The Twelve Tribes

 When a new member joins The Twelve Tribes, they surrender all of their worldly goods: money, property, phones, even the names they were born with. They believe if you forsake everything you had in your former life and live in the community, Yahshua (more commonly known as Jesus) will bless you with a house, brothers and sisters, mothers and children and eventually eternal life.

The need to surrender assets could be a situation where a new recruit’s funds are liquidated into the church’s purse, which is the sort of thing a cult will ask of its members when they downsize their lives upon entry. Phones aren’t something a leader like Spriggs would be crazy about members having access to either. The boss in this kind of organization will almost always take away the means of communicating with former loved ones. The Twelve Tribes take this concept to its extremes. Members are told to cut themselves off from the world they came from completely including from radio, television, books, and the internet. This gives new members more time to devote to Spriggs’ teachings when they show up on the scene.

The new Hebrew names given to followers also serve a purpose. This practice worms its way into the user manual in different kinds of cults now and then for the benefit of individuals like Elbert Spriggs. It seems to be something of a tool in scrambling someone’s identity. It’s useful for Spriggs too, that members not being identifiable by the names they were born with makes them harder to be discovered by concerned loved ones on the outside. The name change also helps along the process of transitioning from an old way of thinking into an absolute belief system. In Spriggs’ organization the process of surrendering all to the system is explained in scripture through likes like, “Every believer is called to forsake everything he has for Yahshua, for his message and his kingdom. A new culture, a peculiar new nation thus emerges…” 

Once a member has given up their old identity in The Twelve Tribes, they learn that Spriggs’ destiny is to restore the ancient Twelve Tribes of Israel and produce an army of 144,000 holy and righteous people to pave the way for the second coming of Christ. This is the sort of fate only a malignant narcissist would dictate for themselves. That level of fantastic self-aggrandizing might seem like a red flag for new members, but these people are likely already brainwashed so it instead has the effect of reinforcing the idea that Spriggs has the authority to claim his faith is the “one true way.” It’s a classic cult leader tactic to tell members you know everything about the path of righteousness because God made you very important. Spriggs convinced more and more people to abandon society and join his faith with his story and the church continued to expand exponentially as it became a global institution.      

Today, The Twelve Tribes have farms, restaurants, and stores in New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri and California. Outside of the U.S. you can find them in France, Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Japan, and Mexico. That’s quite an upgrade from Chattanooga.

Members of The Twelve Tribes go off their reservations to travel to farmer’s markets and music festivals where they sell their goods and spread the gospel. The Yellow Deli has become a true a franchise as the group has spread, with many locations where they sell sandwiches, salads, soup, and drinks like coffee, natural sodas & juice. To Spriggs’s credit, the food they serve is organic and grown mostly on the groups many farms. The delis are usually located in or near college towns where the group introduces itself to the kind of impressionable young people experiencing life transitions that make for easy targets. They keep their prices reasonable as a means to draw in broke students looking for a deal.