What Happened to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel?

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[ezrapark]

The name “lost” makes people want to find them. They were lost as in dead, vanished, absorbed. Some of them became Samaritans

[zacharyhenderson]

Could you imagine searching for a lost tribe, having everybody telling you that you're wrong, and then finding an extent group of religiously Jewish people exactly where you believed you would? What a feeling that would be.

[porkadillo]

Great video Dr. Henry, though I did have one issue with the insistence of this being an "unprecedented" phenomenon. What we see happening with the legend of the 10 tribes is actually quite a common occurrence in the historical record. As non literate people came into contact with literary cultures and adopted their view of history, they crafted new legends to place themselves within that new history. The Romans did it by tracing themselves back to the Trojans, as did the Irish in the Book of Invasions. Later, in West and East Africa, royal dynasties also crafted legends that connected themselves with Muhammad and his close followers in order to assert their own legitimacy as Islamic rulers. Modern day Chinese Christians even do something similar by making the 3 Magi in the Jesus birth story Chinese. It's all about trying to make sense of one's own people in the context of a foreign narrative.

[zenverak]

I think my favorite thing in your videos if none of it comes across as judgmental about different beliefs. You’re studying religion/culture as part of a peoples and I love it.

[stevemcgroob]

It always sounded weird to me when reading about the Samaritans in the Bible. It came off as the author was trying really hard to convince me that the Samaritans were in no way related to the 10 tribes, but he also wasn't doing a good job of it.

[sampoth]

Holy crap, I took dr Tobolowsky’s History and Religion of Ancient Israel class just to fill out credits in college and its what got me into religious studies. Small world I guess

[jonnydent]

I don't know that we can say it's entirely unparalleled. The Romans had a myth that they were the descendants of the survivors of Troy after all.

[mariagutierrezacevedo]

Excellent video Dr. Henry, concise, precise and well-researched as usual. I suggest that you should make a video explaining and comparing the differences between the samaritan and the jewish pentateuch

[raguelelnaqum]

A good video, although I think it's important to asterisk note however that historically there were well-documented Jewish communities in Axum & Ethiopian predecessor states well before the establishment of the Solomonic dynasty. While the Kebra Nagast is largely Solomonic propaganda, Jewish merchants had been travelling to the Horn of Africa long before the Romans & Greeks invaded the region. The Jewish Himyarite empire regularly invaded &/or controlled areas of Modern Day Ethiopia, as well as regions formerly under their domain and/or influence. The case of the Beta Israel is divorced from that of the Mormons in that where the Jewish heritage of the Mormons is largely forged through Replacement Theology, the Beta Israel were born through organic migration & ethnogenesis. While yes Solomonic texts help shape the modern Beta Israel, genetic and archeological evidence both corroborate their pre-Roman Exile Jewish Identity.

[mysticwanderer]

The bottom line is, that the tribes of the Northern Kingdom were likely either assimilated into the Assyrian population which itself was quite diverse, fled to Judah, or fled to some other place nearby. The only thing that is "lost" are the minds of those pursuing the myth of the lost tribes of Israel.

[LangThoughts]

An important piece missing from the video is that sometimes the 12 tribes include Levi, but sometimes he is missing, and Joseph is divided into Manasseh and Ephraim.
My branch of Judaism teaches that the former is a Theological division into 12, and the latter, a political one, since the Levites were Temple functionaries, and thus had an odd place in the political realm. I am sure other Jewish groups, and different Christian denoms have their own explanation.
No matter what, this is why you can have 10 lost tribes and have three left over (12-3=9) because the number 10 is based on the Split Joseph count.
Also, the Jewish view is that Simeon fled north after Rehoboam, and Benjamin took his place.
Also, Traditional Judaism has an interesting take that I'm surprised Dr. Henry didn't mention: Jeremiah brought members of the 10 Lost Tribes back to Judah during the reign of Josiah, though the majority of their population stayed "Lost", and thus all 12 tribes exist in Judaism today, but in the Second Temple period, these returned groups were adopted into Judah or Benjamin.

[scripturequest]

There's a good reason why the tribe of Simeon isn't mentioned in Deuteronomy Chapter 33, that being that Jacob cursed Simeon's tribe and said they would be scattered within Israel, because of their violence and cruelty against the men of Shechem. By the book of Numbers, the tribe of Simeon is the smallest to leave Egypt. I think their absence is a sign of the fulfilment of Jacob's curse upon them.

[grapeshot]

The Babylonians apparently did the same thing when they deported the Hebrews to Babylon, they only took the elites and those who had certain skill sets.

[friedemannkemm]

An interesting point is that according to the biblical reports in 2 Kings and especially 2 Chronicles about Hezekiah and Josiah, many Israelites remained back in northern Israel. Thus, the traditional interpretation of 2 Kings 17 would even contradict the Bible itself.

[Gargoiling]

I suppose there is a parallel with the way many countries in the ancient and medieval world claimed some sort of ancestral connection to Troy. It would be interesting to do a comparison between the two and what motivates choosing one over the other over time. It also reminds me of the history of Anglo-Saxon England. The earliest real history of the invasions was written by Bede a couple of centuries after the event. This used to be taken pretty much as fact but is now seen partly in terms of later dynasties justifying their position "why I should be king".

[tnayenga]

The 10 tribes of Israel married into the Assyrian culture as Samaritans while many moved to the Southern part in Judah which was destroyed in 70AD…

[theanonymousmrgrape]

1:40

“A phenomenon totally unparalleled in any other identity.”

I disagree. In fact, I’d argue it’s a very common story across different identities to argue the origins of one’s culture lie in some prestigious foreign land, especially drawing from esteemed works.

Perhaps the most obvious example lies with the endless list of people groups who claimed descent at one time or another from characters in the Iliad, or the Trojans as a people group. In this category, are of course the Romans, but also many later peoples, such as the Franks/French, Germans, Welsh, and even the Icelanders.

[eladjellinek]

Correction: As an orthodox Jewish person I Need to correct some points: In the story about Dvora, the name Gilad is not a name of a tribe.
Gilad is the name of the land along the Jordan River at the eastern side of the river. The inhabitants of the Gilad are 2½ tribes.
Also if you'll read the Bible in Hebrew you'll see that during the Shoftim years, the tribes lived each tribe to its own most of the time and only get together in danger or for holidays.
So when we look at it from this perspective we can understand that the tribe under attack will call the closest tribes and not the tribes who lived couple of days (walking distance) away.

[realmless]

The twelve tribes is a simplified and symbolic representation of the tribal system of Israel, and that is very clear from the text itself. Firstly, the twelve tribes exclude Levi, an extremely important tribe, because they had no secular power. Various lists of the twelve tribes either exclude or include the tribe of Dan, rename Ephraim Joseph, or as in the song of Deborah, combine some of the Transjordan tribes into Gilead. There are also sub-tribes that are discussed such as east and west Manasseh, and then some tribes like Dan live in the wrong place instead of their tribal allotment, and so on. In reality, the tribal system of ancient Israel was more like 15 tribes or more, but they were simplified into the 12 tribes to represent the tribes of Jacob, however these exceptions to the idealized tribal system are almost always recorded in the Bible itself which is where we get most of our ideas of the difference between the idealized and real situation

[hdde]

1:48 Historical Origins of the Legend
8:43 The Samaritans
11:58 Eldad Hadani
12:50 The Book of Mormon
13:20 The Patriarchal Blessing
17:06 Research on Genealogies