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Transcript 035B — Are Americans and Britons Descendants of Israel?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: I just wanted to say in response to the last caller. I kind of had a head knowledge of God, and I didn't really have a personal experience with Him until He brought sickness into my life. At the time I didn't know what was happening until after it was all over. But I found out that it brought me closer to Him. So He does work that way.
HC: He really does.
CALLER: It might be kind of frightening at first, but after awhile you look back on it, and it's pretty wonderful.
My question tonight is about the old theory that Americans and the British are descendants of the Israelites.
HC: There's not a figment of truth in it.
CALLER: But where does that idea come from?
HC: I have no idea. I have no idea where any man gets any idea. You know, our minds are as prolific in our imagination as you want to name. With our minds we can go to the moon, we can go to the stars, we can dream up all kinds of things. And if we dwell on an idea long enough, pretty soon we begin to believe it. And if someone else has had the idea before, and they wrote about it, then we're more convinced than ever that it may be true.
Ideas ultimately come out of our minds, of course. But there isn't the slightest possibility that this is true. This would be absolutely and totally foreign to the Bible.
CALLER: Have they ever traced the descendants of the tribes of Israel? Where did they disperse to?
HC: Well, yes. The Bible indicates that up until the year 722 BC we have the nation of Israel as it existed in the land of Palestine. It was about two million strong approximately, two to three million. And it consisted of two nations, the nation of Judah to the south, and the nation of Israel, comprised of the ten tribes, to the north.
In 722 BC the Assyrians came and destroyed the northern kingdom of the ten tribes. Now some they took captive into Babylon, some they left there to till the fields, and so on. And they also imported Assyrians to live there. And these became a mixed race, called the Samaritans. They still existed at the time that Jesus came.
And some left the northern area and came into the land of Judah and became part of the two tribes. So you have remnants of all the twelve tribes with the two tribes. And so that then became Israel, from the year 722 BC until 587 BC.
Then in that year, that nation, the nation of Israel as it was not constituted, predominantly of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin with a smattering or remnant from the other ten tribes, was destroyed by the Babylonians. And some were taken captive into Babylon. Many of course were killed. And again, some were left as the poor of the land, right in the land of Palestine.
Then, beginning in 539 BC under Cyrus the Mede, and later on in 458 BC under the reign of Artaxerxes, the king of the Medes and the Persians, some of the Jews from any of the twelve tribes went back into the land of Palestine. And gradually, from this, the nation of Israel was rebuilt until it existed as the nation of Israel as it was in Jesus' day. At that time, of course, they had drifted under the heel of the Roman Empire.
Then in 70 AD the Jewish nation was destroyed by the Roman Empire. The fact is, in Jerusalem itself, according to the secular historians, something like more than a million Jews were killed. And so the nation was pretty well annihilated. And the balance were just dispersed into the nations. So they have continued to exist until the very present day, except for those who returned to Israel beginning in 1948.
Now the Europeans, and of course most Americans, because most of them come from Europe – either from England or Holland or Hungary or Spain, etc. – probably have their genealogical line completely separate all the way back to Noah. The Bible speaks of Noah, back in the year 4990 BC, that he had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now we know the Jewish nation comes from Shem. We know that the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Canaanites, the Egyptians and the people of Africa come from Ham. But the coastland peoples were the descendants of Japheth. And in all probability most of the Europeans came from Japheth.
And so the probability of England or Americans or Europeans being related to the twelve tribes, or the ten so called lost tribes (they're not really lost, because this is a figure of speech that people use, not knowing what the Bible declares) is just about nil.
CALLER: So they're not really lost.
HC: No. They've just been integrated into the nation of Israel and severely decimated by the judgments that God has brought against them.
CALLER: I think also that some people that the word Britain in Hebrew means "Son of the Covenant," or something like that.
HC: Well, I wouldn't pay any attention to that because it's not biblical.
CALLER: I have a friend who just got into that, and he's been telling me a lot about it. And I'm not that much of a Bible scholar, but I can tell that a lot of it's groundless. Did you not write something about this?
HC: No. I never am interested in writing about other religions or cults or gospels. I have written a couple of books on the Bible itself. But I just feel that it's not our job to go through life lambasting others. It's our job to positively offer what the Gospel declares, and let God bring the conviction in the heart.