Tim Callahan. Skeptic. Volume 24, Issue 3, Summer 2019.
Recently, a group called the black Hebrew Israelites came into national prominence as a result of a video that went viral after a confrontation involving a number of groups that took place at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in early 2019. They were somewhat upstaged in the initial press coverage by what appeared to be smirking teenaged jerks who seemed to be mocking a Native American elder, Nathan Philips, as he was beating a drum and chanting. However, this was not the entirety of the confrontation:
But a longer video soon bubbled to the surface, widening the lens. It showed how a group of half a dozen Hebrew Israelites had, in fact, been goading and preaching at both the Native Americans and high schoolers, using profanity and highly provocative language, for nearly an hour…. Dressed in fringed black garb, some with scarves tied around their heads, they preached what to many were both abrasive and unfamiliar End Times messages…calling Native Americans literal descendants of the Israelite “Tribe of Gad,” the white students cursed “Edomites,” and preaching that a nuclear apocalypse was around the corner.
These particular Black Hebrew Israelites were from a group calling themselves “The House of Israel.” Few had ever heard of them. Who are these people? An answer may be found in the fascination some have with the idea of the “lost” tribes of Israel, purported to be 10 of the twelve tribes of Israel deported from their kingdom after its conquest by the Neo-Assyrian Empire circa 722 BCE. Much has been made of this myth, with numerous peoples throughout history claiming to be descendants of one of the tribes.
Black Hebrew Israelites
A movement that arose among African American Pentecostals following the abolition of slavery claimed that the lost tribes of Israel ended up in Africa, where they were betrayed by other sub-Saharan Africans, who sold them into slavery to European slavers. Adherents of this movement variously call themselves Black Israelites or Black Hebrew Israelites, among other names. Some of these groups remained Christian, while others converted to an idiosyncratic form of Judaism. The movement was begun in Chattanooga, TN in 1886 by two men, F.S. Cherry and William Saunders Crowdy, both of whom claimed to have had divine revelations that those enslaved in America were the true Israelites. Some of these groups also claim that, just as they are the true Israelites—the descendants of Jacob, who was renamed Israel—Europeans are the descendants of Jacob’s brother, Esau, also called Edom, and are thus, the Edomites, who in the Bible were traditionally described as being evil.
British Israelism
In Europe the romantic notion of the lost tribes eventually mutated into at least two religious doctrines. One of these was British Israelism. As early as the late 1500s the notion was embraced by a number of theologians and others that the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Germanic and Celtic peoples—essentially the northwest Europeans—were the direct descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. This doctrine eventually became known as British Israelism or Anglo-Israelism. The theory behind this view was that when the Assyrian Empire fell to attacks by the Medes and Chaldeans in 612 BCE, the captive Israelite tribes escaped their bondage and fled north through the Caucasus Mountains, across the Russian steppes and eventually into northwest Europe, thence to become the Celtic and Teutonic peoples. Thus, the peoples of northwest Europe were the true chosen people, while the Jews were really only junior partners. Though British Israelism was not initially anti-Semitic, it did open the way for Europeans who wanted to both accept the Hebrew Bible and also discriminate against the Jews. The desire to prove this link between northern Europeans and the ten lost tribes led adherents of the theory to dig up parts of the Hill of Tara, where ancient Irish kings were crowned, between 1899 and 1902, in search of another lost aspect of ancient Israel, namely the Ark of the Covenant. In the process, they did great damage to one of Ireland’s most important archaeological sites.
Possibly one of the foremost advocates of British Israelism in America in the 20th-century was Herbert W. Armstrong, who founded the Worldwide Church of God in 1933. One can see in his writings a strain of ethnocentrism, if not racism. In his booklet The United States and Britain in Prophecy, after identifying Britain with the tribe of Ephraim, and the United States with Manasseh, he says:
Suffice it to say that there is ample evidence that these other eight tribes have descended into such northern European nations as Holland, Belgium, Denmark, northern France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway.
In fact, Armstrong claimed that the word “Denmark” meant “Dan’s mark,” thus identifying the Danes with the tribe of Dan.
