It is just reasonably doubtful that Jacob had exactly that twelve sons, we were told. The whole Abraham, Isaac, Yacov story is a made up ethnogenesis, an artificially created hindsight. The Bible story shows that in order to create twelve ancestors of the twelve tribes they had to get kids not only from Yacov’s wives, but from his maidservants, meanwhile the maidservant of Abraham, called Hagar, and her child Ishmael, were ousted from the lineage and from the tribal structure together with the six children of Abraham’s Canaanite wife, Keturah.
The Levites are obviously Egyptians, just like Moses, himself. They really had priestly functions back to Egypt, more than likely that they were Aten priests, serving the Ekhnaton style monotheism. However, that should not have meant that they should have been left out from the tribal land allocation, if they had been originated from Levi, as a real son of Yacov, aka being one of the original tribes, but they were not. The story made Levi a son of Yacov, incorporating them into the allience.
The only explanation for their lack of land rights, that they were foreigners, who were not part of the original tribal allience, but were the entourage of Moses, who was a real prince of Egypt and eventually a rival pharaoh and the brother of Seti I, and as such was also a high priest of an Egyptian cult, ex officio.
Also there is no reasonable explanation, why Joseph received two portions from the allocated lands, although he had been also just one of the sons of Yacov. Nonetheless, the Bible gives two portions to Joseph, transferred to his sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, who by the land allocation were elevated into the biblical rank of tribal entities. These latter two had obviously been tribes already, and probably the only Hebrew tribes, which sojourned in the Egyptian Nile Delta.
The Israelites were never really fully united, except under two warlords, Saul and David, and a cruel tyrant, Solomon.
Like all other nations, during the history they naturally merged and mixed with others, which is more than acknowledged in the Tanakh. The number of twelve is an agenda manipulated story item, where the twelve might have been twelve somehow, but manipulated around the half hearted admission of the Levites.
Thus, it looks like that the Israelites were composed by original Canaanite tribes, Hyksos tribes or Hyksos allied Canaanites, Midianites, Canaanites from the Arabah and the copper mining Timnah, Abrahamic clans from Hebron, and Levites from Egypt, some groups of the Hittites, and the Maccabee era conversion of the Edomites. The first Shiloh based Levites had fought for leadership with the Hebron based Abrahamites for at least a millennium or more.
In the long run Shiloh became Israel, Hebron became Judah, and the Jebusite city, Jerusalem, was taken from Benjamin (Saul) by Judah (David).
Despite of its low level accuracy and sometime the complete lack of any decent historicity of the Hebrew Scriptures, and also the obvious geopolitical reasoning in it, the Bible is still the treasure house of one of the highest moral standards in the documented history.
Jeremiah, who wrote or made written around half of the books, including the Book of Deuteronomy, and the final compiler Ezra, prophet Malachy incognito, have close to unlimited merits in the creation of the Bible.
It is true that many other books should have been included, like the Books of Enoch, or the Book of the Jubilies, still it is a monumental achievement.
Nonetheless, it may have easily happened, that Yacov did not have exactly the registry book twelve sons in this ancient reality show.
VERSUS PAUL 