Great stuff. Typical of his research prowess. I would love to have this guy teaching my quorum classes. We have few great scholarly types like him in the Church - mostly just watered down drivel - milk with no fat, let alone meat these days for the spiritually anemic who can handle little of substance.
Here is the article:
Israel’s “Other Tribes”
When the Prophet Joseph Smith
set down the Articles of Faith in 1842, he included an interesting
declaration concerning the tribes of Israel which now reads in part: “We
believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of
the Ten Tribes; [and] that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon
the American Continent.” (A of F 1:10.)
In
that statement the Prophet acknowledged, first, a historical fact—that a
large portion of the house of Israel had been taken by Assyria from the
land of their inheritance and thus were lost from the common knowledge
of the tribe of Judah, the ancient record-keepers; and second, the
Prophet acknowledged the Lord’s promise for the future—that these tribes
“lost” in terms of immediate recognition, would be gathered in again in
the latter days.
It was the Lord himself who referred to these of his scattered sheep as the “other tribes of the house of Israel.” (3 Ne. 15:15.)
The scriptures and related sources give us a limited body of
information about these “other tribes” up to the point when they were
“lost” to Judah’s record-keepers.
After
the conquest of the promised land of Canaan (Palestine) following
Israel’s exodus from Egypt, Joshua partitioned the area into thirteen
geographical entities to be possessed by the tribes of Israel. The
tribes lived under a government of judges for 334 years, and then under
the kingship of Saul, David, and Solomon for another 120 years before
the land was divided into the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah
in 975 B.C.
Because
of Solomon’s transgressions, the Lord declared the end of his kingdom:
“And it came to pass at that time when Jeroboam went out of Jerusalem,
that the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite found him in the way. …
“And Ahijah caught the new garment that was on him, and rent it in twelve pieces:
“And
he said to Jeroboam, Take thee ten pieces: for thus saith the Lord, the
God of Israel, Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of
Solomon and will give ten tribes to thee.” (1 Kgs. 11:29–31.)
Thus
at the death of Solomon, his son Rehoboam suffered a rebellion that
left him the southern part, known as the kingdom of Judah, while a
northern kingdom, known as the kingdom of Israel, formed under Jeroboam.
This northern kingdom was also sometimes called the kingdom of Ephraim
(which was the largest and most prominent tribe), or simply “Samaria,”
after the capital city of the Ephraimite province.
Jeroboam
immediately plunged the kingdom of Israel into enduring wickedness.
Fearing that his people would travel to Jerusalem to worship at the
temple in the kingdom of Judah and thus eventually shift their
allegiance there, he made idols for their false worship. (See 1 Kgs. 12:26–33.)
Nevertheless, the northern kingdom of Israel endured for another 253
years before the people’s wickedness weakened the kingdom to the point
that Assyria conquered it.
The Assyrian conquest began about 738 B.C.
when the armies of Tiglath-Pileser III marched against Menahem, king of
Israel, wresting part of his dominion and compelling him to pay
tribute. By 733 B.C., all of the northern
kingdom except Mount Ephraim was conquered by the Assyrians, including
the lands occupied by the tribes of Dan, Asher, Naphtali, Zebulun,
Issachar, and the half-tribe of Manasseh in the region of Galilee, and
Reuben, Gad, and the other half-tribe of Manasseh in trans-Jordan. (See 2 Kgs. 15:29; 1 Chr. 5:26.) After Tiglath-Pileser’s death in 727 B.C.,
he was succeeded by Shalmaneser IV, who immediately laid siege to
Ephraim’s capital city of Samaria. After three years, Shalmaneser died
and Sargon II took power. His famous “cylinder inscription” declares
that it was he who was “the conquerer of the city of Samaria and the
whole land of Beth-Omri.”
In
his treatment of the kingdom of Ephraim (Israel), Sargon II followed
the policies established by Tiglath-Pileser: deportation and
colonization. Excavators have found, amid the ruins of his palace at
Khorsabad, the annals of his conquest. One entry reads:
“In
the beginning of my reign I besieged, I took by the help of the god
Shamash, who gives me victory over my enemies, the city of Samaria.
27,290 of its inhabitants I carried away. … I took them to Assyria and
put into their places people whom my hand had conquered.”
The Old Testament confirms this account, stating that “in the ninth year of Hoshea [722–21 B.C.]
the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria,
and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the fiver of Gozan, and in the
cities of the Medes.” (2 Kgs. 17:6; also 2 Kgs. 18:9–12;
see map.) Then Sargon “brought men from Babylon, and from Cutha, and
from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the
cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel.” (2 Kgs. 17:24.)
The
people thus transplanted into Samaria eventually mingled with the
remaining peoples of the northern kingdom and produced a religion that
was a mixture of portions of the true faith and portions of pagan
worship, for “they feared the Lord, [yet] served their own gods.” (2 Kgs. 17:33.)
This mixture of nationalities and pollution of the religion appalled
the Jews to the south and created enmity between them and these new
“Samaritans.” Even in the time of the Savior, the Jews had a superior
attitude toward the Samaritans.
