The Biblical story that describes the formation of the twelve tribes of Israel creates a deliberate ambiguity between families, territories, and individual human beings. Judah is a character in the book of Genesis; he is one of the sons of Jacob. But Jacob is also called Israel, and his twelve sons happen to share the names of Israel's twelve tribes. Israel, the man, can tell the reader a great deal about Israel, the people. By the same token, Judah, his son, says something about the tribe that is also called Judah.

Though Judah is not the most important character in Jacob's story, the territory that belonged to Judah's tribe managed to preserve some political autonomy long after the other eleven tribes had been conquered or destroyed. Judaea, the Latinization of the word Judah, is the basis for the modern word Jew. Therefore Judah is arguably the most important tribe from a historical perspective, if not a literary or religious one.

Judah the Son of Jacob

In Genesis 29, we are told that Jacob fell in love with a young woman named Rachel and planned to marry her. However, thanks to a ruse designed by Rachel's father, Jacob ended up marrying Rachel's older sister instead of Rachel herself.

Seven long years later, Jacob managed to marry the woman he loved as well. But jealousy and bitterness was never quite overcome in the relationship between the man and his two wives, especially since the wife Jacob loved the most was not able to produce a son for him for many years. The story becomes even more complicated when Jacob starts having children by the handmaids of his two wives.

So the twelve sons of Jacob are born of four different mothers: a loved wife, an unloved wife, a loved wife's servant, and an unloved wife's servant. It is easy to imagine that the status of these sons and their mothers is meant to reflect the political standings of the tribes named after them. Furthermore, the backstabbing and manipulation that takes place among the brothers themselves makes it clear that the political/family problems did not end in Jacob's generation.

Judah is the fourth son that Jacob fathers upon Leah, Rachel's sister; this is just before Rachel, in desperation, gives her maid Bilhah to Jacob to act as a sort of surrogate mother on her behalf. In Genesis 29:35, Leah announces that she will "praise the lord" upon the birth of this fourth son; the Hebrew word hodah, praise, is related to the proper name Yehudah, which is anglicized to Judah.

Stories about Judah can be found throughout the book of Genesis. He has the dubious honour of being the one to persuade his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery rather than killing him. (Or maybe it's Reuben who does that. The story in Genesis 37:18-36 has come down to us in a very garbled form; it isn't clear which brother saves Joseph's life, or what tribe the slave-merchants belong to.) Judah is also the father of Onan, who later became infamous for reasons that have nothing to do with the subject of this node.

Judah the Tribe

Jacob gives his sons a series of prophecies in Genesis 49, and Judah's is very positive; he is told that he will crush his enemies and seize the sceptre of kingship. When Judah's descendants move into the promised land centuries later, they are given a large (but not especially fertile) territory in the south of Palestine, whose boundaries are described at length in Joshua 15.

When the Israelite kingdom was divided by civil war in 922 BCE, the ten northern tribes rebelled against King Solomon's son Rehoboam and set up their own kingdom under Jeroboam. The two southernmost tribes, Judah and Benjamin, stayed loyal to Solomon's dynasty. Since Benjamin was a tiny tribe with a tiny territory (appropriate, perhaps, since Benjamin was Jacob's youngest son), the southern kingdom was soon simply called Judah.

Judah's lands were dry and rocky, but this ended up being a blessing rather than a curse. The fertile territories belonging to the northern tribes of Israel were much more frequently attacked by armies from the east. Not only were they attractive lands for expansionist Mesopotamians, but they were also the hardest areas for a military force to defend.

It was perhaps inevitable that only Judah and Benjamin would survive the devastating attack of the Assyrians in 722 BCE; the other ten tribes were destroyed and dispersed. The kingdom of Judah was all that was left of Israel.

Judah becomes Judaea

The territory called Judah changed hands a number of times over subsequent centuries. Every few generations, it seemed the Judaeans found themselves paying tribute to a different foreign oppressor. In the second century BCE, the inhabitants of Judah enjoyed a brief period of autonomy under the Hasmoneans, whose story is told in the Biblical books of Maccabees and whose military successes are celebrated at Hanukkah.

When the Romans moved in, during the first century BCE, they Latinized the name Judah into Judaea, and made it an imperial province with its own ethnarch. The Jews were given some relatively generous religious freedoms; for instance, they were not conscripted into the Roman army so that they would not be forced to fight on the Sabbath. However, a series of Jewish rebellions soured the relationship between the Romans and the Jews. After the Jewish War of 66-70 CE (described so memorably by Josephus), and the uprising started by Simon ben Kosiba (better known as Bar Kochba) a generation later, the Romans had had enough of Jewish independence. They renamed the province Syria Palaestina, that is to say, Palestine -- a rather insulting name to Jews, since the word was derived from the name of their ancient enemies, the Philistines. They also renamed the capital city from Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina, and for a time, they forbade Jews from setting foot in it.

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