QUEM SÃO AS 12 TRIBOS? E de que tribo minha familia faz parte?

Shalom and welcome back to Israel with Aline! We are in Jerusalem, and today’s subject is the twelve tribes of Israel. Who are they? Where are they today? And also, did you know that there are more than twelve tribes? And watch with us until the end to find out which tribe my family belongs to. So if you are ready, let’s get started! Walking through the streets of Jerusalem and Israel we often find representations of the twelve tribes, for example in this mosaic here, but to begin to understand the origin of the Tribes we have to go back in history, to the Biblical genealogy since Abraham. So let’s go together now to the Tower of David, find a nice quiet place and talk about all this, come on! I will now also put the biblical genealogy on the screen here for those who wants to follow along with me, We start with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the three patriarchs of Judaism, and the most important, Jacob’s twelve sons, who will originate the twelve tribes of Israel. Yosef, or as we call in Portuguese José, is sold by his brothers and taken to Egypt. Some years later, in the land of Israel there will be a great drought and consequently a great famine, so the rest of the brothers and of the family go down to Egypt and thanks to Joseph they will be very well received, but some time later the Jews living in Egypt will be enslaved and will spend four hundred years as slaves in Egypt, and this family that when they went down was around 70 to 75 people will grow and become a gigantic people. And then happen the exodus from Egypt, one of the most incredible passages in the Bible! God will send the ten plagues to Egypt, the Red Sea will open and the people of Israel will be able to leave Egypt, and when they leave, they are already organized in twelve tribes and they go then to the desert where the people will spend forty years. And here we have two very important modifications of the tribes of Israel, the first modification is that the tribe of Yosef, the tribe of Joseph, will be divided in two, it will be divided between his two sons who will be called Menasseh and Ephraim, and the second modification will be the Tribe of Levi, they will receive a very important role: service to God and the priesthood, and so the tribe of Levi will not receive lands of inheritance, but the tribe of Levi will be placed within the other tribes and so within the whole space of Israel would have part of the people of Levi also living, and in addition who was of the tribe of Levi was Moses and especially his brother named Aaron. Aaron the Cohen, he will be the first priest of the people of Israel and his descendants will continue to be priests, until today we know who are the descendants of Aaron and therefore the tribe of Levi as a whole, they worked in the helping and assisting part, also for example, playing instruments, singing, and the family of Aaron, the family of Cohen, they are priests themselves. And after forty years wandering in the desert, finally the time has come to enter to conquer the land of Israel and this new composition of the twelve tribes will divide the land of Israel among them, remembering that Levi does not receive any part. I will now put for you the map of the division of Canaan among the twelve tribes of Israel as described in the book of Joshua from chapters 13 to 19. And the twelve tribes will live side by side for two hundred years, and after this period there will be the unification of them all under one big kingdom, the first king will be King Saul, after that King David and King Solomon. But after King Solomon’s period, there will be a division, this great Jewish kingdom will be divided into two kingdoms, the northern kingdom will be called the Kingdom of Israel, and within it will be found most of the ten tribes of Israel that you can see on the screen, and in the southern kingdom there will be two tribes, the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin, and that’s why it’s also called the Kingdom of Judah, and Levi as we have already said will be scattered throughout the territory, and so they will live kingdom to kingdom until a dramatic moment. In the year 722 B.C., the great Assyrian invasion of the kingdom of Israel will take place. They are going to destroy the kingdom of Israel and take the ten tribes and exile them, send them somewhere else that we don’t know where. If you have ever heard of the ten lost tribes of Israel, this is exactly what we are talking about. And after invading the kingdom of Israel, they head south and come to invade the kingdom of Judah, in a battle for the survival of all the people of Israel the last free Jews were here, remembering that the kingdom of Judah was the small kingdom with far fewer people, how could they defend themselves from this great Assyrian invader? And now we go to our next place, precisely the place of the battle against the Assyrians, so let’s go! This gigantic wall that you see behind me was built by King Hezekiah precisely to defend Jerusalem from the Assyrian invasion, and the construction of this wall is reported in the book of Isaiah. And King Hezekiah’s strategy is going to work, and the Assyrians fail to conquer Jerusalem, and then they leave, and the kingdom of Judah is saved. So who will become the people of Israel will be practically only those who stayed in the kingdom of Judah, which is primarily the tribe of Judah, which is the majority, also we have the tribe of Benjamin, we have part of the Tribe of Levi which already lived there and we also have part of refugees who arrived from the northern kingdom, from the kingdom of Israel, fleeing to the southern kingdom, to the kingdom of Judah. So this will be the composition of the people of Israel and this composition is still the same today. But since then, people, more than two thousand and five hundred years have passed, and the tribes among themselves, they will begin to blend, and most Jews today don’t know which tribe their family originated from, with one big exception which is the tribe of Levi, since the Levites, they were separated to do work in the temple in Jerusalem, we know exactly who they are, and many of them even keep the last name Levi until today, people. I am a huge fan of jeans, the first jeans in the world were created by a company called Levi’s, Levi’s is precisely because the man who created the company was his last name, and also within the Levi’s tribe we still know who are from the Cohen family, so Cohen is also a last name that is used until today, not necessarily all the Cohens keep their last name but many of them do, for example, the Cohens brothers are very famous filmmakers in the United States, and what I promised you at the beginning of the video was to tell you about my family. So my father’s family we have no way of knowing what their tribe is, so we call those who don’t know the tribe of Israel, but my mother’s family, both my grandmother and grandfather were Cohen, they were from the family of priests of the Temple of Jerusalem. So I will now put here in the edition also for you the “Ketubah” the marriage certificate of my grandparents and you can see written in Hebrew, I will mark the word Cohen. That is, my mother’s family are Cohen from the tribe of Levi and my father’s family we don’t know. And the last big question we have left to talk about is what happened to the ten tribes of Israel, the ten lost tribes. We know that the Assyrians are going to drive them out of Israel, and we don’t know exactly where they are going to be taken, but there are some Jewish communities around the world and Jewish descendants that are believed to be maybe part of these lost tribes, the most famous and most important community is the community in India that are probably descendants of the tribe of Manasseh, and just a few days ago there was a special operation to bring part of this tribe back to Israel, and on December 15 arrived 252 descendants of the tribe of Manasseh who continue to practice Judaism until today, and we can see here also them singing at their arrival at the Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. And it is very beautiful to see one of the twelve tribes of Israel returning to their land, after two thousand and seven hundred years of exile. So the history of the tribes of Israel did not end in the past, but continues to be written until today. I hope you enjoyed this video, don’t forget to like it and share it with your friends, and I see you next time, Shalom!