Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 26:7

"unto which [promise] our twelve tribes, earnestly serving [God] night and day, hope to attain. And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king!" — Acts 26:7 (ASV)

Our twelve tribes.—The noun is strictly a neuter adjective: our twelve-tribed nation. It will be noted that St. Paul, like St. James (James 1:1), assumes the twelve tribes to be all alike sharers in the same hope of Israel, and ignores the legend, so often repeated and revived, that the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel, after they had been carried away by Salmaneser, had wandered far away, and were to be found, under some strange disguise, in far-off regions of the world.

The earliest appearance of the fable is in the apocryphal 2 Esdras 13:40-46, where they are said to have gone to “a country where never mankind dwelt, that they might there keep the statutes which they never kept in their own land.” The Apostle, on the contrary, represents the whole body of the twelve tribes as alike serving God (with the special service of worship) day and night, and speaks as accused because he had announced that the promise of God to their fathers had been fulfilled to them.