Part of Ten Lost Tribes Located

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Part of the so-called lost tribes of Israel appear to have been located.

In 721 B.C., the northern Kingdom of Israel, composed of ten of the ancient Israelite tribes descended from the sons of Jacob, was conquered and destroyed by Assyria.

The Assyrians were among the cruelest people ever to walk across the stage of history. Contemporaneous Assyrian reliefs have been found in which prisoners of the Assyrians are led through the street like dogs, with ropes attached to rings inserted in the septum of the nose. In other reliefs, parading Assyrians hold Hebrew prisoners aloft, impaled on Assyrian spears. In accordance with their usual practice, the Assyrians deported much of the upper classes of Israel and settled other peoples in their place. Those who remained intermarried with the newcomers, and out of this amalgamation came the Samaritans. Those who were deported were never heard from again. To history, the tribes who made up the northern Kingdom of Israel are known as the ten lost tribes.

However, according to a recent study by Dr. Magen Broshi, an archaeologist at the Israel Museum, many Israelites fled south into the neighboring Kingdom of Judah in order to escape the Assyrian onslaught. There they melded with their Hebrew brethren and retained their Hebrew identity.

While all of the evidence has not yet been analyzed, it is becoming increasingly clear that Jerusalem underwent a major expansion during the eighth century B.C. Until that time, Jerusalem was confined to the ridge east of the narrow, central valley of the city, known as the Tyropoean Valley. Then, during the eighth century, the city exploded across the valley to the western ridge. By the end of the eighth century, the archaeological evidence indicates, the city had expanded to three or four times its former size.

Most of the evidence of this expansion comes from Israeli excavations in the city since 1968. In 1970, Professor Nachman Avigad found a massive wall between 20 and 23 feet wide on the western ridge, which he dates toward the end of the eighth century. Thus, by that time, this section of the city was already enclosed by a wall. Beneath this wall, and therefore earlier than it, Professor Avigad found a structure which may date somewhat earlier in the eighth century, indicating that the western expansion of the city started before the building of the wall there. Excavations west of the wall indicate that by the end of the eighth century Jerusalem had extensive suburbs outside the city wall.

Other excavations on the western ridge of the city—in the Citadel, in the Armenian garden and on Mount Zion—have also revealed evidence of initial occupation during this period. All of this makes it clear, in Dr. Broshi’s words, “that Jerusalem at about 700 B.C. had mushroomed, historically speaking, overnight.”

According to Dr. Broshi, this expansion cannot be explained by natural population growth or by normal economic growth. Moreover, the expansion was relatively sudden rather than gradual. For millennia, the Jebusite city of Jerusalem had been confined to a small area on the eastern ridge. David’s City was likewise limited. Solomon expanded the city northward to include the area of the present Temple Mount. This additional area was used primarily for the Temple, Solomon’s royal palace and an administrative area allocated to government buildings. From the death of Solomon to the end of the eighth century B.C.—almost 200 years—the city limits changed very little. Then toward the end of the eighth century the city expanded by a factor of three or four. Dr. Broshi estimates the population of the city increased from about 7,500 to about 24,000.

Dr. Broshi attributes this expansion to 032two massive waves of immigration. The first he associates with a population flight from the northern kingdom of Israel as a result of the Assyrian conquest in 721 B.C. According to this theory, substantial numbers of the “lost tribes” took up residence in the newly settled parts of Jerusalem.

The second wave of immigration which accounts for the expansion of Jerusalem came later in the eighth century, according to Dr. Broshi, from Judean territories. As a result of Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah at the end of the eighth century, Judah lost considerable territory in the southwestern part of the kingdom to Assyria, which Assyria ceded to the Philistine city-states. Many of the Judeans uprooted by this invasion, Dr. Broshi believes, also fled to Jerusalem.

The evidence which Dr. Broshi cites for the flight of the refugees is not confined to Jerusalem. In 1967 and 1968, a survey conducted by Professor Moshe Kochavi of Tel Aviv University revealed that almost half of the settlements in the Judean hills which were occupied during the Judean monarchy were founded during the century before the First Temple was finally destroyed in 587 B.C. Other scholars have found that numerous sites in other parts of the Kingdom of Judah—in the Negev, in the Judean desert, and along the Dead Sea—were first intensively settled in the eighth century. Thus, according to Dr. Broshi, the Israelites from the northern kingdom, fled not only to Jerusalem but also to numerous other sites in Judah. In this way, large numbers of people from the “lost tribes” of Israel melded into the population of their sister kingdom of Judah. A similar population increase at these sites 6160 followed the loss of the western provinces of Judah at the end of the eighth century.

Part of the so-called lost tribes of Israel appear to have been located.
In 721 B.C., the northern Kingdom of Israel, composed of ten of the ancient Israelite tribes descended from the sons of Jacob, was conquered and destroyed by Assyria.