Ten Tribes of Israel

“ And thus they will continue ever more mixed up and intermingled among themselves, with all genealogies lost, and not one of them either east or west being able any longer documentarily to prove of what tribe or family he comes—until the day when He that scattered Israel will gather him, and by His own Divine power and omniscience separate them again into their tribes and families. ”

“ That the inhabitants of Great Britain are Israelites is a modern theory which has been widely spread. Its defenders have invented a large number of resemblances or "identifications," on which, in the absence of authentic history or national tradition, they rest their proof.
The languages of our country—Saxon, English, Welsh, and Celtic—have no affinity with the Hebrew; but that is made of no account. The history of the many tribes of which our nation is composed—whether Teutonic, or Saxon, or Caledonian, or Latin, or Scandinavian—is totally distinct from that of any of the tribes of Israel ”

“ Next to the authorship of the Junius Letters, and the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask the subject that most excites the curiosity of those who delight in ransacking the waste-paper basket of history is the discovery of the Lost Tribes of Israel. There is quite a school of Englishmen - the "Anglo-Israelites" - whose happiness in life depends upon the conviction that they are the direct descendants of the ten tribes. ”

“ For lo, I will command and I will sift (or 'toss') the house of Israel among all the nations, like as corn is sifted (or 'tossed' about) in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. All the sinners of thy people shall die by the sword, which say: The evil shall not overtake or prevent us."
Here, then, we have the whole subject as to what was to become of the Ten Tribes in a nutshell.
(a) First, as a kingdom, they were to be destroyed from off the face of the earth, never to be restored ”

“ Some, indeed, persist in looking for God’s chosen seed—His people, His inheritance—among the bushmen of Africa, the Indians of America; indeed wherever they can find a people mean, and few, and very low in the scale of civilisation. They overlook the fact that Israel, not the Jews, were to be the most powerful and prolific people on the face of the earth, to be as sands of the sea, as the stars of heaven. ”

“ It inevitably follows, that the ten tribes of Israel must now have, somewhere on earth, a distinct existence in an outcast state. And we justly infer, that God would in his holy providence provide some suitable place for their safe keeping, as his outcast tribes, though long unknown to men as such. There is no avoiding this conclusion. If God will restore them at last as his Israel, and as having been "outcast" from the nations of the civilized world for 2500 years ”

“ This is the key that unravels and makes plain the marvellous and sublime history of the English nation and throne. We know many scout the idea of the Lost Tribes ever being found, although over thirty times God declares by the prophets that they must return; surely before they return they must be found. God has not cast away His people for ever. No, no. He declares Israel to be His inheritance, and that this people He had formed for Himself.
The Two Tribes forming the Jews of to-day are said by the best calculation to number about nine millions. ”

“ When the dispensation of the wild olive, or Gentile, shall end, then, but not till then, shall the blessing and the glory return to the good olive—that is, to "all Israel."
Let us take the Word of God simply as we find it. Let us beware of fanciful identifications, which, even were they true, are not worth the stress laid upon them. Suppose I could prove, not by conjecture, but by registered genealogies, that I belong to the tribe of Ephraim or Issachar, what does it profit me? ”

“ Would Israel then be led into the heart of the populous Hindostan?—or into any of the crowded empires of the east? It is inadmissable. The Jews were to be dispersed through the cities and nations, and were to be kept and known as Jews. But this cannot be said of the ten tribes. Fact forbids it; and facts are stubborn things. The Jews have been known as such, over the nations, in all ages since their dispersion. The ten tribes have never been known; but have been lost from the world. ”

“ It is not supposable, however, that the ten lost tribes of Israel emigrated from the land of their captivity in one body, and proceeding direct to the eastern shores of Asia, crossed over to America (by some means which, through changes and convulsions in nature, have become extinct and unknown to the present age) there to resume the rites of their religion, practise the Mosaic laws, and isolated from the rest of mankind, perpetuated in their primitive purity their language and beliefs. ”

“ But note, part of the furious cry of the Gentiles in their onslaught against Jerusalem is broken away from its connection and used by Anglo-Israel writers to prove that the Ten Tribes would lose their identity and that the very name "Israel" would be "lost."
Passing on to the next two references, Isa. xl. 27 and Isa. liv. 8, I would ask the intelligent Bible-reader what relevancy or connection these precious Scriptures have with the subject of the identification of any "lost" tribes? ”

“ Jews " dwelling in it are regarded as the house of Israel, although many members of that "house" were also scattered in other lands.
In this charge of the Lord to the apostles, we see also by the way, in what sense Israel is regarded as "lost." Now Anglo-Israelites are very fond of this word, but they use it in an unbiblical and unspiritual sense. The ten tribes were in the time of Christ, even as they still are, " lost " ; but not because they have forgotten their national or tribal identity, but because they " all like sheep have gone astray, and have turned every one to his own way." ”

“ The "lost" Israelites when deported did not use orally the name given in the English version as "Jehovah," and the mode of its spelling and pronunciation is at this moment in dispute, though generally accepted as Jahveh; therefore, it would be most extraordinary if the tribes of Indians supposed to be descendants of the lost ten tribes of Israel should at this time know how to pronounce a name which their alleged ancestors practically did not possess. ”

