There are Twelve Tribes, and there are Twelve Tribes

One of my favorite shows on television is “Battlestar Galactica”, dare I admit to both versions? The one currently in its last season on Sci-Fi is some of the best, admittedly depressing, science fiction ever put on the small screen.

The story has the remnants of twelve tribes seeking the ‘lost’ thirteenth tribe. There is a lot of other religion mixed into the show, but this particular bit caught my attention. The twelve tribes, each named for a sign of the Zodiac, allude fairly obviously to the twelve tribes of Israel. These are the tribal/political divisions of the nation of Israel as they complete the Exodus and conquer the Promised Land. These stories are chronicled in the books of Exodus through Joshua of the Old Testament.

The parallels diverge from each other concerning the thirteenth tribe. In Battlestar Galactica, the thirteenth tribe is ‘lost’, out there in the cosmos somewhere, in a place will provide salvation for the remnants of the other twelve tribes. I am told that this is in parallel with the origin story of the church of Latter Day Saints, but I do not profess to know enough about our Mormon brothers and sisters to speak to that.

I want to speak to what I know. In the Old Testament, there are also thirteen tribes, twelve of whom inherit land in the Promised Land. Those twelve originate with eleven of the sons of Jacob, renamed Israel by God, and two of the grandsons of Jacob. (Jacob is in turn the grandson of Abraham, with whom God made the original covenant).

In other words, one son of Jacob, Joseph, has two tribes ascribed to his family, one for each of his sons, Ephraim and Manasseh (Joshua 14:4). So twelve get land.

The thirteenth tribe is not lost, it is not eliminated, it is not gone. The thirteenth tribe, named for Jacob’s son Levi is given no inheritance among the territories of the Promised Land. Rather, according to Joshua 13:33 “But to the tribe of Levi Moses gave no inheritance; the Lord God of Israel is their inheritance, as he said to them.”

The tribe of Levi has cities and towns scattered among the other tribes. With God as their inheritance, they became the religious leaders, the priests and religious ‘staff’ of the nation. They represented the presence of God among the people, among the tribes, with them and blessing them if the rest of the nation kept God’s covenant.

Having God was not something the people of the Bible needed to go searching for in a far off land. There was no lost tribe that could save them. That thirteenth tribe was always in their midst, God was always in their midst.

But that does not appear to make as good a science-fiction show.