Benjamin

Benjamin (Hebrew Binyamin, "son of the right hand") was the youngest of the twelve sons of Jacob and the progenitor of one of the tribes of Israel. He alone of Jacob's sons was born in the land of Canaan, near Ephrath (Bethlehem), and his birth cost his mother Rachel her life; with her dying breath she named him Ben-oni, "son of my sorrow," but his father renamed him Benjamin (Genesis 35:16–18). As the only full brother of Joseph, he held a special place in Jacob's affection, and after Joseph's disappearance the aged patriarch clung to him as the last living son of his beloved Rachel.

Benjamin stands at the emotional centre of the Joseph narrative. When famine drove the brothers to Egypt, Joseph — unrecognized — demanded that they bring Benjamin down, then tested them by hiding his silver cup in the lad's sack; Judah's offer to take Benjamin's place as a slave proved the brothers' change of heart and led to Joseph's tearful self-disclosure (Genesis 44:18–34; Genesis 45:14). Jacob's deathbed blessing cast the tribe's future character in vivid terms: "Benjamin is a ravenous wolf, in the morning devouring the prey and at evening dividing the spoil" (Genesis 49:27) — fulfilled in a line of fierce warriors and noted left-handed slingers (Judges 20:16).

The tribe received a small but strategically vital territory between Judah and Ephraim, containing Jericho, Bethel, Gibeah, and the site of Jerusalem on its border (Joshua 18:11–28). Its history was turbulent: the outrage at Gibeah provoked a civil war that nearly annihilated the tribe, leaving only six hundred men (Judges 20:46–48; Judges 21:1–3). Yet from Benjamin came the deliverer-judge Ehud (Judges 3:15) and, most notably, Israel's first king, Saul son of Kish, together with his son Jonathan (1 Samuel 9:1–2). When the kingdom divided after Solomon, Benjamin remained loyal to the house of David, joining Judah to form the southern kingdom (1 Kings 12:21) — a bond that preserved the tribe through the exile and return.

Benjamin's legacy reaches into both Testaments. The Jew Mordecai, kinsman of Esther, was a Benjamite who stood for his people in Persia (Esther 2:5), and the apostle Paul proudly numbered himself "of the tribe of Benjamin" as evidence of his Israelite pedigree (Philippians 3:5; Romans 11:1) — sharing, as Saul of Tarsus, the very name of the tribe's first king. So the smallest of the tribes gave Israel its first anointed king and, in Paul, the great apostle to the nations, and is honoured among the redeemed sealed from every tribe (Revelation 7:8).