Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4

Most of us learned in Sunday school the basics of Israel’s history—

• The call of Abraham (c. 2000 BC)
• The Exodus (c. 1500 BC)
• Establishment of the monarchy under David (c. 1000 BC)
• Civil War (c. 900 BC)
• Deportation of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by Assyria (722 BC)
• Deportation of the Southern Kingdom of Judah by Babylon (586 BC)
• Return from Babylon (536 BC)
• Dedication of the Second Temple (516 BC)

And likewise most of us know what’s missing: the Return from Assyria. Because there was none.

The two exiles are fundamentally different in that respect. Judah comes back. Israel doesn’t.

Judah is re-established as a country—though never as an independent, self-governing entity, at least in biblical times. It exists as a vassal state under Persia, then Greece, then the Ptolemies and Seleucids, and finally Rome, which eventually destroys it (AD 70) and scatters it to the nations, not to reassemble until modern times as the State of Israel (AD 1948, to be precise). Self-governing once again. At last.

But the Northern Kingdom? It disappears.

Whatever happened to those 10 tribes?

Well, to begin with, we need to talk about the numbers. Jacob (named “Israel” by God [Gen 32.28]) had 12 sons—the 12 tribes of Israel—one of whom was Joseph. Jacob gave Joseph, in effect, the birthright, which included a double portion of the inheritance—which Jacob indicated by granting both of Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, full standing as tribes.

So now there were 13 tribes—not counting Joseph as distinct from his sons.

After the Israelites conquered Canaan under Joshua, the land was apportioned among all the tribes (Josh 13-19)—except Levi (Josh 13.14, 33), which received no land inheritance but was given property within the apportionments of each of the other 12 tribes, so that they could serve as teachers of the Law throughout the Land (Josh 21.1ff).

To complicate matters, several tribes—Reuben, Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh—requested land allotments east of the Jordan (Num 32.1-5), a request Moses granted (Num 32.33). So now we’re back to 13 allotments again, with a West and East Manasseh.

And further, Simeon’s land is placed inside Judah’s, as an enclave (Josh 19.9).

So how many tribes are there in the North? How many in the South? Three (Judah, Ephraim, Simeon)? Or four (Judah, Ephraim, Simeon, Levi)? out of 12, or 13? or 14, counting Manasseh twice?

I have no idea. :-)

Well, however many tribes there were in the North, the Assyrians invade in 722 BC and take the leaders of the Northern Kingdom into exile, but not everybody. How do we know that?

• That was the normal practice; you distribute the exiled leadership across the empire, and move in people from across the empire, so that they’ll intermarry with those not exiled and lessen the likelihood that the nationalist / tribal spirit will endure, thereby lowering the likelihood of future rebellions. That’s what Nebuchadnezzar did a little more than a century later (2K 25.12).
• Sargon, the Assyrian king, claimed that he took 27,290 Israelites into exile. This is not likely to have been the entire Northern population, given that 70 years before the exile Judah’s King Amaziah had hired 100,000 Israelite troops as mercenaries to help him fight against Edom (2Chr 25.6). If the Northern army could spare 100,000 soldiers, their entire population must have been quite a bit larger than that.
• There’s evidence that at least some Israelites migrated to the South before the exile, either for religious reasons—for easier access to the Temple in Jerusalem—or to escape the impending Assyrian invasion. There’s a debate between a couple of well-known modern Israeli archaeologists as to how extensive that migration was, but nobody says that no members of the Northern tribes came South.
  • Some from Ephraim and Manasseh had moved south during Asa’s reign, 150 years before the exile (2Chr 15.9).
  • Ephraim, Manasseh, and “all the remnant of Israel” donated to the renovation of the Temple under Josiah in 621 BC (2Chr 34.9), a century after the exile.
  • All 12 tribes were (apparently?) represented at the dedication of the Second Temple in 516 BC (Ezra 6.17, 8.35).
• Several passages in the New Testament speak of the existence of the “exiled” tribes—
  • Anna, the prophetess who welcomes the baby Jesus at the Temple, is of the tribe of Asher (Lk 2.36).
  • In his speech to Agrippa, Paul seems to think of all 12 tribes as still in existence (Ac 26.7).
  • James writes his epistle “to the twelve tribes that are in the Dispersion” (Jam 1.1).

What does all this mean? It means that there are no “ten lost tribes of Israel.” The tribes never left and thus were never lost.

But it’s clear that some from the ten tribes were exiled. Could they have traveled, over several generations, to Britain? We’ll take a look at that next time.