“ And however many difficult questions may attach themselves to the subject, they are all less difficult, than to account for the origin of these traditions on any other principle, than that they are of Israel.
Some have felt a difficulty arising against the Indians being the ten tribes, from their ignorance of the mechanic arts, of writing, and of navigation. Ancient Israel knew something of these; and some imagine, that these arts being once known, could never be lost. ”

“ Prophecy, moreover, intimates that Israel is to remain scattered and under the curse till the Redeemer comes out of Zion, and will turn away ungodliness from Jacob. The whole Twelve Tribes are under the curse till the great day of national deliverance comes for Judah and for Israel. ”

“ At that moment a G. A. R. veteran was dying. He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey's readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States is a democracy. ”

“ During the many years of captivity, Israel, that is the ten tribes, probably mingled with other nations in their midst and became very largely estranged from the father-land. There were fewer of the ties of religious faith with them than with Judah. Even the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, when they returned from the captivity and entered into their city Jerusalem and into the cities and lands surrounding, brought wives from the heathen about them,104 the very priests and Levites being also guilty, Ezra 9:1, although the Mosaic law prohibited such marriages. ”

“ Now, however, she must permit emigration or perish by famine. Take the countries of Europe, and is it not strange that Israel’s fulness of land, people, and language is made the fuller by these nations contributing towards the same? The fulness of the Gentiles is made to flow into the fulness of Israel. These countries, outside of Israel-England, p. 74have no colonies to send their overflow to; hence, they are filling up the domain of Israel and so hastening on her fulness. The French, Germans, Italians, and Spaniards forsake their land and language, thus adding to Israel’s fulness ”

“ This, too, after a general allusion to "the gathering of Israel from the four parts of the earth." What need to particularize as to the Ten Tribes, if they were no longer a distinct people? And why do our Articles of Faith give those tribes a special mention? [19]
The "Highway."—Isaiah's reference to the "Highway" points directly to the lost tribes, respecting whose return from "The North Country," his fellow prophet, Jeremiah, promises an event that shall so far eclipse in scope and grandeur Israel's exodus from Egypt, that the latter will no more be mentioned. ”

“ If they are Christians, whether Jews or Gentiles, their destiny is not linked either with Palestine or with England, but with that inheritance which is incorruptible and undefiled and which fadeth not away; and if they are not Christians, then, instead of occupying their thoughts with vain speculations as to a supposed identity of the British race with the "lost" Ten Tribes, it is their duty to seek the one and only Saviour whom we must learn to know, not after the flesh, but in the Spirit, and without whom a man, whether an Israelite or not, is undone. ”

“ There is not the least possibility of doubt that many of the settlements of the Diaspora in the time of our Lord—both north, south, and west, as well as east of Palestine—were made up of those who had never returned to the land of their fathers since the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles, and who were not only descendants of Judah, as Anglo-Israelism ignorantly presupposes, but of all the Twelve Tribes scattered abroad (James i. 1) . ”

“ Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians being the Descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel.
Those who study the Scriptures, either as a matter of duty or pleasure—who seek in them divine revelations, or search for the records of history, cannot be ignorant of the fact that the Jewish nation, at an early period, was divided into twelve tribes, and occupied their ancient heritage under geographical divisions, during the most splendid periods under the kingdoms of Judah and of Israel. ”

“ To summon from the past and reproduce with any detail the story of Israel's life in the desert is now impossible. The outlines alone remain, severe, careless of almost everything that does not bear on religion. Neither from Exodus nor from Numbers can we gather those touches that would enable us to reconstruct the incidents of a single day as it passed in the camp or on the march. The tribes move from one "wilderness" to another. ”

“ In this remarkable alternation of disappearance of nations and their formation, the conviction forced itself upon Jewish thinkers that the Jewish people was eternal: "A nation arises, another vanishes, but Israel alone remains forever." The barbaric tribes, the avengers of the long-enslaved nations, settled on the ruined sites of the Roman empire, wild plants only to be cultivated by the master-hand of history, uncouth savages, to be civilized by earnest teaching. ”

“ The twelve tribes of Israel disperse and settle, each on its own account, upon different and distant points, some being even separated by the Jordan. The unity of the Hebrew nation, of its faith, of its law, of its government, and of its destiny weakens rapidly; the tendency to idolatry, which the Hebrews had so often evinced when wandering in the Desert, reappears and developes itself, fomented by the vicinity of the Polytheistic tribes of Canaan. ”

“ Some may have come from China, and there is even a tradition that some were from the lost tribes of Israel, but no one really knows. All we know is that if they were not really natives of this land that they must have come from somewhere and that they had degenerated into savages or had never been lifted above it. ”

“ Many scholars [26] maintain that the Twelve Tribes of later history represent groups of ancient nomadic clans who wandered in Western Asia long before the time of Moses; that only a section of these groups went down into Egypt and escaped with Moses, and that these invaded Canaan at one period, while other kindred clans reinforced them at a later time. Israel and the Twelve Tribes, as we know them, arose in Palestine after the conquest, by the subdivision and regrouping of the invading clans, and their combination with the Canaanites. ”

“ It has been stated of late years, that the traditions which exist among this people, and which tend to establish their descent from the ancient Hebrews, are founded on fact, that they are in reality a remnant of the lost tribes of Israel. ”