Pablo Picasso’s “Mother and Child (First Steps)“, 1943, captures for me Hosea’s image of God teaching Ephraim to walk. My own digital painting, representing our cottage days, evokes the fleeting harmony of early childhood—when love is uncomplicated and trust comes naturally.

Today we read one of my favourite passages, which offers a parental image of God that, in my view, leans more toward the maternal than the paternal one. My own children’s early years are still fresh in my mind, so when I read: “When Israel was a child, I loved him… It was I who taught Ephraim to walk… To them I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek, and I bent down to feed them” (Hosea 11:1–4), it brings back memories of the days when each of my children depended on me for every aspect of daily living. However, verse 2, “the more they were called, the more they went away from me” also resonates with the frustration every parent feels, to varying degrees, when the children we believed we had taught to walk—literally and figuratively—choose not to follow the path we laid before them, nor walk in our footsteps.

What we forget, it seems, is that learning to walk is a natural process that unfolds without help, assuming typical development. We think that we teach and heal, as Hosea says (11:3)—and often we do—but we tend to overestimate our influence and contribution to who our children become, and so we may blame ourselves or feel resentment that our children no longer let us lead them with “cords of kindness” and “ties of love” (Hosea 11:4).

Evidently, these feelings are not unique to our time, given that Hosea expressed them in the eighth century BCE. What drew my attention today is that in chapter 11, he begins his anguished address using the name “Israel,” but soon switches to “Ephraim” as a stand-in for the entire northern kingdom, where Hosea lived. These words, written as the voice of God, are among the most heartbroken and tender in all of Scripture—the voice of a parent recalling early gestures of love, bewildered by a child’s rebellion.

But who was Ephraim, and why did he represent northern Israel? Why, of all the patriarchs, do Ephraim and Judah emerge as the two primary names? Why does the list of the twelve patriarchs—the great-grandchildren of Abraham—differ from the list of the twelve tribes elsewhere in Scripture, with Joseph, for instance, disappearing? And what made God so disappointed, anyway?

This is a long story, laid out in Genesis chapters 37 to 50. We might call this portion of Genesis a novella—rich in conflict, character development, and transformation—which underwent redaction and reached its present shape by the fifth century BCE. It forms a bridge between the covenant made with Abraham and the later developments in Israel’s history.

Recall that after Abraham migrated to Canaan from Mesopotamia, he and Sarah had Isaac, who with Rebekah (his cousin, born to Abraham’s brother Laban) had Esau and Jacob. Jacob, in turn, had twelve sons with four women. Rachel, Jacob’s first love, remained childless until ten sons had been born from the other three women, and at least one daughter, Dinah, was born to Leah. Then Rachel bore Joseph and, later, Benjamin—whose birth took her life. As a teenager, Joseph naively shared dreams with his brothers that highlighted Jacob’s favouritism, and as a result was sold by them into slavery. He was traded five times before ending up in Egypt, where he eventually rose to power and had two sons: Manasseh and Ephraim.

Meanwhile, Joseph’s half-brother Reuben had an affair with their father Jacob’s concubine, Bilhah. In response to this betrayal, Jacob transferred Reuben’s inheritance to Joseph’s sons, while the descendants of another brother, Levi, became the priestly tribe and were not allotted any territory in Israel. This reassigning of birthrights preserved the symbolic number of twelve tribes inheriting the land, even though the actual family tree ended up with thirteen branches.

Though younger than Manasseh, Ephraim was blessed by Jacob as if he were the firstborn—just as Jacob himself had once deceived Isaac to receive the birthright over his older brother Esau. This is the biblical reason why the descendants of Ephraim became especially powerful and came to dominate the northern and central regions of Canaan, especially the area of Samaria. Over time, “Ephraim” became a poetic name for the entire northern kingdom, and “Judah” for the south.

