Question:
Many people speak of the lost tribes of Israel; even the Latter-day Saints say that the Native Americans were those lost tribes. I had never heard before that there was a lost tribe of Israel. If there is, would you be so kind as to tell me where it is in the Bible?
Answer:
We know of no place in the Bible where it speaks of a lost tribe of Israel. The ten tribes were split from the two tribes; the ten tribes went into captivity. Numbers of them came back and joined the two tribes at different times. The Bible often speaks of them as in captivity, but it does not speak of them as lost tribes; that is an invention of man. It speaks of the lost sheep of the house of Israel (see Matthew 10:6, 15:24), and that is true of all those who have wandered away in sin.
The Lord told the people of the ten tribes that they would go into captivity and their kingdom be utterly destroyed if they refused to hear His voice (see 2 Kings 17:20, 23), yet we learn from Ezra that when the children of Judah and Benjamin returned to Jerusalem, some from other tribes returned with them (see Ezra 1:5; 2:70). The decree was so broad that it gave all the permission to return, which is all that the Lord ever does. It also seems that the twelve tribes were all represented at the temple’s dedication. Ezra 6:17. See also 2 Chronicles 30:10, 11, and 35:18, which show that those of the ten tribes who so desired returned to Jerusalem and identified themselves with the tribes of Judah. The ten lost tribes is an unscriptural theory.
An article in the New York Independent of March 8, 1904, says that the Assyrian inscriptions agree in all leading particulars with the Biblical account of the captivity. The article states that probably to exceed 50,000, all told, were carried away. Sargon says that from Samaria, he carried away 27,280 persons, and a few more were added afterward. He also says that he sent Arabs into the land. “The system of deportation,” says the article, “practised [sic] by the despots of that day, never sent the entire people of a land into exile,” but only those “who it was feared might cause rebellion.” Only “the leading and influential families” were removed. All weapons were taken away, and all who made them were deported. The article thus concludes:
“In reality the ten tribes never were ‘lost.’ The few people carried away by Tiglath-Pileser form an insignificant contingent compared with the masses that remained. They could not have constituted one-tenth of the people. The deported were not tribes, or larger parts of tribes, but only individuals, or at most families. These, indeed, have been ‘lost,’ but lost beyond a least chance of rediscovery. The tribes as such remained in Canaan, and absorbed the heathen settlers that were sent in. The division into tribes signified little or nothing in later times; the division into tribal territory was not regarded. Anna, of the tribe of Asher, dwells in Jerusalem; Joseph the carpenter, of the tribe of Judah, in Nazareth; Paul, a Benjamite, in Tarsus; Barnabas, a Levite, in Cyprus, etc. In general, the Jew of the New Testament era knew as little from what tribe he came as does the modern Jew. Then as now the Jews were cosmopolitan. Their diaspora was scattered over the entire world. Everywhere they found they could prosper as well, or even better, than in their native land. The endless wars in Palestine finally destroyed them as a nation altogether, in the days of Titus and Hadrian. This great diaspora embraced representatives of all the tribes of Israel. Among modern Jews all these tribes, without any doubt, have their descendants. In other words, the ‘lost’ tribes never have been, and are not now, ‘lost.'”
New York Independent of March 8, 1904
