matteh

At its root this is simply a wooden rod, the kind of thing a person carries in the hand. It can be the shepherd's or traveler's stick, a herding or threshing tool, a club used to strike, or the ornamented rod a ruler holds as a sign of power.

The Bible uses it most memorably for the staff Moses and Aaron carry before Pharaoh, the plain rod that becomes the instrument of God's wonders. From there the word stretches naturally into a picture of power: a rod that strikes is an image of an oppressor's force, and a rod held up is an image of rule. When the prophets speak of God breaking someone's rod, they mean breaking the strength that person leaned on.

The step from this meaning to the other one, a tribe, runs through the idea of a chief's staff. The leader of a clan carried a rod as the mark of his office, so the group he led came to be called by the same word. The two meanings are close cousins, but a reader needs different English words for them, so they are kept apart here.

This is the word the books of Numbers and Joshua use over and over for the tribes of Israel. It names a large kinship group, one of the twelve (or thirteen, when Levi and the two halves of Joseph are counted) descended from the sons of Jacob, treated as a unit for counting the people, arranging the camp, marching, and dividing up the land.

The meaning grew out of the rod sense: a clan's chief held a staff as the mark of his leadership, so the people gathered under that leader took the name of the staff. By the time of the wilderness and settlement narratives the word is a fixed term for these divisions, and the rod picture has faded into the background.

Israel had a second, fully interchangeable word for tribe as well, so the two appear side by side in the same lists. Here the word simply means the people-group, with no thought of an actual stick.