However, it is possible that the blessing of Ephraim did not cause the tribe’s dominance, but was written to explain it. According to a growing number of archaeologists, there were always two distinct cultures in Canaan: a strong and prosperous northern kingdom and a weaker, poorer southern one. The biblical tradition tells us that the eleven sons of Jacob went to join Joseph in Egypt during a great famine and later became enslaved. They were led out by Moses and, after forty years in the wilderness, returned to conquer Canaan under Joshua and settled it by tribe. Yet historians increasingly believe that only the descendants of Joseph—the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh—may have entered from Egypt. The other tribes were likely native to Canaan, perhaps since Abraham’s time, gradually coalescing into the people of Israel. As such, the conquest of Canaan may not have been a unified military invasion, but a gradual and uneven process, as part of which, over time, the Exodus story of deliverance and covenant became a shared vision of God as liberator.

Initially, each tribe was independently ruled by a judge. For instance, Deborah (Judges 4–5), the only female judge, came from Ephraim. Internal struggles for dominance and bloody conflict persisted, even as external enemies like the Philistines pressed in. Partly in response to this external pressure, the tribal confederation eventually gave way to monarchy. Saul, from the tribe of Benjamin, was Israel’s first, ultimately unsuccessful, king, deposed by David of Judah, who established Jerusalem as the capital. After David’s death, a succession crisis erupted: Judah supported Solomon, while many other tribes initially backed his older brother Adonijah. Though Solomon ultimately prevailed, built the Temple, and consolidated power, tensions remained. Heavy taxation and forced labour bred resentment, especially in the north, which demanded lighter burdens. So when Solomon died and his son Rehoboam ascended the throne, only Judah and Benjamin supported him. The other ten tribes seceded and formed the northern kingdom under King Jeroboam, with Ephraim retaining influence.

This division shaped the rest of Israel’s history. The northern kingdom, led from Samaria, was larger and richer but politically unstable, with frequent regime changes, foreign interference, and departures from the worship of YHWH. To prevent pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Jeroboam established rival shrines in Bethel and Dan, each with a golden calf. That is where Hosea enters the scene, warning the people of the north about the consequences of such idolatry. The passage we read today is among his gentler words. Hosea even married a sex worker to illustrate the people’s unfaithfulness and God’s enduring forbearance. But why is it always a woman who symbolizes the unfaithful party—from Hosea’s wife Gomer to the “whore” of Babylon in Revelation?

Be that as it may, Hosea’s message was one of grief, anger, and longing. His warning of judgment was fulfilled in 722 BCE when the Assyrians destroyed Samaria and exiled the people. The ten northern tribes became the “lost tribes,” and despite its early prominence, Ephraim vanished from history. And so, the Messianic line is traced not through Joseph, who saved his brothers despite being sold by them, nor through Ephraim, who was blessed and powerful, but through Judah—David’s tribe. Though Judah, too, fell to Babylon in 586 BCE, it was Judah who preserved the scriptures, rebuilt Jerusalem after the exile, and restored the Temple worship of YHWH.

Judah’s own story is not without flaws—a subject for another time. But in Genesis, he offers himself in place of Benjamin, who was being held in Egypt by Joseph—then unrecognized by his brothers who had come to beg for help during the famine in Canaan. Later, Jacob blesses him, saying, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah” (Genesis 49:10). That is how Israel’s ultimate hope came to rest in a future king born not from Joseph, the brilliant prince of Egypt, nor from the powerful tribe of Ephraim, but from the tribe that was poor and lacked influence. Its ancestor was flawed, yet learned to act selflessly, and the tribe mirrored that transformation—remaining faithful and redefining itself after exile through God’s law.

Still, the memory of the “lost tribes” persisted, and their restoration became tied to the hope of End Times renewal—a vision of the entire creation redeemed from brokenness.

These complex scriptural sagas remind us that God’s promises rarely follow the expected path, precisely because they work within human nature. It is a complicated—and, I dare say, unfinished—story, shaped by faith and conflict, memory and mystery. Today, arguments continue over who was indigenous to the area we again call Israel, who is right and wrong in the never-ending conflicts, and where we draw the lines of our own empathy. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately!—Scripture does not represent history exactly; rather, like so many of our own family stories, it points to events that did happen while also conveying deeper truths through allegory.

Most importantly, however, it reminds us that God longs to gather home all his children, even as they continue to seek independence as part of natural human development: “Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he the child I delight in? As often as I speak against him, I still remember him” (Jeremiah 31:20).