Revelation 7:4-8 – The List of Tribes
In Revelation 7:4-8, the list of ‘all the tribes of IsraEl’ appears differently from other manuscripts in the Sinaiticus manuscript:
| # | Sinaiticus | Other manuscripts | Accurate List |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Judah | Judah | Judah |
| 2 | ReuBen | ReuBen | ReuBen |
| 3 | – | Gad | Gad |
| 4 | Asher | Asher | Asher |
| 5 | NaphTali | NaphTali | NaphTali |
| 6 | ManasSeh | ManasSeh | ManasSeh |
| 7 | – | SimeOn | SimeOn |
| 8 | Levi | Levi | Levi |
| 9 | IsSachar | IsSachar | IsSachar |
| 10 | ZebuLun | ZebuLun | ZebuLun |
| 11 | BenJamin | JoSeph | (no such tribe as ‘JoSeph’) |
| 12 | JoSeph | BenJamin | BenJamin |
| 13 | – | – | Dan |
| 14 | – | – | Ephraim |
As you may notice, there are four big problems:
- Both lists only name 12 tribes, but there were 13 tribes when you include Levi (and the list does include Levi).
- Ephraim is missing from both.
- Dan is missing from both.
- Both contain the tribe of ‘JoSeph’, which never existed. JoSeph’s two sons, Ephraim and ManasSeh, instead formed their own tribes. Now, ManasSeh is already listed in both lists, so JoSeph could be a stand-in for the other son, ‘Ephraim’, – but why? This is not a common practice.
- Gad and SimeOn are missing from the Sinaiticus list.
In other words, the list – no matter which version you use – is clearly and obviously wrong, so wrong that it’s hard to believe it was not deliberate. There is simply no way that any Jewish person would not notice that the list is wrong.
Perhaps it was intended as some sort of riddle or puzzle with a hidden message. However, it seems that later copyists attempted to ‘correct’ the ‘errors’ and may have ruined the original intent, because our oldest copy contains even more ‘errors’.
Our oldest copy lists 10 tribes
The list is most strange and contains the most errors (possibly deliberately) in our oldest copy of Revelation, the early 4th century AD Codex Sinaiticus:
- It gives the number as 140,000, not 144,000.
- In addition to missing Dan and Ephraim like in the other versions, it’s also missing the tribes of Gad and SimeOn, only listing just 10 ‘tribes’ (including the non-existent tribe of ‘JoSeph’).
- The numbers add up to 120,000 (12,000x10), not 140,000 or 144,000 (keeping in mind that 12 and 10 are also symbolic numbers in Revelation).
- The last two listed, JoSeph and BenJamin, are listed in reverse order.
Given that the twelve tribes of IsraEl are among the most well-known facts of Jewish history, basic errors like this could only exist deliberately. Perhaps the author intended for these deliberate mistakes to be a clue to the reader, or some kind of numerical riddle for the reader to solve.
The Sinaiticus is one of the oldest manuscripts of Revelation (if not the oldest) and it went through many rounds of proofreading and correction by multiple scribes in ancient times; yet not one tried to ‘correct’ any of these errors, even though they corrected many other incorrect spellings and other mistakes. This suggests they deliberately left these ‘errors’ in place, perhaps thinking they were supposed to be there as some sort of puzzle.
Of course, since we’re not really sure what the original text was, it would not be easy to solve this ‘riddle’, if it even was one in the first place!
Added as [[insertions]]
Our standard translation of Revelation is from Sinaiticus, but we have added [[insertions]] in double brackets to show where we’ve completed it from other manuscripts. This is our standard practice for all our texts when we include something from another source.
We’ve done this so the text doesn’t confuse or shock readers who don’t know about these issues (especially if they’re doing a public reading), also linking to this translator note where they can read more. We feel it’s fair, given that nobody can say which version is truly correct anyway.