According to the Hebrew Bible, the Tribe of Ephraim (, ʾEp̄rayim, in pausa: , ʾEp̄rāyim) was one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The Tribe of Manasseh, together with Ephraim, formed the Tribe of Joseph. It is one of the Ten Lost Tribes. The etymology of the name is disputed.For the etymology, see
Ephraim as portrayed in biblical narrative
According to the Bible, the Tribe of Ephraim is descended from a man named Ephraim, who is recorded as the son of Joseph, the son of Jacob, and Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera.Genesis 41:50-52, Genesis 30. The descendants of Joseph formed two of the tribes of Israel, whereas the other sons of Jacob were the founders of one tribe each.
The Bible records that the Tribe of Ephraim entered the land of Canaan during its conquest by Joshua, a descendant of Ephraim himself. and However, many archeologists have abandoned the idea that Joshua carried out a conquest of Canaan similar to that described in the Book of Joshua, seeing Jews instead as indigenous Canaanites who developed a monotheistic religion over time.
From Joshua to the formation of the first Kingdom of Israel, the Tribe of Ephraim was a part of a loose confederation of Israelite tribes. No central government existed, and in times of crisis the people were led by ad hoc leaders known as the Judges, or shofeṭim, which are known from related societies from Canaan and their colonies in Carthage
With the growth of the threat from Philistine incursions, the Israelite tribes decided to form a strong centralised monarchy to meet the challenge. The Tribe of Ephraim joined the new kingdom with Saul as the first king. The widely accepted date for Saul's reign is approximately 1025–1005 BCE. Some scholars dispute this date range and place Saul later, perhaps as late as "the second half of the tenth century B.C.E."On both datings, see
After the death of Saul, the Bible records that all the tribes except Judah remained loyal to the House of Saul. After the death of Ish-bosheth, Saul's son and successor to the throne of Israel, the Tribe of Ephraim joined the other northern Israelite tribes in making David, who was then the king of Judah, the king of a reunited kingdom. According to archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, there is doubt about whether the biblical ordering of the reigns of the early monarchs is reliable, and that the sequence preserved in the Bible, in which David follows Saul as king of Israel, may not be historically accurate.
However, on the accession of Rehoboam, David's grandson, in c. 930 BCE, the northern tribes split from the House of David to form the Northern Kingdom, known as both "Israel" and "Samaria". The first northern king of Israel was an Ephraimite, Jeroboam, who likely ruled in 931–909.For the biblical account, see On the date of Jeroboam I, see
The accents of the tribes were distinctive enough even at the time of the confederacy so that when the Israelites of Gilead, under the leadership of Jephthah, fought the Tribe of Ephraim, their pronunciation of shibboleth as sibboleth was considered sufficient evidence to single out individuals from Ephraim, so that they could be subjected to immediate death by the Israelites of Gilead.
Ephraim was a member of the Northern Kingdom until the kingdom was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in c. 723 BCE and the population deported, an event known as the Assyrian captivity. From that time, the Tribe of Ephraim has been counted as one of the Ten Lost Tribes.
Ephraim is often seen as the tribe that embodies the entire northern kingdom and the House of Omri resided in the tribe's territory just as Judah is the tribe that embodies the Kingdom of Judah and provided its royal family.
Tribal territory In the biblical account, following the completion of the conquest of Canaan by Joshua allocated the land among the Twelve Tribes. Kenneth Kitchen, a well-known Biblical maximalist, dated this event to slightly after 1200 BCE.Kitchen, Kenneth A. (2003), "On the Reliability of the Old Testament" (Grand Rapids, Michigan. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company)() However, the consensus of modern scholars is that the conquest of Joshua as described in the Book of Joshua never occurred."Besides the rejection of the Albrightian ‘conquest' model, the general consensus among OT scholars is that the Book of Joshua has no value in the historical reconstruction. They see the book as an ideological retrojection from a later period — either as early as the reign of Josiah or as late as the Hasmonean period." "It behooves us to ask, in spite of the fact that the overwhelming consensus of modern scholarship is that Joshua is a pious fiction composed by the deuteronomistic school, how does and how has the Jewish community dealt with these foundational narratives, saturated as they are with acts of violence against others?" "Recent decades, for example, have seen a remarkable reevaluation of evidence concerning the conquest of the land of Canaan by Joshua. As more sites have been excavated, there has been a growing consensus that the main story of Joshua, that of a speedy and complete conquest (e.g. Josh. 11.23: 'Thus Joshua conquered the whole country, just as the had promised Moses') is contradicted by the archaeological record, though there are indications of some destruction and conquest at the appropriate time.
