February 5, 2023
THE MYSTERY OF THE TWELVE TRIBES
Gospel of Luke 2:36-38:
"There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. "
It is almost an accentuated certainty, that there were Jews settled in the British Islands as early as the Roman legions of Julius Caesar showed up at the immigration office in Britain, that they came to take over the country. Written proof of the presence of Jews can be found only after William’s Norman Conquest, in the year of 1070.
In the next centuries the anti-Semitism in England grew into the extreme with the ongoing crusades aiming to defeat the Arab rule over the Holy Land and Jerusalem. For the crusaders fought to establish their own kingdoms in the Land of Israel, and definitely not for the reestablishment of a Jewish state, of any kind. In this conquest of the Holy Land, the Jews, as the biblical owners were in the way of the crusading armies.
In 1274, Edward I of England, called also Edward Longshanks, right after his return from the crusade and his consequent coronation, enacted the Statute of Jewry, which also included a requirement: “Each Jew, after he is seven years old, shall wear a distinguishing mark on his outer garment, that is to say, in the form of two Tables joined, of yellow felt of the length of six inches and of the breadth of three inches.”
The yellow badge wearing duty of the Jews had been already introduced by Edward’s father, King Henry III in 1218, when he proclaimed the Edict of the Badge, and reinforced it in the Statue of the Badge in 1253. This was also nothing new in medieval Europe, as in almost every country they had similar rulings, boldly supported by the medieval Catholic church. Anti-Semitism grew popular in medieval England, where Jews were murdered by the hundreds in recurring progroms, as it happened notably in York, London, Worcester, Canterbury and many more places.
Nonetheless, it was King Edward I, who returned from his military campaign in France, deep in depth and fury, he wanted to solve his problems by seize the properties and the assets of the Jews, so he issued the royal decree of the Edict of Expulsion in 1290, expelling all the Jews from the Kingdom of England. This ban had been upheld for more then 360 years until Oliver Cromwell lifted the ban in 1657.
The man who played a major role in lifting the ban was a Portuguese Jew, Menahem Ben Israel, a well known teacher of Baruch Spinoza, a rabbi, a kabbalist, a traveler, a great scholar and a diplomat, who settled in Amsterdam fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. In 1644 he met Aharon HaLevi, a Portuguese traveler, who said that he had found a native American tribe in the jungles of Ecuador, which must be one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
This discovery was not quite accurate, we can imagine that, but it gave some fuel to Menasseh's messianistic zeal. With that he began to realize that in protestant England itself, British Israelism was born, believed by wide circles, that the very people of Great Britain are "racially, and linguistically direct descendants" of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel.
Of course it was and it is a wishful claim, but it showed to Menahem, that the sentiments finally changed towards the Jews in the Anglican England and in the Presbyterian Scotland for the better. Invited by the Cromwellian government, Menahem officially called upon the Parliament of England to repeal the almost four hundred years old ban on the Jewish presence in England.
The real life Lost Ten Tribes of Israel were carried into captivity by the Assyrians at the fall of the Northern Kingdom called Israel in 722 BCE. Legends had it that they were resettled on the Land of the Medes in Persia, and eventually they never returned, and nobody really knows what happened to them.
Anna the daughter of Phanuel, according to the Gospel of Luke, belonged to the tribe Asher, which is considered lost together with the tribes of Gad, Dan Manasseh, Ephraim, Yissachar, Naphtali, Zebulon, Simeon, Reuben. It is true that after the fall of Israel in 722 BCE, maybe the majority of the ten tribes fled to Jerusalem, to the southern kingdom, called Judea.
Archaeological findings suggest, that during that time the population of Jerusalem surged around for times. Maybe that was the very reason, how King Hezekiah and prophet Isaiah was able to repel the consequent Assyrian attack now against Jerusalem.
The number of the refugees might have been huge, still, losing their lands, they were not able to maintain their tribal affiliations, as the land was allocated to the tribes and the clans distinctively. They were absorbed by the southern Kingdom, into the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The subsequent Babylonian captivity, where Judah was taken, and only a remnant returned to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple, also helped lose the tribal affiliation.
Thus, when the Gospel mentions, that seven hundred years later, after all of these, Anna was from the tribe of Asher, it is not likely an ethnic description, but a geographical one. The territory of the tribe Asher included Mount Karmel, on the Nord-West at the Lebanon borderland, the legendary place of prophet Elijah, whose prophetic schools and traditions apparently survived several centuries, wars and calamities. Nonetheless, the memory of the Lost Ten Tribes, as an inevitably important part of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, never faded.
The very brother of Jesus, the head of the Jerusalem congregation after Jesus, opens his letter, stating that “ James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greeting.” When Jesus healed the sick of the multitude in the desert, it is written that “when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see: … they glorified the God of Israel.”
In the expanded version it says that this is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the latter was renamed by the Angel of the ladder as Israel, who had twelve sons and the twelve sons emerged as twelve tribes, as Abraham had been promised by God that “I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great. You will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who treats you with contempt. All the families of the earth will be blessed through you.” As Jesus himself said to the Canaanite women that “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
The lost will be gathered again, as Jeremiah wrote that “Hear the word of the Lord, you nations; proclaim it in distant coastlands: ‘He who scattered Israel will gather them and will watch over his flock like a shepherd.”
How?
It is a mystery, hidden by the Lord.
Nonetheless,
the very reason for Jesus, the Shepherd, had chosen twelve Apostles, because they represented the twelve tribes of Israel, just as it is written in the Book of Revelation, that the Angel “showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. ”
May the Lord's Name Be Praised. AMEN
