Naphtali

Jacob's blessing on Naphtali is two images in one line: a hind let loose, and one that gives goodly words. Swiftness and speech are an odd pair to assign a tribe, and translators have not agreed on the second half, some reading it as a deer that bears beautiful fawns rather than as eloquence. The Greek and the Hebrew traditions diverge here, and both readings have been carried forward.

Whatever the blessing meant, the tribe's recorded moment is military. Barak, who led the northern muster against Sisera and his chariots, came from Kedesh in Naphtali, and Deborah's song singles out Naphtali and Zebulun as the tribes that risked their lives on the heights of the field, while others are named for staying home. The battle was fought at the foot of Mount Tabor, on the edge of the territory, against an army equipped for the valley floor.

The allotment ran from the north western shore of the Sea of Galilee up into the upper Jordan hills, and it included Hazor, the largest fortified city of the region, and Kedesh, named as a city of refuge. It was hill country facing the routes down from the north, which made it defensible and made it the first thing an army from Damascus or Assyria would meet.

That position determined the tribe's history. Naphtali appears in the record chiefly at moments when the north is under attack, and it disappears from it at the moment when the north finally could not hold.

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.