Just
how many Israelites were carried into Assyria is not known. Sargon II
claimed 27,290 captives, but that number only represents the captives
taken from the city of Samaria alone. Doubtless the total number carried
away was significant, for Samaria never recovered as a power from the
expulsion and never again became the dominant force that the northern
kingdom of Israel had been. Nevertheless, the depopulation was not
total, since it was the usual policy of the Assyrians to select only the
ablest, most skilled, and intelligent of the people for deportation,
just as Nebuchadnezzar later did in the captivity of Judah: “And he
[Nebuchadnezzar] carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and
all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the
craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people
of the land.” (2 Kgs. 24:14.)
It
may be that those taken captive by the Assyrians numbered in the
hundreds of thousands. In any case, these members of the Lord’s Other
Tribes were taken away as colonists to the area of northwestern
Mesopotamia, toward the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers, there to await the time of their escape. Today those areas are
associated with eastern Syria, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and the
Armenian region of eastern Turkey.
Eventually,
some of the displaced Israelites escaped from their captivity, to the
fulfillment of the word of the Lord through his prophet Amos: “For, lo, I
will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations,
like as corn is sifted in a sieve.” (Amos 9:9.) How this portion escaped, and when, are not known.
Perhaps the fall of Assyria afforded the captives the opportunity to escape. In the period from 614 to 610 B.C.
the army of the Medes under Cyaxeres overran all the territory of the
Assyrians, including the areas of Halah and Gozan, where many of the
captives had been settled. This was the end of the Assyrian empire.
Subsequently, some of the peoples held captive by Assyria migrated. This
migration seems to have been under way by the early part of the sixth
century B.C., for at that time Nephi wrote:
“Behold, there are many who are already lost from the knowledge of those
who are at Jerusalem. Yea, the more part of all the tribes have been led away.” (1 Ne. 22:4; italics added.)
The
best account of the departure of the Other Tribes by Judah’s
record-keepers is found in the book of 2 Esdras (also called 4 Ezra). In
verses 40 through 47 of chapter 13 we read:
“These
are the ten tribes which were led away captive out of their own land in
the days of Josiah [Hoshea] the king, which (tribes) Salmanassar the
king of the Assyrians led away captive; he carried them across the
River, and (thus) they were transported into another land. But they took
this counsel among themselves, that they would leave the multitude of
the heathen, and go forth into a land further distant, where the human
race had never dwelt, there at least to 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 wrought wonders for them,
and stayed the springs of the River until they were passed over. And
through that country there was a great way to go, (a journey) of a year
and a half; and that region was called Arzareth. There they have dwelt
until the last times.” (R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964, 2:619.)
This report agrees with 2 Kings 17:6, 18:11 [2 Kgs. 17:6; 2 Kgs. 18:11], and 1 Chronicles 5:26 [1 Chr. 5:26]
in that the tribes would have been taken “across the River” (the
Euphrates) on the way to the places of captivity named in those verses.
An escape “by the narrow passages of the river Euphrates” (that is, in
its upper reaches—see map) into “a land further distant, where the human
race had never dwelt” points to a northward direction for the
subsequent migration of the tribes (the lands east, west, and south of
Assyria were already inhabited at that time). This, too, agrees with a
number of scriptural prophecies relative to the eventual return of those
Other Tribes from the “land of the north,” or “north countries.” (See,
Israel, Ten Lost Tribes of, in Topical Guide, LDS edition of the King
James Bible.)
(click to view larger)
Beginning in 721–22 B.C.,
the Assyrians carried many Israelites captive, settling them “in Halah
and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.”
From these areas, according to one account, they later migrated
northward “by the narrow passages of the river Euphrates.”
This was to be an event of such significance that the prophet Jeremiah spoke these powerful words:
“Behold,
the days come, saith the Lord, that they shall no more say, The Lord
liveth, which brought up the children of Israel out of the land of
Egypt;
“But,
The Lord liveth, which brought up and which led the seed of the house
of Israel out of the north country, and from all countries whither I had
driven them; and they shall dwell in their own land.” (Jer. 23:7–8.)
Precisely
where the tribes journeyed after the fall of Assyria is another
unknown, even as it is unknown to Judah where Lehi and Mulek went; Arzareth itself
simply means “another land.” But seeking an actual locale is perhaps an
irrelevant question, since the scriptures clearly indicate that the
Other Tribes were to be scattered among many nations, even though a
distinct remnant of them clearly would remain in the “land of the
north.”
It
is also clear that part of the scattering surely involved portions of
the Other Tribes that didn’t go north. As mentioned earlier, some of the
population of the northern kingdom were left in the conquered lands of
the northern kingdom by the Assyrians and not taken captive at all.
Others, although taken captive, elected to remain in the land of their
captivity, for Isaiah indicated in his well-known prophecy: “And it
shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again
the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be
left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea.” (Isa. 11:11; also 2 Ne. 21:11;
italics added.) Assyria, Elam, Shinar, and Hamath were all lands
involved in the Assyrian captivity. This same principle also applies to
Judah, for many Jews did not return to Jerusalem after establishing
themselves in Babylon and places where they fled.
