It is clear that the scheme is an artificial one. Israel, after its conquest of Canaan, could indeed be divided into twelve separate parts, but such a division was theoretical only. There were no twelve territories corresponding to the parts, while the parts themselves could be reckoned as thirteen, eleven, or ten, just as easily as twelve. The conclusion to be drawn from this is obvious. History credited Jacob with twelve sons, and it was consequently necessary to bring the number of Israelitish tribes into harmony with the fact. Modern criticism has amused itself with reversing the history, and assuming that the twelve sons of the patriarch owed their origin to the twelve tribes. It has accordingly drawn inferences from the fact that some of the sons of Jacob are said to have been the offspring of concubines, and not of his two legitimate wives, and that Joseph and Benjamin were the youngest of all. But such inferences fall with the assumption that in the twelve sons we have merely the eponymous heroes of the twelve tribes. It is a cheap way of making history, and, after all, what we know of the tribes does not fit in with the theory. There is nothing in the history of Dan and Naphtali, or Gad and Asher, which would have caused them to be regarded of bastard descent, if that bastard descent had not been a fact; indeed, in the Song of Deborah, which is almost universally allowed to go back to the early age of the Judges, Naphtali and Zebulun are placed on exactly the same footing. The distinction between the sons of Leah and those of Rachel does not answer to the real cleavage between the tribes of the south and those of the north of Palestine: Benjamin, after the age of Saul, followed Judah and Simeon, while the sons of Joseph were joined with Zebulun and Issachar. Moreover, had the sons of Jacob been mere reflections of the tribes, it would be difficult to account for the existence of Joseph, or to understand why Machir takes the place of Manasseh and Gad in the Song of Deborah. The critical theory is the result of introducing Greek modes of thought into Semitic history. The Greek tribe, it is true, traced its origin to an eponymous ancestor, but that ancestor was a god or a hero, and not a man. Among the Semites, however, as the history of Arabia may still teach us, the conception of the tribe was something wholly different. The tribe was an enlarged family which called itself by the name of its first head. It began with the individual, and to the last styled itself his children. The Greek tribe, on the contrary, began with the clan, and its theoretical ancestor, accordingly, was merely the divine personage whose common cult kept it together. In the Semitic tribe there could be no cult of its ancestor, for the ancestor was but an ordinary man, who worshipped the same form of Baal and used the same rites as his descendants after him.