Some of Armstrong’s other linguistic arguments to support his theories were also laughingly specious. For example, he asserted that the word “British” came from the Hebrew words brit (actually b’rith), meaning “covenant” and ish, meaning “man.” Thus, “British” means “man of the covenant.” This would, no doubt come as a surprise to the members of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith (“Sons of the Covenant”). He also asserted that the word “Saxons” was derived from a variant of the name of the Hebrew patriarch Isaac… Saac…plus the word “sons.” Hence, “Saxons” meant “Saac’s sons.” This is utter nonsense. The word “Saxon” derives from a Teutonic word seax, meaning a sword or dagger. Armstrong had an answer for this:
Many confuse the Anglo-Saxons with the German or Old Saxons who still live in Germany. The German Saxons derive their name from the Old High German word sahs, meaning “sword or knife.” These sword-carrying Germans are entirely different people from the Anglo-Saxons who migrated to Britain.
This is also nonsense. The Saxons who migrated to Britain came from the coastal areas of what is now Saxony. This blithe dismissal of disconfirming evidence is a hallmark of specious reasoning that should set off baloney detection alarms.
In the U.S., British Israelism eventually mutated into the virulent, racist Christian Identity movement that believed that only white people are decended from Adam and Eve, while non-Caucasian races are mixed with the seed of Satan, the Serpent from the Garden of Eden, or other beasts. Its anti-government stance influenced Timothy McVeigh in his attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK.
The Assyrian Captivity and the Tradition of the Lost Tribes
Such modern mythmaking has a long and rich history grounded in lost tribe fantasies that go back millennia.
The foundation for the idea of lost tribes is found in 2 Kings which relates that the Assyrians under Shalmaneser V took the ten northern tribes of Israel into captivity in 722 BCE. From this point on, at least in the popular imaginations, they vanish from history, leading to endless mythopoeic speculation as to what happened to them.
However, Assyrian records, Jewish historians, scholars, and even other Bible sources paint a different, sometimes contradictory story. The area traditionally thought to be the territories of the 12 tribes served as a buffer state between Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt, and populations were often uprooted and relocated in the seemingly endless conflicts. There was more than one deportation and the numbers reported as taken varied widely depending on the motives of who was telling the story.
A decade before the northern tribes were reported to have been carried off, in 735 BCE the Assyrians under Tiglathpileser III invaded the northern kingdom of Israel. Israel’s king, Pekah, fled, and Tiglathpileser replaced him with Hoshea, as a tributary king. However, King Hoshea also proved unsatisfactory to the Assyrians when he turned to the Egyptians for support. 2 Kings 17:1-6 says:
In the twelfth year of Ahaz, king of Judah, began Hoshea, the son of Elah to reign in Samaria over Israel nine years. And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, but not as the kings of Israel that were before him. Against him came Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, and Hoshea became his servant, and gave him presents. And the king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea, for he had sent messengers to So, king of Egypt and brought no present to the king of Assyria as he had done year by year, therefore the king of Assyria shut him up and bound him in prison. Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land and went up to Samaria and besieged it three years. In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away into Assyria and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river Gozan and in the cities of the Medes.
The Egyptian king identified above as “So” was Osorkon IV of the 22nd, or Libyan, dynasty, who ruled Lower Egypt (i.e., the Nile delta) from 730 to 715 BCE. Though Osorkon appears not to have given any military aid to Hoshea, it was the Egyptian policy from the time of Tiglathpileser III to try to detach the western provinces of the Assyrian Empire as a way to forestall further Assyrian expansion that might threaten Egypt. This went on until the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (681-668 BCE) conquered the Nile delta in 673. 2 Kings goes on to emphasize the total destruction of Israel and the deportation of its population (2 Kings 17:18):
Therefore, the LORD was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight; there was none left but the tribe of Judah only.
It was the policy of the Assyrians when they deported people from one area to move another group in to repopulate the land. According to 2 Kings 17:24-34, the entirety of the population of Israel was deported, and the Assyrians brought people from Hamath, a Syrian city, and a number of other places to replace them. Because these foreign peoples worshipped other gods, Yahweh, the god of Israel, purportedly sent lions to attack them. So the Assyrians brought back a priest from the exiled Israelites to help the newcomers make sacrifices to Yahweh. But the foreigners, while now sacrificing to Yahweh, still continued to worship their own gods.
