Benjamin

Benjamin does almost nothing in the story that turns on him, which is the point of him. He is the object the plot moves around: the one son Jacob will not risk after losing Joseph, and therefore the only lever the disguised Joseph has.

Joseph demands that the brothers bring the youngest down to Egypt to prove they are not spies, and Jacob refuses until the famine leaves no choice. Judah offers himself as surety, in terms that hold him personally liable forever. In Egypt Joseph seats the brothers by age, which unsettles them, and sends Benjamin five times the portion the others get at the meal, watching to see whether they resent the favourite the way they once resented him. They do not.

Then he has his silver divining cup put in Benjamin's sack, has the caravan stopped and searched, and declares that the man in whose sack it was found will be his slave and the rest may go home free. It is the same choice they faced with Joseph, arranged deliberately: abandon the favoured youngest son of Rachel and walk away clean.

Judah answers with the longest speech in Genesis, describing his father's state, the surety he gave, and offering to be enslaved in the boy's place. Joseph cannot keep the disguise through it, clears the room and tells them who he is.

The test needed a passive subject to work, and Benjamin is it. Nothing he says or does affects the outcome; what matters is whether his brothers will pay for him.

The last three chapters of Judges tell the worst story in the book, and Benjamin is at the centre of it. A Levite travelling with his concubine stops overnight at Gibeah, a Benjaminite town, and men of the town abuse her until she dies. The Levite cuts the body into twelve pieces and sends them through Israel. The other tribes muster and demand the guilty men; Benjamin refuses to hand them over and fights.

The war nearly ends the tribe. Israel loses two engagements, wins the third by ambush, and burns the towns, and the text says six hundred men escaped to the rock of Rimmon and no more. The tribes had sworn not to give their daughters to Benjamin, and then had to face having cut a tribe out of Israel by their own oath. The remedy is as ugly as the offence: the town of Jabesh Gilead is destroyed for not joining the muster and its unmarried women given to the survivors, and the shortfall is made up by telling the remaining Benjaminites to seize girls dancing at the yearly festival at Shiloh. Judges ends four verses later, saying there was no king in Israel and every man did what was right in his own eyes.

The tribe recovered and produced men out of all proportion to its size: Ehud, the left handed judge who killed Eglon of Moab; Saul, the first king, from Gibeah itself; Mordecai in the book of Esther; and Paul of Tarsus, who names the tribe when establishing his credentials. A small territory on the border between north and south, holding the ridge that Jerusalem sits at the edge of, mattered more than its numbers.