Tribe of Zebulun

[2] With Leah as a matriarch, Biblical scholars believe the tribe to have been regarded by the text's authors as a part of the original Israelite confederation.

Traditionally this has been interpreted as referring to the "rod of the scribe", an object that in Assyrian monuments was a stylus of wood or metal used to inscribe clay tablets, or to write on papyrus; thus, those who wielded it would have been the associates/assistants of lawgivers.

[5] This army, under the command of Eliab the son of Helon, encamped with Judah and Issachar east of the Tabernacle and with them made up the vanguard of the line of march.

In the Song of Deborah, the tribe is specially singled out as having "offered their lives to death in the region of Merom,";[10] and praised because there came "out of Zebulun they that led the army to fight," as in Hebrew, "they that carry the pen of the writer," i.e., such as recruiting and inspecting officers.

[14] Among those that followed David to Hebron to make him king were 50,000 fully armed men of Zebulun with no double heart,[15] who brought with them, as sign of their hearty allegiance, bounteous supplies of meat and drink to celebrate the accession of their new ruler.

Mockery and ridicule met the emissaries of the reformer; yet some were true to the religion of their fathers, and, even from far away Zebulun, went up to Jerusalem, destroyed the idols, and kept the feast of the unleavened bread.

However, in the descriptions of its territorial borders in the Book of Joshua, it is stated that its western boundary is the Kishon River, with the tribe of Asher located to its west.

Based on this study, the different verses can be reconciled as follows: the territory of Zebulun extended to the area of present-day Kibbutz Yagur, where the Kishon River flows nearby, to the west of which was a small inlet, and to the north of it was the tribe of Asher.