Zebulun

Two passages describe Zebulun in maritime terms and one does not, and the tension between them is one of the durable puzzles of the tribal geography.

Jacob's blessing says Zebulun shall dwell at the haven of the sea, shall be for a haven of ships, and his border shall be toward Sidon. Moses' blessing pairs him with Issachar and speaks of the two sucking the abundance of the seas and treasures hidden in the sand. But the boundary list in Joshua 19 traces a territory in lower Galilee, running between the Jezreel valley and the hills, that touches no coastline at all and comes nowhere near Sidon.

Several explanations have been offered and none has settled it. The blessings may record a claim, or an older distribution, or an economic reality in which the tribe worked the trade routes to the coast without holding the shore, since the road from the Mediterranean ports up into Galilee ran through its territory. The boundary lists may be later and more administrative than the poems, which are among the oldest material in the Hebrew Bible.

What the tribe demonstrably held is good ground on a crossroads: hill country and valley heads through which traffic between the coast and the inland routes had to pass, and which supported farming. The blessings and the boundaries agree on prosperity and disagree only about water. That the compilers preserved both, without harmonising them, is characteristic of how the tribal material was handled.

The Song of Deborah, one of the oldest poems in the Hebrew Bible, works as a muster roll with commentary. Some tribes are praised, some are asked why they stayed home, and two are singled out for the highest praise: Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that risked their lives to the death on the heights of the field. The same poem earlier notes that out of Zebulun came those who handle the marshal's staff. Elon, one of the minor judges, is also of Zebulun.

The tribe went into exile with Naphtali when the Assyrians took Galilee in 733 BCE, and the name should end there. It does not quite. When Hezekiah of Judah, a generation later, sent messengers through the ruined north inviting people to keep Passover at Jerusalem, the account says most of them laughed at the couriers, but that some of Asher, Manasseh and Zebulun humbled themselves and came. It is a small notice and a rare one: a fragment of a deported tribe still present on the ground and still recognisable by name.

The territory's longest afterlife is geographical. Nazareth stands within the old Zebulun allotment, and Capernaum within Naphtali's, which is why the Gospel of Matthew introduces the Galilean ministry by quoting Isaiah on the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali. A tribal boundary drawn in the book of Joshua supplies the frame through which a first century preaching circuit is read, and that is now the main reason the name is known outside the tribal lists.