These people came to be known as Samaritans, after the name the Assyrians gave to the province they set up in the northern kingdom of Israel: Samaria.
But there are other contradictory views about the fate of the 12 tribes in Jewish history and scripture. Flavius Josephus tells a different story in his Antiquities of the Jews, probably completed in the last year of the reign of Emperor Domitian, CE 96:
…there are but two tribes in Asia and Europe subject to the Romans, while the ten tribes are beyond the Euphrates till now, and are an immense multitude and are not estimated by numbers.
This statement follows a retelling of Ezra’s mission to lead the Jews from Babylon back to Judah, particularly to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. So, there may be some conflation here of the ten tribes lost in 722 BCE and the Jews of a later deportation in 587 BCE who elected to stay in Babylon when given permission to return to Palestine in 538 BCE.
In the Apocryphal book 2 Esdras (a Hellenized form of Ezra), written at about the same time as the Antiquities of the Jews and falsely attributed to the biblical Ezra, 2 Esdras 13: 39-44 says of the lost tribes:
And whereas you saw that he gathered to him another multitude that was peaceful; these are the ten tribes, which were led away out of their own land in the time of Osea [Hoshea] the king, whom Salmananser the king of the Assyrians led away captive, and he carried them beyond the River, and they were carried into another land. But they took this counsel among themselves that they would leave the multitude of the heathen, and go forth into a further country, where never mankind lived, that they might there keep their statutes, which they had not kept in their own land. And they entered by the narrow passages of the river Euphrates. For the Most High then did signs for them, and stayed the springs of the River, till they were passed over. For through that country there was a great way to go, namely, of a year and a half: and the same region is called Arzareth.
God staying the springs of the River Euphrates could be based on the same myth pattern as God interrupting the flow of the River Jordan so the Israelites could cross into Canaan (Joshua 3:16). According to the Jewish Encyclopedia entry on this passage, “Arzareth” is probably a contraction of eretz aheret, the “other land” into which in Deut. 29:28 God says he “will cast the people as this day” if they forsake their covenant with him.
The Lost Tribes in 1 and 2 Chronicles
Josephus, who along with others furthered the romance of the ten lost tribes, ignored what Chronicles said about them. The books of 1 and 2 Chronicles, a postexilic (written after 538 BCE) retelling of the history of 1 and 2 Kings, give a very different history of those taken into captivity by the Assyrians (1 Chron. 5:26):
And the God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pul, king of Assyria and the spirit of Tiglathpilnezer king of Assyria and he carried them away, even the Reubenites, and the Gadites and the half tribe of Manasseh and brought them to Halah and Habor and Hara and to the river Gozan, unto this day.
Actually, the territory of the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh east of the River Jordan had already been lost well before the Assyrian conquest of Israel. Also, it wasn’t Tiglathpileser, rendered in a somewhat corrupted form in the passage above, but his son, Sargon II, who carried out this deportation from the northern kingdom. Not only is that deportation not mentioned in either 1 or 2 Chronicles, but 2 Chronicles 30:1 says that Hezekiah, king of Judah wrote letters to the apparently still established tribes Ephraim and Manasseh to come to Jerusalem to keep the Passover. Verses 10 and 11 of the same chapter say:
So the posts passed from city to city through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh even to Zebulun: but they laughed them to scorn and mocked them. Nevertheless divers of Asher and Manasseh and of Zebulun humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem.
Hezekiah was a contemporary of Sennacherib, the son of Sargon II. Sennacherib reigned 705-681 BCE, well after the deportation of 722. So, according to 1 and 2 Chronicles it was only the tribes east of the Jordan that were taken into captivity by the Assyrians.
The final event recorded in 2 Chronicles is the decree made by the Persian king Cyrus the Great allowing the descendants of those deported from Judah by the Chaldeans to return home to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem (2 Chron. 36:22, 23). The first year of the reign of Cyrus the Great over the territories that had been the Chaldean Empire would have been 538 BCE, 184 years after the fall of Samaria in 722. This was also nearly 50 years after the Chaldeans had razed Jerusalem and deported its inhabitants to an area near Babylon (587 BCE). It would seem, then, that the author of Chronicles writing from the perspective of a returning exile was less inclined to be antagonistic toward the tribes of the northern kingdom.