Nevertheless,
as a distinct remnant, the Other Tribes did become “lost” to Judah’s
record-keepers—not simply because they were taken captive, but also
because they left their captivity and went forth “into a land further
distant,” numerous of them undoubtedly choosing to settle in the lands
through which they traveled.
Since
that time—particularly in the last few centuries—attempts to locate and
identify the Other Tribes have been numerous. At different times and by
a variety of Christian
authors the Other Tribes of Israel have been identified with the
Japanese, Chinese, Turks, Ethiopians, Persians, Yemenites, Nestorians,
Afghans, Arabians, Britons, Kassites of Russia, Hindus and Buddhists of
India, Scythians, Cimmerians, Celts, Kareens of Burma, North and South
American Indians, Australians, and Eskimos. Indeed it is possible that
remnants of the Other Tribes may have spread out and became part of all
these peoples in fulfillment of the prophecies that Israel would spread
itself throughout many countries.
In
the ninth century, for example, a man called Eldad ben Mahli went to
Kairwan, Tunisia, announcing that he was from a Jewish kingdom in
Ethiopia comprising peoples of four of the ten tribes. This tradition
continued into the sixteenth century when the geographer Abraham Yagel
placed the Other Tribes in Ethiopia and India. Perhaps the most
interesting accounts of Other Tribes “hunting” came from a merchant
named Benjamin de Tudels, a Jewish-Spanish traveler at the time of the
Crusades who shared an account of Jewish communities in the Near East
and communities of the Other Tribes in Iran, India, and beyond,
northward as well as eastward. Many are the legends, romantic tales, and
speculations concerning the locale or present-day identification of the
“Lost Tribes.”
It
was in this vacuum of reliable reformation regarding the Other Tribes
that in November 1831 Joseph Smith received this revelation from the
Lord:
“They
who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the
Lord; and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay
themselves; and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down
at their presence.
“And an highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep. …
“And they shall bring forth their rich treasures unto the children of Ephraim, my servants.
“And the boundaries of the everlasting hills shall tremble at their presence.
“And
there shall they fall down and be crowned with glory, even in Zion, by
the hands of the servants of the Lord, even the children of Ephraim.
“And they shall be filled with songs of everlasting joy.” (D&C 133:26–33.)
In
the last days, then, the Other Tribes are to come to Zion, “upon the
American continent,” there to receive blessings from Ephraim. The keys
of the “gathering of Israel from the four parts of the earth, and the
leading of the ten tribes from the land of the north” were committed to
the Prophet Joseph Smith by Moses
on 3 April 1836 in the Kirtland Temple. Since Ephraim itself was one of
the Other Tribes lost to Jewish and Christian history, we see that the
promised restoration has already begun. In fact, we have been blessed to
identify many from another tribe, Manasseh. This identification of
tribal lineage is made under the hands of inspired patriarchs in the
normal spiritual processes incident to the functions of the priesthood.
As
we look toward our common future, we see that, as foretold, the great
gathering, or restoration, of all the peoples of Israel who have spread
themselves throughout the world will be accomplished and distinct
remnants of all of the tribal units of Israel will at last be united
again in fellowship under Christ. All tribes are to have representation
in the establishment of the New Jerusalem. All tribes will have
representatives in the calling of the “hundred and forty and four
thousand” mentioned in John’s revelation, twelve thousand out of every
tribe of Israel. (Rev. 7:2–8.)
These are “high priests, ordained unto the holy order of God, to
administer the everlasting gospel; for they are they who are ordained
out of every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, by the angels to whom
is given power over the nations of the earth, to bring as many as will
come to the church of the Firstborn.” (D&C 77:11.)
Thus, a great work awaits representatives of each tribe as they
continue to preach the gospel throughout the world to all mankind.
Ultimately, in righteousness the Other Tribes of Israel will be prepared
to return to Jerusalem, to receive with Judah the lands of their first
inheritance. (See Deut. 30:1–5.)
Certainly
all the reasons why the Lord “hid” the tribes—as he did with both
Ephraim and Manasseh—and exactly when we will identify the others and
when a distinct remnant of “they who are in the north countries” will
come to “the boundaries of the everlasting hills” is information that
remains with God. However, we do know that it will ultimately be for the
benefit of all—for those who were “lost,” for the nations who were
blessed by their leavening seed, and for us in Israel today who await
the gathering of these Other Tribes and the great work of restoring to
all the peoples of Israel the true knowledge of their God and King, Jesus Christ.
[photo] Bas-relief from the Black Obelisk showing the Israelite
King Jehu bowing to Shalmaneser III, King of Assyria, which took place
around 820 B.C. (Photography courtesy of the British Museum.)
Do you know Vern Swanson and did you visit with him when he was in Cardston this summer? By calling him by his first name indicates familiarity. I share another interest with him regarding Old Testament history - he is an exceptional individual.
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