Israel

p18
The Athenian system of ten or twelve tribes corresponds closely to the biblical tribal divisions. The biblical tribes each claimed descent from an eponymous ancestral figure, the twelve sons of Israel forming an analog to the four sons of Ion, or to the later ten or twelve ancestral heroes of later Athenian tribal organizations. The lists of ten or twelve eponymous tribes of the Israelites vary in the names listed, suggesting that the number of tribes was more important than the tribal figures.? There is no inscriptional evidence to support the organization of the northern kingdom of Bit-Omri (Samaria or Israel) into ten tribal districts, and the provincial districts created by the Assyrians fail to correspond in name or geographical extent to biblical tribal divisions. This tribal division may be considered (like the Athenian tribal divisions) a legal fiction. The invention or selection of twelve eponymous ancestors for the tribes of Israel was likely not too dissimilar from the selection of eponymous ancestors of the Attic tribes under Kleisthenes in 508/507 BCE.

p19
The biblical system of ten or twelve tribal divisions!.: corresponds numerically to the ten tribes of the Kleisthenes reforms that lasted from 508 to 307 Bce and the twelve tribes of the reorganized Athenian state from 307 to 223 BcE. ... However, the biblical system may have been based on Plato's Laws of ca. 350 ce, which also advocated a twelve tribe system. ... The visit of Jewish scholars to Alexandria to create a copy of Jewish "legislation" for the Great Library in ca. 270 BCE provides an opportune occasion in which Jewish legal scholars could have become acquainted with Athenian legal institutions, with the Jewish foundation story in Hecataeus of Abdera's Aegyptiaca, and with Plato's Laws, and adopted the notion of political and military organization into twelve tribes found in all three.