Part 6Part 7Part 8

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Part 1Part 2Part 3

Anglo-Israelism, the view that Anglo-Saxons are especially blessed by God and the people of his covenant, is based in the idea of “the lost 10 tribes of Israel.” It begins with the historical fact that the Northern Kingdom of Israel broke away from the Kingdom of Judah shorty after Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, ascended to the throne (1K 11.41-12.24). These two kingdoms lived side by side, sometimes in relative peace but often at war, for about two centuries, until 722 BC, when the Assyrian army invaded the North and exiled its people (2K 17.1-41). After that event, the Northern Kingdom was never re-established; it disappeared as an entity from the pages of history.

It was common in ancient empires to exile people you conquered. The reasoning was simple: a conquered people is always inclined to rise up in rebellion against its conqueror, because nationalism never dies. So what do you do? You pack up the people and scatter them to other locations around your empire. Over time they intermarry with other ethnicities, and they lose their sense of tribal identity. Nebuchadnezzar did the same thing more than a century later, when he conquered the Southern Kingdom of Judah (2K 25.11-12), and the practice is confirmed in archaeological records across the Ancient Near East.

The story told by Anglo-Israelites posits an unexpected outcome of this event:

• When Jacob blessed his sons, the future 12 tribes of Israel, he gave the birthright to Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh (Gen 48.1-22).
• These tribes were exiled in the Assyrian invasion.
• Modern Jews are descended from Judah (as the name demonstrates), who does not hold the birthright. They’re the custodians of the royal line, but not chosen as inheritors of the birthright.
• The Northern Kingdom was taken to Mesopotamia in exile. Eventually escaping, the ten tribes left evidence of their generational path northwestward, eventually to the British Isles.
• The kingly line of Judah arrived in the British Isles as well after the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BC, when Jeremiah the prophet secretly escaped with a daughter of King Zedekiah. She established the royal line in Ireland when she married Ireland’s king. That line became the royal line of the UK when James VI of Scotland became James I of Great Britain. Thus the royal line of Judah and the birthright line of Ephraim are united in Britain.
• Many Anglo-Israelites also maintain that Manasseh, the older brother of Ephraim but placed second by Jacob’s decision (Gen 48.14-20), is the ancestor of white Americans, making the US part of Israel as well.

This is quite a claim—or concatenation of claims. There’s a lot to consider here.

Next time we’ll begin to work through these assertions.

Part 5Part 6Part 7Part 8

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Part 1Part 2

There are those who claim to believe the Bible but who allege that only whites are descended from Adam and Eve; other races allegedly descend from other sources. (This is the view that distinguishes Christian Identity proponents from Anglo-Israelites.) There are many suggested sources—

• They’re an earlier stage of evolution, and therefore less well developed.
• They’re the spawn of Satan or of demons, a situation perhaps alluded to in Genesis 6.1-4.
• They’re “the beasts of the field” mentioned in Gen 1.24 and often elsewhere.

Of course there are problems with each of these suggestions. The first, as evolutionary, I would rule out simply on that basis. It’s been suggested that at least the early incarnations of Darwinism might have encouraged this kind of thinking.

As to the second view, there’s a whole industry of bizarre thinking that springs from the Genesis 6 passage. There’s a lot of interest currently in “the Nephilim,” allegedly giants who were produced from sexual relationships between fallen angels and human females. I don’t buy it, and I’ll observe generally that obscure passages make an exceedingly weak foundation for entire worldviews. If there are aliens among us, it’s odd that God hasn’t given us any means of identifying them, or even warnings about the situation in general.

I’d like to spend a little more time on the third view, which is fairly popular among adherents to Christian Identity. There are two primary problems with positing that the Bible teaches this—

