Genesis⁶ 25-34

There is something quietly surprising about this part of Genesis. As we've been reading, we instinctively treat men like Noah, Abraham, and others before Jacob as though they were Israelites. Yet the truth is almost the opposite: there were no Israelites on earth during their lifetimes. The name “Israel” had not yet been spoken. No nation had yet been formed.

Instead, the world at that time was organized around families, not nationalities. People drew their identity from the name of their father or the leader of their household. Communities were not built by borders or governments but by bloodline, memory, and a shared story.

That is what makes Jacob so important. When God renames him Israel, something entirely new begins. He becomes the first person to carry this name, and his children become the first community to carry that identity. In reality, we should imagine their names like this: Reuben Israel, Simeon Israel, Levi Israel, Judah Israel… and so on.

Israel becomes their family name, their collective identity, the beginning of what will eventually be called a nation. His sons’ families grow, and these expanded families become what the Bible calls tribes. This is where modern readers often get confused, because in our day, “tribe” is a massive ethnicity with a distinct language, but then, a nation is what shared a language. But biblically, a tribe was simply the line of one son—a family growing into a clan.

So their structure looked more like this:

- A nation was an extended family.

- A tribe was a household line.

- A country was simply the land where that family settled.

This is very different from our world. Today, lines drawn on maps divide people who historically belonged together. The Maasai straddle Kenya and Tanzania. The Luhya sit across Kenya and Uganda. The Somali stretch across Kenya and Somalia. The Boranas cut across Kenya and Ethiopia. Borders divide what bloodlines once joined.

If we keep this in mind, the story of Genesis reads differently. We begin to see how deeply connected identity was to ancestry. We begin to understand how a man’s name could shape an entire nation’s future. And we begin to see why the tribes of Israel, though later large and complex, began as nothing more than twelve brothers carrying one father’s name. They still hold this dearly to date and that's why they're still fighting for their family land. Remember the woman at the well who was proud to be fetching water from a well that was dug by her patriarch Jacob?

Over time, leadership shifts from fathers, to elders/chiefs(in the wilderness), to judges(in Canaan), to kings(when crisis hit them). Through these transitions, a quiet expectation grows—a prophet will one day speak of a coming Ruler, a King who will rise above all kings. He will be called King of Kings.

The entire story is moving somewhere and with each chapter, we are invited to pay close attention even as we try and find out how we(non Israelites) fit into the story.

We read on.