101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

yth #66:
Jacob awarded the sceptre to Judah.
The Myth: Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be
in the neck of thine enemies; thy father’s children shall bow down before thee. Judah
is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched
as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from
Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the
gathering of the people be. (Gen. 49:8–10)
The Reality: This prophecy was made by a Shilohite priest opposed to King
Solomon and put into the mouth of Jacob.
With Reuben, Simeon, and Levi disenfranchised by Jacob, Judah emerged to the
fore. Although Joseph remained heir to the blessing, Jacob declared that the sceptre
would not depart from Judah. If Joseph carried the blessing and the covenant, what
did it mean that Judah inherited the sceptre?
The sceptre symbolized the kingship and, not surprisingly, David and Solomon
came from the tribe of Judah. But Israel didn’t have a king for hundreds of years after
the Exodus, and a significant faction of the Israelites objected to the institution of
kingship.
While the prophecy says that the sceptre shall not depart from Judah, according to
the Bible, the first king, Saul, came from the tribe of Benjamin. The sceptre had
departed from Judah. When Saul died, his son, also a Benjaminite, succeeded him,
while David only ruled in Judah. It was not until two years after Saul’s death that
David become king over all of Israel.
If Jacob uttered this prophecy, his forecasting skills were seriously impaired. Anyone
predicting that the sceptre would not leave Judah would have to have done so from
the perspective of the sceptre already being in Judah, sometime after David ascended
the throne (but not necessarily during David’s reign). But that is not the case. More
importantly, Jacob’s prophecy is conditional. The sceptre would remain with Judah
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