• The term “beasts of the field” is used in Scripture in contexts that cannot refer to humans or humanoids.
  • 1Sam 17.44: David says that he’ll give Goliath’s flesh to the beasts of the field. But he clearly cannot have meant that Africans, Asians, or Pacific Islanders, for example, would eat Goliath’s body.
  • 2Sam 21.10: Rizpah protected something from birds by day and the beasts of the field by night. No Africans, Asians, or Pacific Islanders in sight.
  • Ezek 39.4: God speaks of dead soldiers as being devoured by the beasts of the field. Never in recorded history have conquering armies, or even human(oid) scavengers, feasted on the bodies of the slain.
  • The term is often paralleled with “the fowls of the air,” an association that speaks more obviously of animals than of human(oid)s (Gen 2.19-20; 1Sam 17.44; Ezek 29.5; 31.6, 13; 38.20; 39.17; et al).
• The Bible frequently speaks of non-Israelite peoples as within the sphere of humanity and God’s plan of salvation.
  • Ps 22.27: All the nations will worship before God.
  • Ps 67.4: The nations will rejoice before the Lord.
  • Ps 72.17: All nations will call the Lord blessed.
  • Ps 86.9: All nations will worship the Lord.
  • Ps 117.1: All nations are called to worship God.
  • Isa 2.2-4: “All nations” shall flow into the Lord’s house.
  • Isa 55.5: Many nations will run to Israel because of the Lord.
  • Isa 66.18-20: All nations will come to Jerusalem to see God’s glory.
  • Rev 7.9-17: Believers from “every kingdom, tongue, tribe, and nation” will worship the Lamb before his throne.

This is a truly crucial point. What I’ve listed here is just a sampling of passages from 3 biblical books; there are scores of others, and the concept is pervasive across the biblical canon. The Revelation 7 passage is the climax of the biblical story and of cosmic history; it’s literally the whole point of the Bible. God is gathering to himself a people from every kingdom, tribe, tongue, and nation. He is bringing together people who by every human measure should be enemies, and making them all his sons and daughters, seated at his table, united perfectly by a power and grace that can be explained only by the existence of a good and great God (Eph 2.11-22; 3.10). The unity of the church is a testimony, even when silent, to the fact of God’s existence, his power, and his remarkable kindness to those whose only desire was to be his enemies. Making any of this about “race” is simply to miss the whole point.

So the foundational belief of Christian Identity is unbiblical—in fact it goes directly contrary to the whole point of biblical revelation. It’s false teaching.

Next time, we’ll begin looking at the evidence for the claim that white Europeans are “the lost 10 tribes of Israel.”

Part 4Part 5Part 6Part 7Part 8

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Part 1

It seems to me that before we can think through arguments about race, we need to define our key term. What is “race,” anyway?

And immediately we run into deep, deep trouble.

There’s an old classic delineation of races as Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. Whites, Asians, Blacks. But is that accurate?

What are Indians? Latinos? Pacific Islanders?

You can see the indecisiveness all over the census form.

This lack of any meaningful definition for race has resulted in all kinds of confusion when we try to implement race-based policies. In South Africa, post-apartheid, the culture recognizes 3 racial groups: White, Black (or “African”), and “Coloured”—which is anybody who isn’t either White or Black. But that means that Indians, of whom there are many in South Africa, are lumped in with those of mixed race—what Americans used to call “mulattos”—who are culturally completely different from Indians. How does that make sense?

And speaking of “mixed race,” how do you define that? Back when Americans cared about such things, “mulatto” meant someone with a white parent and a black parent; “quadroon” meant someone who had 1 black grandparent; then there was “octaroon” and “hexadecaroon” and so on. At what point is the person just “white” or “black”? It just gets ridiculous; according to the “one-drop rule,” pretty much everyone in the USA is black. And I suppose that means we all ought to get along just fine.

Raced-based policy is simply unworkable and thus nonsensical. Or vice versa.

Does the Bible bring us any help?

Well, it begins by saying that all humans have 2 common ancestors, Adam and Eve (and, several generations later, Noah and Mrs. Noah). It doesn’t speak of “race” at all. We’re all “one blood” (Ac 17.26).

I highly recommend a book by my friend Ken Ham on this topic: One Race One Blood. It’s clear, understandable, and solidly biblical.

The New Testament does use the Greek word ethnos for “nation,” speaking of what today we would call “ethnicities” or “people groups.” I’m inclined to think that we’re more easily categorized by culture than melanin level, though history has demonstrated that cultural identities often arise from people’s general preference for others of their own ethnicity.

So where did the races, or ethnicities, or whatever, come from? Why are we all so different in appearance?

Nobody knows.

Really.

If the Bible teaches that we all have common descent (and for what it’s worth, my understanding is that many secular evolutionists would agree to a common human ancestry as well), then we have to conclude that all the variations we see today were contained in the original genetic code and manifested over time. How and when did they manifest?

Dunno.

We know that Noah had 3 sons, whose descendants populated the earth:

• Shem’s people appear to have populated the Middle East (Gen 10.21-31).
• Ham’s people appear to have populated the Middle East and North Africa (Gen 10.6-20).
• Japheth’s people appear to have populated generally north and west of the Middle East (Gen 10.2-5).

