It might surprise you to learn that there were no people at Mt. Sinai who were called “Jews.” There was a group of people who were of the tribe of Judah, one of the twelve sons of the Patriarch Jacob, but they only account for approximately one-thirteenth of the people who had been led out of captivity in Egypt. They were not called “Jews,” however. They were known as Hebrews.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions today, especially among Christians. There is even a book on the market, recently released, called “The Ancient History of the Jews.” In truth, the book tells the ancient history of the Hebrew people who became known as Israelites.

It tells the story of all the people who were descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and while the history presented is pretty much accurate, the author throughout often calls his subject people “Jews.” They were not all Jews…only a small segment of the Israelite people were Jews.

Not all Israelites are Jews
All Jews are Israelites—but not all Israelites are Jews. The name “Jew” was never used for this segment of the Israelite people until after the Babylonian captivity. At that time it became the designation of the people who had made up the southern kingdom of Judah after the Israelite nation split into the northern and southern kingdoms after the death of Solomon.

The southern kingdom was composed of the tribe of Judah, the tribe of Benjamin, and most of the tribe of Levi. When the Hebrew people entered the Promised Land and the territory was divided among the tribes, the Levites received no land of their own. They were spread throughout all of the tribes to serve as priests.

After the nation split, the Levites were driven out of the northern kingdom, which had taken the name Israel, by the rulers who had set up their own form of worship. Fearing that the people would want to travel to Jerusalem for the Holy Days, Jeroboam, the first king in the newly formed northern kingdom, set up altars and sacred sites within the boundaries of Israel. He feared that if the people traveled to Jerusalem, they would leave him and become reunited with Judah, the southern kingdom, once again.

Not only did he establish two sacred cities, after the manner of Jerusalem, but he offered a golden calf as the people’s God who led them out of Egypt, and changed the times and dates of some of the major Holy Days. The Levitical priesthood objected to what he had done. He answered them by killing some and driving the rest out of the northern kingdom. They went to the southern kingdom where they could practice the worship of God in the way they had been instructed at the foot of Mt. Sinai.

So the only people who can really be called Jews are the people who were living in the southern kingdom of Judah at the time of their capture and captivity in Babylon—the descendants of Judah, the descendants of Benjamin, and most of the descendants of Levi, with a very small remnant of the other ten tribes who had escaped to the southern kingdom when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom.

Yet, today, the average Christian refers to all of the Israelite people as “Jews.” The New International Version edition of the Life Application Bible even speaks of Jews at the foot of Mt. Sinai in its footnoted material. This type of error in modern Bibles only serves to further the misconception among Christians, who often think the footnotes are as sacred as the Word of God and infallible because they are printed in their Bible.

The truth is, there were no people at Mt. Sinai who were known as Jews.

Why is this important?
Much of prophecy is unintelligible if the reader doesn’t understand the distinction between the House of Israel and the House of Judah. Through the voices of the prophets, God speaks to his people and gives significant messages to both groups of people—messages for their own time in history, but also messages for their future and for the end times.

The northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians about 130 years before the southern kingdom was captured and taken to Babylon. When the Assyrians captured the northern kingdom of Israel, they carried all of the people off. They were transported to the northern most area of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians then moved other people that they had conquered in other battles into the land of Israel.

This seems to us like a lot of moving of people around, but it was a common practice of warfare in those days. The Assyrian take-over of Israel happened in three separate campaigns. The Israelites fought back and rose up in rebellion after the first attack which conquered most of the land and people living on the east side of the Jordan River. It was their rebellion that caused the Assyrians to take them captive. The people were transplanted and scattered so they could not gain their strength back and rise up against their conquerors. With each campaign, the Assyrians rolled across the land and eventually captured all of the northern kingdom of Israel.

The people were transported far from their home and were resettled in areas near the Caspian Sea. The invasions happened in waves from 734 to 722 B.C. and with each transport of captives, they were located in a different place from the previous group. When it was complete, the ten tribes who had made up the nation of Israel, were scattered over an area hundreds of times larger than their homeland had been. Any unity they had felt as a nation was suddenly and swiftly dissolved. To all intents and purposes, they ceased to exist on the pages of history.

All that remained in the Promised Land was the tribe of Judah, the tribe of Benjamin, and most of the tribe of Levi. There were people from the northern ten tribes who had escaped and fled before the Assyrian onslaught. There is some belief that a few did and were able to make it to Judah. But their numbers were few and over time they became assimilated into the southern kingdom, later to become known as “Jews” also. They do not, however, represent the lost ten tribes.

The rise of the Jews
The southern kingdom was captured and led into captivity by the Babylonians between 604-587 B.C. The southern kingdom was never completely destroyed as the northern kingdom had been. A remnant of the people of Judah was left behind to maintain the homeland. Those who were taken captive were only held for 70 years and then set free to return to Jerusalem and the land of Judah—however, it was a Judah under the control of first Persia and later other nations. These are the people who have become known as the “Jews.” Their history from that point forward is well documented down through the pages of history. But they do not represent all of the Hebrew (Israelite) people who descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The promises that God made to Abraham in Genesis, then made to Isaac and Jacob in their time, were to all of Abraham’s descendants, not just the few that we can identify today—the Jews.

So what happened to the ten tribes of the northern kingdom—the people who have become known as the “Lost Ten Tribes.”

They were not all killed. They were all transported to new lands and continued to live on, to marry and multiply and thrive. Being captured and losing the Promised Land was their punishment for breaking their covenant with God, but they were not killed. They were not wiped off the face of the earth.

Over time they lost the knowledge of who they were. Their heritage became lost to them as they assimilated into the peoples in the areas where they lived. They, along with other peoples of different descent, migrated to other parts of the world. The area in which they had been transplanted had been grassy plains when they first arrived. At a later date, long after they had lost the knowledge of their heritage, drought and adverse weather conditions changed the area around the Caspian Sea and they were forced to move out and find other lands.

