Page "Tribe of Joseph" Paragraph 2

According to the Torah, the tribe consisted of descendants of Joseph, a son of Jacob and Rachel, from whom it took its name ; however some Biblical scholars view this also as postdiction, an eponymous metaphor providing an aetiology of the connectedness of the tribe to others in the Israelite confederation.

In the Biblical account, Joseph was the brother to Benjamin, the other son of Rachel and Jacob, and the eponym of the Tribe of Benjamin, which was located on the immediate south of the tribe of Joseph ; the birth of Benjamin does not appear in the passage in which the births of the other sons of Jacob occur, but instead appears elsewhere, with Benjamin being born only once Jacob had returned to Canaan.

According to several biblical scholars, Benjamin was originally part of the house of Joseph, but the biblical account of this became lost ; the account of the birth of the other sons of Jacob is regarded by textual scholars as a complex mixture of Elohist and Yahwist texts, and very corrupt, and it is clear that parts of the corresponding Elohist text, and parts of the corresponding Yahwist text, are missing.

The aetiological explanation of Benjamin being born in Canaan is simply that the tribe of Benjamin broke off from the Joseph group once it had settled in Canaan, by joining the Kingdom of Judah rather than that of Israel.