Issachar

Jacob's words over Issachar are the shortest route into the tribe's reputation, and they will not settle into one meaning. He is a strong ass crouching between two burdens, or between two sheepfolds; he saw that rest was good and the land pleasant, and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant under tribute.

Read as rebuke, this is a people who preferred comfort to independence and accepted foreign labour obligations in exchange for being left alone on good soil. Read as description, it is simply a strong agricultural tribe on the best land in the north, doing the work that land requires, with the tribute the price of holding it. Ancient and modern commentators have taken both, and the Hebrew is genuinely open.

The geography supports the second reading and explains the first. Issachar held the Jezreel valley and the slopes under Mount Tabor: the most productive ground in the region, crossed by the trade road from Egypt to Damascus, and therefore the corridor every army in the ancient Near East used. A tribe there would be rich and would be repeatedly obliged to accommodate whoever was marching through.

The tribe is not passive in the record. The Song of Deborah names the princes of Issachar with Deborah and with Barak, going down on foot into the valley, which is the same ground. Tola, one of the minor judges, is of Issachar. And Baasha, who seized the northern throne and held it for over twenty years, came from the tribe, so it produced a dynasty as well as a proverb about patience.

One verse changed the tribe's meaning. Listing the forces that came to David at Hebron, the Chronicler describes the men of Issachar as those who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do. In context it probably means political judgement, knowing when to move. Later Jewish tradition read the times more literally, as the reckoning of months and festivals, and made Issachar the tribe of the calendar and of the study house.

That reading joined itself to the neighbouring blessing over Zebulun, whose lot is placed at the haven of the sea. From the two, the rabbis built the Zebulun and Issachar arrangement: Zebulun goes out to trade and supports Issachar, who studies, and the two divide the reward. It became a named institution rather than a metaphor, invoked in medieval and modern Jewish philanthropy as the formal basis on which a merchant may fund a scholar and share in the merit of the study.

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a later work outside the Hebrew canon, takes a third direction and gives Issachar simplicity as his virtue, a farmer who works the ground and does not look at his neighbour's wife or his neighbour's field.

Three readings of one tribe, then: the ass under its burdens, the scholar of the calendar, and the plain farmer. All three are built out of a handful of verses, and the middle one, which has the least support in the text, is the one that gave the name its long afterlife.