This information of Israel’s migration is not spelled out in the Bible. One has to turn to anthropology and the history books to get an understanding of what happened to the northern ten tribes and where they might be today.

Hebrew heritage could
be claimed by many
There are some really good books available that detail the research of scholars who have dug deeply into the whereabouts of the lost ten tribes (see list below). The purpose of this article is not to identify them or go into the migration of these people.

Suffice it to say that any one of us today reading this article could be a descendant of one of the lost ten tribes. They lost the knowledge of who they were, but you can be sure that God did not. He knows who is a descendant of Israel and who is a Gentile.

After Christ’s death, the promises that were made to Abraham and his descendants was extended to include the Gentiles. So the promises are yours regardless of whether you can trace your lineage to Abraham or not.

The purpose in this article is to begin combating the prevalent anti-Semitism that most Christians have, whether they know it or not. Many of the practices of the organized Christian Church grew out of the strong anti-Semitism among the early church fathers. Several of the doctrines that Christians take for granted today were instituted between 150-400 A.D. because the church fathers wanted to move as far away from Judaism as possible.

The Sabbath was changed from the seventh day to the first day of the week. All of God’s Holy Days were replaced with pagan celebrations and even the fact of Jesus’ Jewishness was downplayed. They couldn’t change the fact of it, so it was just ignored and buried under teachings of how he disagreed with the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

Have you ever talked with a new Christian and noted their wonder and surprise when they first learn that Jesus was Jewish? Have you ever heard the statement, “But I thought he was a Christian?”

Sometimes the response is not that simple, but you get the idea.

Surprise! Jesus was not a Christian—not even at his death. He was completely Jewish and kept all of the Laws of God as given in the Torah (the law given at Mt. Sinai—the covenant agreement the Hebrew people made with their God). All of the changes that have taken place that make Christianity such a departure from Judaism happened 100 to 400 years after Jesus’ death. None of them were instituted or established by Jesus. The New Covenant that Jesus' established was based on the Old Covenant. All of the Old Covenant was still in place. The only differences were that Jesus' sacrifice was once and for all time thus negating the need for any further animal sacrifice, and from that point forward God would write his laws and statutes on people's hearts and in their minds instead of them carrying them as physically written little scrolls on their foreheads or wrists.

Let’s remove the blinders
Today, most Christians are under the belief that the Jews represent all of the people written about in the Old Testament. When the subject of the Lost Ten Tribes comes up, it is ignored and treated as if it were just a myth. Some believe that the ten tribes all wandered back to Palestine and became Jews at some point.

Underlying anti-Semitism, whether knowingly or not, prevents them from accepting the remote possibility that they themselves might carry a drop of Hebrew blood in their own veins.

God punished his people—the descendants of Jacob—because they broke the covenant they had made with him at Mt. Sinai. He punished them through the other nations by allowing them to be conquered and losing the Promised Land. But he never allowed them to be killed and he never forsook them. Much of prophecy talks about how he will gather them all back one day.

When he says ALL he is not just talking about the Jews. He is also talking about the lost ten tribes…those who do not know who they are.

It could be you. When you see an orthodox Jew in his tassels, skullcap, and long hair and beard, rather than passing judgment on him, you might want to stop for a minute and think about what you are doing. He could very easily be your blood brother.

Research has tied
Anglo-Saxons to Israel
Following are some of the books that advocate the British-Israelism idea:

John Wilson, Anglican layman from Cheltenham, England, published Our Israelitish Origin in 1840. This work was the first full-blown thesis connecting the Anglo-Saxons to ancient Israel. Wilson drew on the best of contemporary scholarship and methodology of his time. He made particular use of the work of Sharon Turner (1768-1847), a monumental figure in British historiography whose multivolume work, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, traces the Anglo-Saxons back through Europe to the Balkan countries and ultimately to the Crimea and Caucasus Mountains, the very area where it is believed the Assyrians transplanted the northern kingdom.

Edward Hine, a banker and successor of Wilson, wrote Forty-Seven Identifications of the British Nation With Lost Israel (1871). He claimed to have addressed five million people on this topic during his lecture-circuit career.

John Harden Allen, Methodist Minister from the U.S. Pacific Northwest, wrote Judah’s Scepter and Joseph’s Birthright (1917).

Herbert Armstrong (1892-1986), founder and chancellor of Ambassador University, wrote The United States and British Commonwealth in Prophecy, published in several editions until 1986.

Steven Collins wrote The “Lost” Ten Tribes of Israel…Found! (1992).

Yair Davidy authored The Tribes: The Israelite Origins of Western Peoples (1993), Ephraim (1995), and Lost Israelite Identity (1996).

A new book by William Dankenbring of Triumph Prophetic Ministries is due out this year that identifies more clearly who the United States is in prophecy.

The earlier writers have identified the tribe of Ephraim as the British Commonwealth and the tribe of Manasseh as the United States of America. Following the work of Dankenbring, he makes a very convincing argument that the opposite is really the truth. The U.S.A. is more likely the present-day nation portrayed in the Bible as Ephraim.

Those who say that the two greatest nations on the earth are not mentioned in the Bible are completely wrong. It is lack of understanding of what happened to the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel that causes them to make this assertion.

Much of prophecy refers to Ephraim and Manasseh, prophecies that were written long after both tribes had been taken into captivity by the Assyrians, and prophecies that are referring to the end times. These prophecies make no sense if we believe that all of the Israelite people are today’s Jews or if we believe that God has remained completely silent about the British Commonwealth and the United States when most of the other nations of the world are mentioned in the Bible.