As recorded in the Book of Joshua, the territory allocated to the Tribe of Ephraim was at the center of Canaan, west of the Jordan, south of the territory of Manasseh, and north of the Tribe of Benjamin. The region later named Samaria, which was distinct from Judea and Galilee, consisted mostly of Ephraim's territory. The area was mountainous, giving it protection, and also highly fertile, giving prosperity,Hosea 9:13Genesis 49:22Deuteronomy 33:13-16Isaiah 28:1
The territory of Ephraim contained the early centers of Israelite religion: Shechem and Shiloh.Jewish Encyclopedia These factors contributed to making Ephraim the dominant tribe in the United Kingdom of Israel, and led to Ephraim becoming a synonym for the entire kingdom. Joshua 16:1-4 outlines the borders of the lands allocated to the "children of Joseph", i.e. Ephraim and Manasseh combined, and Joshua 16:5-8 defines the borders of the land allocated to the tribe of Ephraim in more detail.
Bethel was allocated by Joshua to the Tribe of Benjamin. However, even by the time of the prophetess Deborah, Bethel is described as being in the land of the Tribe of Ephraim. Some twenty years after the breakup of the United Monarchy, King Abijah of Judah, the second king of the Kingdom of Judah, defeated Jeroboam, king of Israel-Samaria, and took back Bethel, Jeshanah and Ephron with their surrounding villages. Ephron is believed to be the Ophrah that was also allocated to the Tribe of Benjamin by Joshua.
The wadi Qānā () of Joshua 17:9 divided Ephraim's territory to the south and Manasseh's territory to the north. The illegal Israeli settlement of Karnei Shomron is built near this gulch, which runs in an easterly-westerly direction.Carta's Official Guide to Israel and Complete Gazetteer to all Sites in the Holy Land (3rd edition 1993), Jerusalem
The border of Ephraim extended from the Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. It incorporated within it the cities of Bethel (now BeitinCarta's Official Guide to Israel, Jerusalem 1983, p. 99. Beitin, identified as Bethel, is now an Arab village 4 km. NE of Ramallah. Burj Beitin, the ruins of its ancient settlement, lay within the boundaries of Beitin village.), ʻAtarot, Lower Beth-Ḥoron (now Lower Bayt ʻUr), extending as far as Gezer (now Abu Shusha, formerly known as "Tell el Jezer") and the Mediterranean Sea.Joshua 16:1 et seq. Gezer was said to have been inhabited by Canaanites long after Joshua had either killed or expelled the other Canaanites.Joshua 16:10 According to French archaeologist, Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, who identified the site in 1871 and later carried out excavations there, Gezer marked the extreme western point of the territory of Ephraim, and was "situated at the actual intersection of the boundaries of Ephraim, Dan and Judah."Charles Clermont-Ganneau, Archaeological Researches in Palestine during the Years 1873-1874, vol. II, London 1896, p. 275 (Translated from the original French by John MacFarlane) This view, however, does not seem to be supported by the Scriptures themselves which place the extent of Ephraim's border at the sea. Josephus noted, "The tribe of Ephraim had by lot the land that extended in length from the river Jordan to Gezer; but in breadth as far as from Bethel, till it ended at the Great Plain."
The traveller Benjamin of Tudela, a Jew from the Kingdom of Navarre, wrote that the southernmost bounds of the territory of Ephraim extended in a southwesterly direction as far as the town of Ibelin (now Yibna).The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, (ed. Marcus Nathan Adler), Oxford University Press, London 1907, p. 27
Origin According to the Torah, the tribe consisted of descendants of Ephraim a son of Joseph, from whom it took its name;Genesis 30 however some critical scholars view this also as postdiction, an eponymous metaphor providing an aetiology of the connectedness of the tribe to others in the Israelite confederation.Peake's commentary on the Bible In the Biblical account, Joseph is one of the two children of Rachel and Jacob, a brother to Benjamin, and father to both Ephraim, and his first son, Manasseh; although Manasseh was the eldest, Jacob foresaw that Ephraim's descendants would be greater than his brother's.Genesis 48:13-20
Though the biblical descriptions of the geographic boundary of the House of Joseph are fairly consistent, the descriptions of the boundaries between Manasseh and Ephraim are not, and each is portrayed as having exclaves within the territory of the other. Furthermore, in the Blessing of Jacob, and elsewhere ascribed by textual scholars to a similar or earlier time period,e.g. Joshua 17:14-18 Ephraim and Manasseh are treated as a single tribe, with Joseph appearing in their place. From this it is regarded as probable that originally Ephraim and Manasseh were considered one tribe — that of Joseph. According to several biblical scholars, Benjamin was also originally part of the House of Joseph, but the biblical account of this became lost; Benjamin being differentiated by being that part of Ephraim (House of Joseph) which joined the Kingdom of Judah rather than that of Israel.
A number of biblical scholars suspect that the Joseph tribes (including Benjamin) represent a second migration of Israelites to Israel, later than the main tribes, specifically that it was only the Joseph tribes which went to Egypt and returned, while the main Israelite tribes simply emerged as a subculture from the Canaanites and had remained in Canaan throughout; in the narrative in the Book of Joshua, which concerns the arrival in (and conquest of) Canaan by the Israelites from Egypt, the leader is Joshua, who was a member of the Ephraim tribe. According to this view, the story of Jacob's visit to Laban to obtain a wife began as a metaphor for the second migration, with Jacob's new family, possessions, and livestock, obtained from Laban, being representations of the new wave of migrants;