistical method originally used by Alan Turing, the British cryptographer who cracked the Nazis’ Enigma code, the PNAS authors found that Kingdom of Israel residents had a much more diverse list of baby names than those in the Kingdom of Judah. This suggested, according to the authors, that Israel was “a more cosmopolitan society” than Judah. Israel Finkelstein, one of the best-known biblical archaeologists today and a co-author of the PNAS paper, told the Archaeology section of Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper that “[the Kingdom of] Israel had a larger and more diverse population, more open to interactions with neighboring entities,” while “Judah was a more closed, more tribal, conservative society, centered in the more isolated block of the southern highlands, with weaker connections to its neighbors.”
This has many implications for me as a historical novelist and a Jew. If it was the more conservative Children of Israel who were responsible for the Bible as we know it today, but the majority of tribes in the Promised Land were more open and liberal, what might their common ancestors have believed and practiced centuries earlier in Egypt? Can I think of some of the tribes as being more like me, reformist or even secular Jews who seek their own spiritual paths, and others as treading a much narrower and more tradition-bound way toward God like today’s ultra-Orthodox? Might there have been mutual antipathy and condescension, the one group seeing the other as backward and the other seeing the majority as impious? What does all of this mean not only for my characters who are buffeted by events they do not control, but for me in the modern world as I navigate the stormy sea of Jewish identity in the 21st century?
Another case in which tribe and even clan was important was ancient marriages. According to Hayyim Schauss of the Jewish Teachers Seminary in New York, writing in the My Jewish Learning newsletter, “It was undesirable to marry a woman from a foreign clan, lest she introduce foreign beliefs and practices.” My guess is that there was probably enough tension between the kingdoms of Judah and Israel for them to consider marriages combining the two groups as “mixed.”
There were economic implications as well. “In those days a father was more concerned about the marriage of his sons than about the marriage of his daughters,” writes Schauss. “No expense was involved in marrying off a daughter,” but if one’s son was to be wed, the father of his bride had to be compensated with a dowry for the loss of a valued family member’s labor. The son’s family would benefit from the young wife’s skills, so payment to the people who had raised her was only fair.
Biblical stories record the option of paying for a bride not with cash and gifts, but with in-kind employment — like when Jacob works for Laban for fourteen years in order to marry Rachel (Genesis 29). And as the custom was passed down through the centuries and women grew more respected as individuals in these societies, the dowries began to be given not to the father of the husband, but to the bride herself should there be a reason for divorce, according to Schauss.
So I know exactly where I want my main female protagonist to be: In the liberal future Kingdom of Israel, enjoying plenty of contact with the outside world, and with enough property to be independent of her husband — Kingdom of Judah be damned.
