When it came to “putting a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God” in Revelation 7:3, the tribe of Dan is not included. The total number sealed was “144,000 from all the tribes of Israel,” 12,000 from each tribe (4), but no 12,000 from Dan.
One explanation is that because Judah and Dan had collaborated so closely together in the past, Dan was absorbed into Judah, in the same way that Ephraim is not mentioned in the 144,000 either, but is included in with his father Joseph (8) instead.
Another explanation for why both Dan and Ephraim are missed out by name in the 144,000 is in 1 Kings 12. The story here is that only two generations after king David’s reign a major rift had developed between David’s grandson, king Rehoboam, and Jeroboam who’d returned from exile in Egypt having fled there after king Solomon tried to kill him for rebelling against him (11:26-40).
On his return, Jeroboam begged Rehoboam to ease up on the heavy taxes inflicted on them by his father king Solomon. But Rehoboam refused, resulting in ten Israelite tribes breaking away and making Jeroboam their king (12:1-20). To provide the ten tribes with an alternative to the temple in Jerusalem, Jeroboam had two golden calves made, claiming they were “the gods who brought you up out of Egypt” (12:28), and set them up in Bethel and Dan (29). Bethel was in Ephraim, Jeroboam being an Ephraimite himself.
So Dan and Ephraim became the two breakaway centres of worship, but of false gods with non-Levite priests and pagan shrines, and a festival of Jeroboam’s own making for offering sacrifices (31-33). In only two generations after king David, then, his kingdom had been divided by Jeroboam, who also made Ephraim and Dan the religious centres for Israel, that led to Israel’s demise at the hands of the Assyrians who carted them off into captivity and out of the pages of history. Did God, therefore, take all this into account in Revelation 7 when thinking of Dan and Ephraim and their role in drawing Israel away from him?
God had also predicted through Jacob that Dan would “provide justice for his people” (Genesis 49:16), which Dan did not do, so was it pure justice, therefore, that made God leave Dan out in Revelation 7? On then to the tribe of “Gad: the warrior clan”….(next blog)
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