So where did the Chinese come from? Sub-saharan Africans? Native Americans, north and south?

Don’t know. It doesn’t say. Better reserve judgment.

I doubt that Mongoloids came from Shem, and Negroids from Ham, and Caucasoids from Japheth . It’s clearly not that simple. Apparently those genetic characteristics manifested themselves over time, and certain features, melanin among them, tended to cluster in specific geographic areas (Africa, East Asia, and so on) largely because people weren’t moving around as easily as we do today.

Upshot?

Well.

Between the fact that there’s a lot we don’t know about ethnicity, and the fact that what we do know leads us to minimize rather than emphasize the distinctions, ethnicity is a really lousy basis for theological and doctrinal decisions. Particularly in the body of Christ, it ought to pretty much disappear as a factor (1Co 1.24; Gal 3.28; Col 3.11) .

But the fact remains that still today, in spite of all those billions of years of evolution (?), we’re still focused obsessively and passionately on the topic; and even within Christendom—broadly defined—people are making significant decisions based entirely on racial considerations. That fact suggests that there are serious needs to be addressed.

Hence the series.

Next time: some variations on the “common human ancestor” dogma.

Part 3Part 4Part 5Part 6Part 7Part 8

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Nearly 40 years ago now, I wrote, and BJU published, a brief monograph refuting the alleged biblical evidence that white people—specifically Anglo-Saxons—are God’s chosen people. After a brief shelf life, it went out of print, for the sole reason that hardly anybody bought it. (That’s kind of how publishing works. ?)

I wrote on the topic because I had a relative who espoused the view. But eventually I lost interest and moved on to other things. The recent talk about “white nationalism,” however, has gotten me thinking about the topic, and it has occurred to me that it’s worthwhile to address it again, both because of recent emphases in the news and because we can all see that racism lives on in the human heart.

I’m a fan of listening to people who know what they’re talking about—and its corollary, ignoring, or at least devaluing, the opinions of people who are just shooting their mouths off—of which the percentage seems to be growing every day. As one of my daughters commented just recently, “People who say stuff often don’t know stuff.”

Which means that I should stick to areas where I have expertise. So let’s start by defining some issues, so I can safely set aside those where I’m ignorant and should consequently keep my thoughts to myself.

The dominant term today, the one I’ve used to title this series, is “white nationalism.” That’s technically the view that whites should preserve majorities and control in one or more nations. Hence resistance to immigration (legal or illegal) by nonwhites. Usually aligned with that is the idea that white culture is superior to other cultures, and therefore white culture should be preferred as better for the future of the planet. That view we call “white supremacism,” which of course is just one form of racism. It’s a modern descendant of the American practice of slavery before the Civil War and segregation in the years that followed.

A quick side note: My experience leads me to believe that the primary reason for disdain of other cultures is unfamiliarity: you think a practice of some other culture is “stupid” because you don’t understand what’s going on behind the practice. I note that cross-cultural ignorance tends to be a particular feature of Americans because we have oceans—big ones—on both sides. Lots of Americans have never left their country, and I think this is the primary reason for the overseas stereotype of “the ugly American,” who thinks people are stupid because they don’t speak English—and who thinks that they’ll understand if he just speaks more slowly and loudly. All the “ugly American” does is proclaim his own ignorance to everyone around him. Travel more, people. And listen.

Back to my main point. Though a great many racists, including white supremacists, are secular in their thinking, some integrate religious arguments or themes into their position. It’s at this point that my ears perk up, because while I have no professional expertise in anthropology or sociology or psychology or politics, I do know something about religion, particularly Christianity, and I have some facility in tools for research and thinking in that area.

So I’d like to spend a few posts addressing some of the religious arguments for white racism, specifically the ones allegedly based in biblical exegesis. While these posts won’t apply to all “white nationalists,” I’d like to think that they might direct well-intentioned Christians away from distortions of the biblical material, mainly by demonstrating the perversion inherent in the alleged biblical interpretation.

The bulk of these posts will address the arguments of “British Israelism” or “Anglo-Israelism,” which teaches that the Anglo-Saxons are the “lost ten tribes of Israel.” A more recent popular form of British Israelism is the Christian Identity movement, which holds additionally that other white Europeans are descended from the biblical Southern Kingdom of Judah. While the former group would recognize modern Jews as descended from Judah and therefore included in God’s covenant with Abraham, the latter group holds that all modern Jews are impostors and so is aggressively antisemitic. I hope to say some things about that view as well.

See you next time.

Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5Part 6Part 7Part 8

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash