The 10 Lost Tribes of Israel – Part 1

The 10 Lost Tribes of Israel

Part 1

The events of the past few years, culminating with the devastating October 7, 2023 raid and hostage taking by Gaza upon Israel, Israel’s subsequent furious retaliation, and then Iran shocking the globe by initiating a game-changing missile and drone attack upon Israel that came from within Iranian territory, tells us that we need to pay much more attention to End Times prophecies that seem to be materializing at break-neck speed. Since these prophecies all revolve around Israel, and around the return of the Israelites from all over the world to their ancient homeland, then it is necessary to explore this return in depth. This immediately leads us to beyond the return of the millions of Jews from Europe and from behind the former Iron Curtain countries that most of us are familiar with, and into the realm of other members of Israel that were scattered long before the Jews were sent off into exile to Babylon. These “other Israelites” are regularly called The 10 Lost Tribes of Israel.

The lost tribes of Israel: are they myth or fact? Is there actually such a thing as the lost tribes of Israel, or is it simply a good name for the next Indiana Jones movie? If it is fact and not fiction, WHY are these tribes said to be “lost”? And, if they are lost, WHEN did they get lost? WHAT caused them to disappear from view? Or have they perhaps been hiding in plain sight and nobody’s noticed? Might they exist today in some other form or by another name? Or is it all just a fascinating but otherwise irrelevant footnote in ancient history? And, perhaps most important, does this have anything at all to do with us? That’s what we’re about to explore and it is going to take several lessons to accomplish it.

Beginning today I will show you biblical, historical, and archaeological findings, along with current events concerning these mysterious so-called lost tribes of Israel. We’ll examine a lot of Scripture, so have your Bibles handy. In order to unlock this mystery, we need to begin our investigation by turning back the clock by about 4,000 years. There are no shortcuts; many pieces of a complex puzzle have to be laid out before us in order to get to where we want to go. We’ll spend a good portion of today reviewing the ancient history of Israel to give us a firm foundation for our exploration. This is going to also pull together what is called the Kingdom Books: 1st and 2nd Samuel, and 1st and 2nd Kings, to get us well prepared to study Daniel, then Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah.

It’s around 2000 B.C., probably some 7 or 8 centuries after the Great Flood has drowned the entire earth’s population except for a righteous man named Noah and his immediate family. After the earth was repopulated by these survivors, and probably around 350 – 400 years after the infamous Tower of Babel incident led by Nimrod, God selected out a man named Abraham from among the large and wide-ranging Mesopotamian tribe of the Amorites to begin a new race of people that God would a long-time later call, “His precious treasure”. An ordinary man would be the father of an ordinary people who were created for an extra-ordinary purpose; to be set-apart as the main players in a scheme to redeem mankind from a fate of eternal destruction. These set-apart people are first identified by the title of Hebrews.

The Bible calls Abraham the first Hebrew. The word Hebrew comes from an ancient West Semitic word Ipuru, which loosely means “one who crossed over”. Abraham was born in an area of Mesopotamia called Ur of the Chaldees (located in modern day Iraq), and was 75 years old when God called him into service. Since there was no such thing as a Hebrew when he was born, Abraham didn’t became a Hebrew until after he accepted God’s command to leave his father and brother and to travel to a land that God would show him. That land was several hundred miles to the south of Abrahams home, and in his day it was called Canaan. God told Abraham that if he would trust Him, Abraham would bring forth innumerable descendants, that out of him would come many nations PLUS a great and special nation; and that from Abraham’s seed would all the families of the earth be blessed. Even more, God would give the land of Canaan to a certain group of Abraham’s descendants as their possession, forever. Abraham could never have imagined the magnitude or the final result or the many wars that would proceed from what was promised to him.

The Bible refers a number of ways to those promises that God made to Abraham that day: most often they’re spoken of as the Abrahamic Covenant, or THE covenant, or the covenant of promise, or just the promise. Abraham had no idea how long it was going to take for the list of promises that God had made to him to come about; but he must have sensed that not all of them would come to pass in his lifetime. So, an heir to this covenant was needed; Abraham needed a son to follow him after his death, to carry on the line of people, the Hebrews, who would receive all the blessings, and carry out all the duties, of these covenant promises. That heir would be his son Isaac.

Abraham had a number of sons and daughters, but only the one …Isaac … specifically selected by God, was to be the one honored to become the leader of the next generation of Hebrews. None of Isaac’s brothers and sisters was even counted as Hebrews, only Isaac. Thus, we immediately understand that the only difference between a Hebrew and all other humans is that God elected the Hebrews and declared them to be set-apart from the rest of the human species for special service to Him. So, the issue is not race but rather service.

The covenant God had given to Abraham was transferred to his son, Isaac, upon Abraham’s death. Isaac matured, married, and fathered twin sons, Jacob and Esau. Just as Isaac had been selected and elected by God to be the leader of the Hebrews, so it would be for Jacob. Jacob would be counted as Hebrew, a member of the line of covenant promise, but interestingly his twin brother Esau would not. Upon Isaac’s death the covenant originally given to Abraham, then put into his son Isaac’s hands, was transferred to Abraham’s grandson Jacob. These 3 men (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) will later be known in the Bible as The Patriarchs.

Some years later, after Jacob married and produced several children of his own, he had a most unusual encounter with God. The Bible says it was with the Angel of Yehoveh… a manifestation of God… that he did battle. Yehoveh (more popularly known as Yahweh) is God’s personal name that has been Latin-ized and then later English-ized to “Jehovah”.

By means of what the Bible describes as an all-night wrestling match, God would test Jacob; and at the end of that testing anoint him to be the one who would bring about that set-apart nation of people that had been promised to Abraham, thus fulfilling ONE of the series of promises that God had given to Jacob’s grandfather so many years earlier. And, (vital to our purposes) God also did something else: he gave Jacob a special title, Israel. Israel is thought to mean, “God strives”. From this point forward in the Bible we will see the terms Jacob and Israel used interchangeably, for they refer to the same person, and they will even be used to refer to the same country.

Jacob’s 2 wives, plus his 2 concubines, produced for him a substantial family with a total of 12 sons. We know there was some number of daughters produced as well, as we’re told of one named Dinah, but without doubt there were others. Jacob’s 12 sons are called the 12 tribes of Israel. Jacob was the first man to father exclusively Hebrew children; that is, NONE of the children Jacob produced would be counted as gentiles; all would be considered Hebrews without exception (again, a first). Let’s back up for a second to understand that last statement a little better. Abraham fathered Isaac (the only one who would be designated as Hebrew), plus several gentile children. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was the key. She produced only one child for Abraham (and that from an old dead womb); Isaac. Thus, we see that even though all of Abraham’s children were essentially the same race/ethnicity (in that Abraham was their actual, biological, father) it was Yehoveh who DECLARED that Isaac was to be considered distinct from his brothers and sisters; so, this was far more of a spiritual than a physical distinction (although since this was the only children produced by Sarah, there was a biological distinction as well). Isaac was declared to be a Hebrew, the rest of Abrahams children were thus gentiles just as were the rest of the world’s growing population.

Later, Isaac fathered Jacob and his twin brother Esau, plus some other children as well. Jacob, like his father Isaac, was DECLARED by God to be set apart from his siblings as the inheritor of the covenants first given to Abraham; Jacob, like his father Isaac, was DECLARED to be a Hebrew. Genetically Jacob was not substantially different than any of his brothers and sisters, for they all had the same father, Isaac, and same grandfather, Abraham. Jacob and Esau, as twins, obviously shared the same mother; they even shared the same womb so that the ONLY distinction between them was a spiritual one.

This pattern of God DECLARING one son from the line of Abraham as a Hebrew, and by default Abraham’s other children as gentiles, changed significantly once Jacob produced offspring. Jacob fathered ONLY Hebrew children…no gentiles; every one of the 12 tribes of Israel were Hebrews. From this moment forward a child born of Hebrew parents was automatically a Hebrew; no longer would some be declared Hebrew and others not. I cannot tell you why God decided that it was Jacob that would be the direct father of all future Hebrews, and that Jacob would not contribute any children to the gentile world as his father and grandfather had done. But I can tell you that from this point forward, ALL who came from the line of Jacob were to be counted as Hebrews without exception. And, those Hebrews who came from Jacob’s line later came to be called Israelites. Why Israelites? Because Jacob’s alternative and unique name is Israel; so, all Hebrews beginning with Jacob’s children and right through until the present are BOTH Hebrews AND Israelites.

Further the prophets of God declared that out of this nation of Israelites would come the seed (the offspring, the family line) that would eventually produce the Anointed One, the Messiah, who God would establish to crush the head of the serpent, Satan. But only one of the 12 Hebrew tribes would be honored with producing this special seed: the tribe of Judah.

The 12 sons or tribes of Jacob, Israel, all of them Hebrews, were born in this order:

Rueben was the first born. Then Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Ashur, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and finally, Benjamin.

Joseph, the 11th born, was Israel’s favorite son, primarily because Rachel, Joseph’s mother, was Israel’s favorite wife. Jacob (Israel) had two wives who were sisters (in fact they were his 1st cousins because the girls’ father, Laban, was Jacob’s uncle. In addition to his 2 wives Jacob also acquired 2 concubines. The blatant favoritism shown to Joseph by his father Jacob was so humiliating, and it created so much shame, that it led to a searing hatred and jealousy of Joseph by his 10 older brothers. One time, when Joseph went to gather a report about his brothers’ activities at the request of his father, they turned on him, threw him into any empty water cistern and then sold him to a passing caravan of Arab slave traders. Joseph was taken to Egypt by these traders of human flesh, and there re-sold to the Pharaoh’s most trusted advisor, a man named Potifar.

The 10 brothers needed to devise a cover up for Joseph’s mysterious disappearance so they took a special tunic that Joseph had been given by his father, sprinkled animal blood all over it, and presented it to their father who naturally believed exactly what the brothers had hoped he would: that Joseph had been killed and devoured by a wild beast. Jacob was devastated.

Time passes. Down in Egypt, through a series of God-orchestrated events, Joseph finds himself in the employ of the Pharaoh, for the purpose of interpreting a dream that troubled the great king of Egypt. Joseph rightly discerns that the dream is a warning of an impending famine that will arrive 7 years into the future, and then will last for an equal number of years. Pharaoh, who believed Joseph, instantly realized that he needed a plan to save his nation from starvation, and decided that there was no one in all of Egypt more capable than the very one who had interpreted his dream. So, Joseph found himself as the Vizier, the most powerful ruler in Egypt, with only Pharaoh himself above Joseph. Joseph set about to stockpile grain to prepare for the coming catastrophe.

As the 7 years of plenty and planning ended, the famine began. It’s not a localized condition: much of the known world is affected. Back up in the land of Canaan, Jacob and his clan are enduring the same famine. Running short of food, Israel hears that Egypt, a long way to the south, has stockpiled grain and might be willing to sell some. Israel sends his 10 eldest sons to try and buy grain from the ruler of Egypt… having no idea that that ruler was none less than the son, Joseph, whose loss he had never overcome.

These 10 sons of Israel go to Egypt and find themselves standing before the ruler of Egypt to ask for grain. They were unaware that this man who wielded such great power was their very own brother, now much older, highly Egyptian-ized in appearance, and as such unrecognizable to them. After Joseph put his brothers through some trials and testing, he finally reveals himself to them, and asks if his father Jacob is still living. When they answer yes, he tells them to go back to Canaan, and to move the entire clan… father, 11 brothers, some daughters, wives, and grandchildren…everyone… to Egypt so Joseph can care for them through this famine.

Jacob agrees to come, knowing that he will never again see Canaan. Nor will the 12 sons of Israel ever again graze their flocks in the lush pastureland of Canaan because they will now be in Egypt for the next 400 years as God told Abraham would be the case. Jacob knew of this prophesy well so, it must have been a bittersweet day that he left Canaan with his family knowing that sometime in the future they would become oppressed slaves. Yet, somehow, the oppression would be but part of a larger plan of greater blessing for the 12 tribes. Israel would at first be honored guests of the Egyptian ruler; later they would become full citizens of Egypt; but eventually they would be reduced to slave labor for Egypt’s Pharaohs and their ambitious building plans.

In the Nile delta region of Egypt, in a large region called Goshen, the 12 tribes of Israel who we are told numbered only 70 when they first arrived, settled into an easier lifestyle than they had ever known. Over time Israel would grow into the enormous nation that God told Abraham it would.

It’s time that we pause and examine some Scripture. Open your Bibles to Genesis 48:1-20. Here we’ll examine a key event that took place in Egypt, and is of far more significance than meets the eye.

READ GENESIS 48:1-20

Some years after Israel’s arrival in Egypt, we have this watershed event occur; an event that I call Jacob’s Cross-Handed Blessing. It is an important piece to the puzzle of these so-called “lost tribes” of Israel, and interestingly, the prophesy contained in Jacobs Cross-Handed Blessing has, for the most part, escaped the attention of Christian scholars. That is at least partly due to the enormously long time between the pronouncement of the prophecy and its fulfillment.

As concerns prophecy I think it would be fair to say that the unveiling of ALL Biblical prophecy entered a state of suspended animation for almost 1900 years beginning in 70 A.D., upon the sacking of Jerusalem by Rome. It continued in dormancy until a mere 75 years ago when Israel was reborn as a nation. Let me say that again so that you can begin to understand the amazingly privileged age in which we all live: absolutely NO significant or even discernable prophetic fulfillment occurred from 70 A.D. until 1948. But shortly after WWII the prophetic dominoes suddenly starting tumbling again, and at a breathtaking rate I might add. There are many revelations that had been bound up in the Word of God for centuries but now these things are being revealed to us…some within only the last few years; one quite recent that has gone utterly unnoticed… and I am confident that even more will burst forth in the months and years just ahead of us. I only hope we are prepared to have the eyes to see and ears to hear so we can recognize them for what they are, and get prepared for what it portends.

Because of the nature of our subject, it will necessarily involve some amount of speculation on my part because I’m going to be dealing with unfulfilled or only partially fulfilled prophecies. So, I ask this of you in advance: be open minded, BUT go to God about everything I’m going to tell you. Harbor a healthy skepticism; yet don’t be afraid to recognize a new revelation if it is scripturally sound and the Holy Spirit confirms it in you. Just as important don’t hang on to some tired and agenda driven doctrines coming from either traditional Judaism or Constantinian Christianity, which have always been of dubious value… nor should you throw out the baby with the bathwater; because, brothers and sisters in Yeshua, we are in an age of prophecy fulfillment and revelation. But also understand that when it comes to discussing unfulfilled prophesy there is ALWAYS speculation and opinion involved. So, we need to be oh-so-careful not to be so rigid in our views of exactly how these so-called End Times prophecies will play out such that when they happen we inadvertently miss them because of some false mental picture a Bible teacher or a novelist or a Pastor has created for us. 2000 years ago, the Jewish religious authority did essentially that in their estimation of just how the coming of their Messiah would play out and it turned out that despite the best efforts of their brightest scholars and the religious elite they were wrong. The result was, and remains, that the majority of the Jewish community rejected what God did, refused to re-examine their ancient prophecies to ascertain if what Yeshua claimed fell in line with those writings, and instead they have continued looking for another who better fit their own stubborn preconceived notions of which they were, and are, so very confident.

With the aforementioned caveat in mind, here’s the short version of what actually took place in Genesis 48. Jacob legally adopted Joseph’s two Egyptian-born children, Ephraim and Manasseh, away from Joseph. These children were by tradition Egyptians, as their mother (Joseph’s wife) was an Egyptian, and Joseph was now (nationally speaking) an Egyptian despite being a Semite.

Jacob (these two boys’ grandfather) has announced that he has made himself the official father of Ephraim and Manasseh. However, Joseph can retain all future sons born to him. But, Ephraim and Manasseh now belong to Jacob. The effect of this is that these two children are now on par with Jacob’s 12 sons. By means of this Cross-Handed Blessing these two young boys’ 11 uncles have just become their 11 brothers. It would in no way be incorrect to say that as of the moment of this adoption and prophetic blessing ceremony there was for a time 14 tribes of Israel (the 12 sons of Jacob plus his 2 adopted sons, Ephraim and Mannaseh). What a strange thing occurred here… and we’re given no real explanation for it…at least not outwardly or immediately. Joseph must have walked away from this meeting with his father completely stunned. He walked into this meeting with 2 male heirs and walked out with none. I wonder how he might have broken this news to his Egyptian wife?

The result of this rather strange story of Jacob’s Cross-Handed blessing and the inexplicable and drastic action of Jacob has been that we, the Body of Christ, have sort of mentally skipped over these verses because they don’t seem to have much present or future application but rather must only be unconnected remnants of some ancient custom. Yet there is one hidden but significant clue given to us that is only uncovered if we look at those particular verses in their original Hebrew. Verse 19 ends with “… and he (Ephraim) will grow into many nations”. Different Bible versions put those final 4 or 5 words in slightly different ways, but they all say essentially the same thing.

We’re going to spend some significant time getting rather technical, and slicing the proverbial onion pretty thin. This is necessary if we’re going to get the needed foundation to put together the ancient puzzle of the lost tribes of Israel. I think you’ll find that what you learn over the next few minutes will also help you in your Bible study in general; so, hang in there with me.

What is commonly translated into English in Genesis 48:19 as “will grow into many nations”, is actually in Hebrew melo ha goyim. After you hear what it means in its most literal sense you will understand why it was reasonable for the translators to come up with “grow into many nations”. Literally Gen.48:19 says that Ephraim will become a fullness of the gentiles. More in context Joseph’s son (now Jacob’s son) Ephraim is prophesied to someday become a fullness of gentile nations. Until very recently that really didn’t make a lot of sense, nor did it catch very many people’s attention.

“Fullness of the gentile nations” is a somewhat strange phrase to our ears. What does that mean? Let’s examine those words beginning first with my insertion of the word “gentile”, which essentially modifies the word “nations”. That is, I modify the word “nations” to explain that it means only “GENTILE nations”.

Gentile is “goyim”… or more accurately “goy”… in Hebrew; and from a biblical standpoint it simply means, “not Hebrew”. That is, when God declared Abraham to be a “Hebrew”, He in essence divided the entire world’s population into two distinct and separate people groups: Hebrews and everybody else. The “everybody else” is who we call gentiles (most of the people in this room and who are listening in). Of course, prior to Abraham, who was the FIRST Hebrew, the term gentile (non-Hebrew) would have had no meaning in this sense…because the entire world was only one, generic kind of people in God’s eyes.

Let’s take that one more step. When the Bible refers to events and conditions of the world before the time that Abraham was declared a Hebrew (the first of a new people group created by God to fulfill a specific divine purpose), the term goyim was certainly used but it had a little different meaning; it indeed meant nations, people groups, as in nations-at-large; your nation, my nation, any old nation in general. However, when the Lord initiated this division of mankind by selecting out His chosen people (who were called Hebrews) suddenly there were TWO kinds of people on our planet. Thus, if a nation is not a Hebrew nation, it is by definition a gentile nation; gentile nations, gentile people groups…goyim. The point is that AFTER the time of Abraham, less than halfway through the Book of Genesis, we need to recognize that when the Bible uses the term goyim it is no longer referring to all nations in general, but ONLY to gentile nations.

Over time the meanings of words in any and every language transform, often simply reflecting a changing society and changing realities. Our modern dictionaries undergo constant revision; usually as much by the addition of new words as with new meanings for existing words; and so, it operated that same way long ago, as well. By the time of Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, the word “goyim” had evolved from meaning “nations-at-large”, to meaning “all nations that are NOT Hebrew nations”, but then it even became a little more specific…it came to mean “not Israelite” because all Hebrews (a race of people) eventually became members of a recognized national entity called Israel. But then the term goyim evolved even further.

Since the return of the remnant of Israel from Babylon, 500 years before the birth of Christ, the term goyim came to mean “not Jewish”; and it means “not-Jewish” to this day. Why “not Jewish” instead of “not Israelite” or “not Hebrew”? Because the Jews are today typically considered as the sole remaining remnant of the entire original Israelite people. That is, the Jews are seen as the representative modern-day survivors of the ancient 12 tribes of Israel. Right now, this may seem like a splitting of hairs that only a Bible academic could love; but it is not. The difference between the terms Jewish and Israelite is critical. I’ll explain that in more detail somewhat later in the lesson. So let me sum this up by saying that when studying Scripture, it is beginning with Genesis 13 that the meaning of goyim makes its first significant shift; in Genesis chapters 1–12 goyim means “any and all nations without distinction” and from Genesis 13 forward it means “all nations that are NOT-Hebrew nations”. And the ONLY Hebrew nation ever to exist was and is Israel.

After 400 years in Egypt, the 12 tribes of Israel had multiplied to around 2-3 million people. But that multitude was now serving Egypt as slave labor; it was time for God to keep another of His promises to Abraham… Yehoveh would bring His specially created nation, Israel, out from Egypt and put them back into Canaan, the land God had prepared to give to them as a permanent possession. This is the event we commonly call The Exodus; in reality, it is only the FIRST of what will be 3 Exoduses of Israelites that will occur over the centuries. But as slaves of the Egyptians, the Israelites were hardly free to leave Egypt on their own accord just because God said it was time to go.

God sent the Hebrew Moses to fetch His people out of Egypt, and to lead them to the promised land of Canaan. It took a series of terrible and devastating plagues and judgments upon Egypt to convince Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. But the catastrophes are sufficient that Pharaoh relents; then Moses leads the 12 Tribes of Israel on a difficult and dangerous journey across the Sinai, onto the Arabian Peninsula, and then towards the relatively undefined border of southern Canaan.

Permit me to take just a moment to point out what was their likely route to the promised land. Recognize, please, that the Mt. Sinai located on the tip of the Sinai Peninsula is a least likely place for Moses to have led the Israelites. First, He would have had them heading for miles in the opposite direction of Canaan. Second, there is simply nowhere for 2 or 3 million Israelites to camp near the base of the traditional Mt. Sinai. Third, the Sinai was Egyptian territory, so to imagine that somehow they would be safe there isn’t plausible. Fourth, the Mt. Sinai we know of today was not designated as that holy place until the Roman Emperor Constantine’s mother…Katherine…had a vision about it in the 4th century A.D. She sent a couple of monks to Sinai; they saw something that loosely resembled the biblical description of the holy mountain…and presto! We have a new holy site. Today, St. Katherine’s monastery is built upon this place, and millions of Christian pilgrims have been taken there ever since, supposedly to see where Moses received the 10 Commandments. As I said earlier, not likely and not supported by Biblical, historical or archaeological evidence.

A much more likely place for the location of the Holy Mountain is in Arabia; and a finger of the Red Sea…which had to be crossed to get there… divides the Sinai and Arabian Peninsulas. The finger of the Red Sea that they may have crossed over is today called the Gulf of Aqaba. Prominent Jewish historians from the Apostle Paul’s day, Josephus and Philo, say outright that Mt. Sinai in on the Arabian Peninsula. Further, Paul makes reference to “Mt. Sinai in Arabia” in Galatians chapter 4 when he employs it as an allegorical comment. Even more there is much physical evidence of the Israelites’ presence at a place in Arabia today called Jabel el’lawz. The Arabian locals call the mountain, the Mountain of Moses.

After their escape from Egypt, as the Israelites approached Canaan, they sent out 12 scouts to reconnoiter the land and 10 of them came back fearful saying that the Canaanites would be nearly impossible to defeat; so, the Israelite people panicked and balked at moving forward. God punishes Israel’s lack of faith and their rebellion by sending them back into the desert wilderness of Arabia and the Sinai for 38 more years.

Finally at the appointed time, when the 1st generation of the Exodus who refused to enter Canaan had died off, God tells Moses to ready the new generation to enter into the Promised Land. Moses leads them only part way, dies, and Joshua takes over leadership. Israel crossed the Jordon River from the east, and started taking over the land of Canaan as God had instructed them to do. But, just before they crossed over the Jordan River and into Canaan, and only days prior to Moses’ death, each of the tribes of Israel was allotted a prescribed territory within Canaan for their own.

Interestingly we find that some of the tribes did NOT want to go into the promised land of Canaan. Rather they were satisfied with where they were, on the east side of the Jordan River. Two tribes, Rueben and Gad, decided NOT to enter Canaan at all, but instead to make their homes permanently on the east side of the Jordon River. A third tribe…one of the largest ones…couldn’t come to agreement among themselves whether to enter the promised land, or to join Rueben and Gad and stay on the east side of the Jordan. The result was that about ½ of the clans that made up the tribe of Manasseh stayed on the east side, and the other half went on into to Canaan. Even though the tribe split along clan lines, they still considered themselves members of one unified tribe: Manasseh. The 9 remaining tribes, plus ½ of the tribe of Manasseh, took their land inheritance inside Canaan, the land that the Lord had promised Abraham almost 600 years earlier.

We’ll pause here for today and continue our study into the origin and future of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel.