Issachar the Scholar Tribe and the Sapphire Torah

Issachar was born from a transaction. The story begins with mandrakes. Reuben, wandering in the fields during the wheat harvest, found the fragrant plants and brought them to his mother Leah. Rachel, who was barren and desperate, wanted them. She believed the plants had some power over fertility, or perhaps she simply wanted them the way people want things they cannot name. Leah, who had given Rachel her maidservant Zilpah and watched her husband continue to love Rachel more, was not inclined to generosity. The negotiation that followed was between two women who understood exactly what power they each had over the other. Rachel offered Jacob's presence in Leah's tent that night. Leah accepted the trade. That night, Issachar was conceived.

The Testament of Issachar, preserved among the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a collection compiled in the Second Temple period drawing on older traditions that may reach back to the third century BCE, records Issachar himself describing the circumstances of his birth and then drawing the lesson he had taken from them. He was born, he says, because his mother wanted something and was willing to give honestly for it. The entire character of his tribe flows from this origin. They were farmers. They worked without complaint. They did not covet what belonged to others. They gave to the poor. And they studied.

The midrashic tradition preserved in Legends of the Jews works through the names of Issachar's four sons as if each name were a lesson in what the tribe was for. Tola: the silkworm, distinguished by its mouth above all its other features, spinning its thread from its own body, as the tribe of Issachar was distinguished above all by the wise words of its mouth. Puah: the madder plant, which colors everything it touches, as Issachar's teachings colored the thinking of the entire world. Jashub: the returning one, for through Issachar's teachings Israel is turned back toward its Heavenly Father, the study of Torah functioning as a continuous act of repentance and reorientation. Shimron: the observing one, the tribe whose vocation was to watch the Torah closely enough to guard it.

Their stone was the sapphire. The reason the tradition gives for this choice is striking in its directness: the two tablets of the law were hewn from sapphire, and the tribe that devoted itself entirely to the study of those laws should carry the stone from which the laws themselves had been made. The symbol and the substance are identical. The sapphire increases the strength of vision and heals diseases, as the Torah enlightens the eye and heals the body. Every detail of the assignment connects Issachar to the object of its devotion in the same way a craftsman is connected to the material he has worked with for a lifetime.

Jacob's blessing for Issachar, as preserved in the compilation from Ginzberg, contained a prophecy that seems at first to be about agriculture and then reveals itself to be about something else. The fruits of Issachar's land would grow extraordinarily large, large enough to be remarkable to the non-Jewish traders who bought them in the markets. When those traders asked the cause of such extraordinary fruit, the Jewish merchants would explain that God rewarded the tribe of Issachar for their devotion to Torah study, and some of those traders, upon hearing the explanation, would convert to Judaism. The scholarship of one tribe would produce grain that would produce astonishment that would produce new members of the covenant. Study had agricultural, commercial, and missionary consequences, all downstream from a tribe that kept its head down and read.

The arrangement with Zebulon made this possible in a way the tradition treats as a formal covenant between tribes rather than a private family arrangement. The full account is preserved in the discussion of Zebulon supporting Issachar's Torah study. Zebulon went to sea. He traded. He made money. A portion of those earnings went to Issachar, so that Issachar could study without worrying about the harvest or the markets. Zebulon's stone was the white pearl, the pearl that brings its owner sleep, and the tradition notes with dry irony that even though the pearl was associated with rest, the Zebulunites stayed up through the night doing commerce so that the scholars of Issachar could keep learning undisturbed. Their wealth turned like a wheel, the pearl reminded them, and the wheel could turn against the wealthy at any time. Generosity toward the scholars was their hedge against the fickleness of fortune.

The picture that emerges is of a tribe designed from the moment of its conception, from the mandrakes exchanged in the fields of Haran to the names Issachar gave his four sons to the blue stone he carried in the desert, to serve a single function in the life of Israel. Not to conquer or to reign or to trade or to fight, though other tribes would do all of these things, but to hold the Torah steady while everyone else was occupied with the work of staying alive. The sapphire stone of Issachar said it plainly: the two tablets of the law were made from sapphire, and the tribe that studied those tablets carried the same stone. Their devotion and their symbol were identical. Someone had to do it. Not because the scholars of Issachar were better than the merchants of Zebulon or the warriors of Judah, but because a people without someone doing nothing but reading the covenant eventually forgets what the covenant says. Issachar was born from a transaction, and the transaction his tribe made with Israel was the oldest one in the tradition: you take care of the material world, and we will take care of the thing that tells you why the material world matters.