Thus, as to the fate of the northern tribes, there are two mutually contradictory views in the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Testament. This might explain a curious passage in the Gospel of Luke. When Joseph and Mary bring the infant Jesus to the temple to be presented as their firstborn, two prophets, a man named Simeon and a woman named Anna, upon seeing the baby Jesus, proclaim his greatness. Luke 2:36 says of Anna that she was of the tribe of Asher. So, Luke would appear to support the view of 1 and 2 Chronicles, rather than that of 2 Kings.
The ten tribes appear not to be “lost” in another book of the Christian scriptures, namely Revelation. In diat book’s seventh chapter, a number of servants of God are sealed on their foreheads. This would seem to be the opposite of those who have taken the Mark of the Beast on their foreheads (Rev. 13:16). Those sealed to God number 144,000, 12,000 from each of the following 12 tribes (Rev. 7:5-8): Judah, Reuben, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Manasseh, Simeon, Levi, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph and Benjamin. Two oddities about this list are the absence of the tribes of Ephraim and Dan, and the mention of a tribe of Joseph. This latter might reflect Ephraim. However, the absence of Dan is odd and led certain end-time theorists to assert that Dan was left out because the Antichrist was to come from that tribe. Of course this entire passage is highly symbolic. The 144,000, is 12 (for the 12 tribes) squared, then multiplied by 1,000. Also, the ten lost tribes being among the 144,000 could have been seen as returning at the end of the world.
Reassessing the Ten Tribes: Assyrian Records
For all that, the dominant view that prevailed not only in Judaism, but in Christian drought as well, was that the entire populations of ten of the original 12 tribes had been carried off into a foreign land. In point of fact, the tribes making up the northern kingdom of Israel amounted to far fewer than ten. Simeon, though officially a tribe, was actually just a region of Judah. Thus, only nine tribes were initially in the north: Asher, Dan, Ephraim, Gad, Issachar, Manasseh, Naphtali, Reuben and Zebulun.
So, did the Assyrians take nine tribes into captivity instead of ten? In point of fact, the northern kingdom had already been greatly reduced, losing most of its territory east of the River Jordan. Hazael, the prince of Damascus who likely authored the Tel Dan inscription, seems to have annexed much of the territory of Manasseh. The prophet Amos, probably active between 760 and 757 BCE, railed against the Ammonites because they “ripped up women with child in Gilead that they might enlarge their border” (Amos 1:13). Gilead consisted of the tribal territories of Reuben and Gad, as well as some of eastern Manasseh. In his inscription at Calah, the Assyrian Emperor Tiglathpileser III (745-727 BCE), father of Shalmaneser V and Sargon II, says that he annexed the territory of Naphtali and seems to have also annexed Zebulun.
Asher seems to have also been lost, its territory being absorbed into the Phoenician city-states. It may never have really even been a full tribe incorporated into the northern kingdom. The article on Asher in the Jewish Encyclopedia states:
On the whole the conclusion is irresistible that Asher consisted of certain clans that were affiliated with portions of Israel, but were never incorporated into the body politic.
Thus, the tribes still part of the northern kingdom of Israel at the time of its final conquest in 722 BCE would have been only Ephraim, the half of Manasseh west of the Jordan, Issachar and Dan—all tribes west of the Jordan. The Israelites residing in tribal areas east of the Jordan, in all probability either fled west or were assimilated into the Assyrian Empire to such a degree that they lost their separate identity over time. So, were four tribes taken into captivity by the Assyrians?
According to a royal inscription commemorating his great deeds, Sargon II, who overthrew his brother Shalmaneser V in a bloody coup in 722 and who concluded the siege of Samaria, says of this conquest and deportation (Nimrud Prism IV 25-41):
At the beginning of my royal rule, I…the town of the Samarians I besieged, conquered (2 lines destroyed) [for the god… ] who let me achieve this my triumph… I led away as prisoners 27,290 inhabitants of it (and) equipped from among them (soldiers to man) 50 chariots for my royal corps… The town I rebuilt better than it was before and settled therein people from countries that I had conquered. I placed an officer of mine as governor over them and imposed upon them tribute as is customary for Assyrian citizens.
