The second book of Kings records that Tiglath-Pileser, king of Assyria, took Ijon, Abel-beth-maacah, Janoah, Kedesh, Hazor, Gilead, Galilee and all the land of Naphtali, and carried the people captive to Assyria. The campaign is dated to 733 BCE and it is the first deportation of Israelites in the biblical record, more than a decade before Samaria itself fell. Naphtali was the frontier and went first.
Isaiah takes that specific catastrophe and turns it. The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, brought into contempt, will be made glorious; the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. The promise is attached by name to the two tribes that had already been carried off, which is the sharpest thing about it: the consolation is addressed to a territory whose population is gone.
The Gospel of Matthew quotes those verses at the point where Jesus leaves Nazareth and settles at Capernaum, which stood inside the old Naphtali allotment on the shore of the lake, and reads the ministry in Galilee as their fulfilment. The link between a tribal boundary of the twelfth century BCE and a first century preaching circuit is made entirely through that prophecy.
The tribe has one more literary afterlife. The book of Tobit, set among the exiles, gives its hero a Naphtalite genealogy and has him remember worshipping at Jerusalem while the rest of his tribe sacrificed at Dan, so that the deported northerners get a narrative voice they have nowhere else.