Quite often, the events recorded by Assyrian kings were colored by self-aggrandizing propaganda. We would expect, then, that Sargon II would have inflated the numbers of people he took into captivity and the number of cities he destroyed. Yet he does not say he deported the entire population of Israel. Instead, he says he deported 27,290 people, the inhabitants of the capital city of Samaria, a much more manageable task. Thus, there were no lost tribes as a result of the Assyrian conquest of Israel, merely the lost population of a single city. Deporting the populace of the capital of a conquered country was a way of effectively decapitating the subject nation, thus removing the likely source of potential later revolts.
Just such a revolt took place in Judah, then a kingdom tributary to Assyria. Led by King Hezekiah, this disastrous revolt resulted in the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, greatly reducing Hezekiah’s holdings and leaving Judah little more than a city-state centered on Jerusalem. In his inscription on the Taylor Prism, now in the British Museum, Sennacherib says he captured 46 of Hezekiah’s cities and took over 200,000 of the people of Judah captive—a vastly greater number than Sargon’s deportation of 27,790 from the city of Samaria. That the people of Judah remained, even after Sennacherib’s deportation of over 200,000 inhabitants of Hezekiah’s kingdom, demonstrates that Sargon’s deportation of less than 28,000 would not have amounted to a loss of ten entire tribes.
The Samaritans
To understand why 2 Kings says that the northern kingdom of Israel was, in the wake of the Assyrian invasion of 722, populated by strangers whose worship of Yahweh was impure and corrupt, one has to remember that in religious quarrels the intensity of animosity increases, paradoxically, the closer the two religious doctrines are to each other. For example, though Christians and Muslims have warred against each other, the Thirty Years War, during which Protestants and Catholics murdered one another, was far more vicious and brutal than any atrocity committed during the Crusades. Likewise, Islam today is experiencing horrific acts of barbarity perpetrated by Muslims against other Muslims. Consider the Sunni-Shia violence and the acts of suppression perpetrated by such groups as the Taliban and the so-called Islamic State. Among the worshippers of Yahweh in ancient times there was bitter antagonism between the rival priesthoods of the southern kingdom of Judah, with its temple in Jerusalem, and the northern kingdom of Israel, with its temple on the slopes of Mount Gerezim. The upshot of this bitter rivalry was that the Jews (i.e., the people of Judah in the south) and the Samaritans (the people of the northern kingdom, now the Assyrian province of Samaria), both worshipers of Yahweh, anathematized each other. Thus, the claim that the northern tribes were taken into exile and that those living in what had been the northern kingdom of Israel were foreigners worshiping Yahweh in a corrupt manner was simply a calumny. The northern tribes were never lost.
However, the northern tribes, i.e., the Samaritans, were very nearly lost. They were not dispersed in diasporas, as were many of the Jews in the wake of both the first Jewish and Bar Kochba revolts, crushed by the Romans in CE 70 and 136, respectively. However, the Samaritans did revolt against the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire on numerous occasions, due to tensions between them and Christians living in Palestine. These revolts took place in 484, 529-531, 556 and 572 CE. The conflicts were brutal on both sides, with the Samaritans massacring Christians and destroying churches, and the Christian authorities destroying Samaritan holy places and even setting up a cross on Mt. Gerezim, where the Samaritans had their temple. The Byzantine authorities killed tens of thousands of Samaritans and sold many of the survivors into slavery, not only within the Byzantine Empire, but into the Sassanid Persian Empire as well. After the Levant fell to the Arabs in 634, in the initial expansion of Islam, many of the Jews and Samaritans still living there were converted to the Islamic faith. Medieval Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela (d. 1172 CE) estimated there were less than 2,000 Samaritans still living in the region in the 1100s. As of 2017 there were only 796 Samaritans yet left in the state of Israel.
Thus, the original tribes of Israel were either lost through conquest or were subsumed mainly into the Samaritan community. The Samaritans were greatly reduced by brutal suppression of their revolts and by conversions to Christianity and Islam. Tribes in general were assimilated into the kingdoms of which they were a part, and so ceased to retain their identity. This is yet another reason these tribes seemingly vanished. So there is no grand mystery as to what happened to any of the twelve tribes.