Haifa; or, Life in modern Palestine

by Laurence Oliphant

[6] This MS. has since been examined, and is pronounced to be part of the Pentateuch in Samaritan characters of the fifteenth century.

[7] I am indebted to the researches of the Palestine Exploration Fund for these details.

[THE TEN LOST TRIBES.]

Haifa, Oct. 25.—In my last letter I gave some account of the ancient literature of the Samaritans, which is still extant and in their possession. The people themselves, however, are such an interesting ethnological fragment of a remote past that there are many points connected with their origin and history which are worthy of consideration, the more especially as they bear upon a problem which has, of late years, exercised a singular species of fascination over a certain class of minds. I refer to the so-called “lost” ten tribes. It may be a disappointment to the Anglo-Israelites to suggest that they are more likely to be found in the neighbourhood of the country they were carried from than in England; but, under the circumstances, it is certainly a more rational and less strained hypothesis, as I think may be clearly shown by a reference to existing traditions, facts, and records.

It would appear from the recently discovered cuneiform tablets which are now under the investigation of Assyrian scholars, that, while they substantially afford a remarkable confirmation of Biblical history, there are certain discrepancies in regard to the capture of Samaria and the carrying away of the Israelites into captivity, which make it somewhat difficult to determine the exact date and nature of that event. The complete recovery of the records of Shalmaneser (IV.), who no doubt did besiege Samaria, will clear this up, and throw light upon the records of his successor, Sargon, who seems to have succeeded to the throne about the time of the capture of the city, after a three years' siege, and who in that case would be the monarch who actually carried off the Israelites. If this were so, then, according to the date of his accession, the captivity must have occurred before the invitation which Hezekiah sent out through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh inviting Israelites to the Passover at Jerusalem, where we are informed that large numbers attended it (2 Chron. xxx. 18); and it would put beyond a doubt, what is in fact most probable, that Sargon, in carrying away the Israelites captive, did exactly what Nebuchadnezzar also did not long afterwards, when he carried off the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, and left a large population of the poorer classes behind, who were not worth taking.

Indeed, when one comes to consider the population which we know to have inhabited Samaria and Galilee at this time, it seems incredible that any conqueror would have burdened himself with a host which must have numbered at the lowest estimate over a million souls and probably a great many more; and this conjecture is borne out by the fact that we read, in Jeremiah xli. 5, that a deputation of fourscore Israelites came to Jerusalem after its destruction, or more than a hundred years after the captivity of the Israelites. That the Israelites thus left intermarried with the colonists sent from Assyria on the adoption by these latter of the Jewish religion, under the instruction of a priest sent for the purpose, is extremely probable. The Samaritans themselves, however, deny all intermixture with the colonists, and maintain they are pure-blooded Israelites; and in confirmation of this we may mention their marked Jewish type of countenance, their possession of an ancient text of the books of Moses, and their observance of the Jewish Passover according to the most ancient forms of that rite.

The Samaritan account of their origin and composition is, as may be supposed, diametrically opposed to that contained in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. They assert that at the time when the two tribes returned from the captivity a large number of the ten tribes also returned to Samaria under Sanballat, called by Nehemiah a Horonite, but the Samaritans call him a Levite. The Samaritan account goes on to state that while the two tribes under Zerubbabel repaired to Jerusalem, the rest of the congregation, three hundred thousand in all, besides youth, women, children, and strangers, were led to Gerizim, where they established the Temple. Then came the quarrels between the Jews at Jerusalem and the Israelites at Samaria about the building of the Temple; and the accounts contained in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the Samaritan records are not very discordant. Making allowance always for the fact that the Biblical books do not admit that the Samaritans were Israelites at all, though they admit that Sanballat's son was married to the daughter of Eliashib, the Jewish high-priest, while this latter is stated to have allied himself with Tobiah, who was a Samaritan priest. This caused great displeasure to Nehemiah, and increased the schism, but it goes, too, far to confirm the supposition that Sanballat and Tobiah were Israelites.

The Samaritans are, indeed, in the peculiarities of their doctrine, almost identical with the original Jewish party—the Karaite and Sadducean sects. They are even called Sadducees in Jewish writings, and their denial of the resurrection was, like that of the Sadducees, based on the declaration that nothing was to be found in the law of Moses on the subject. Again, their version of the law is closely similar to that of the Septuagint, which was a translation authorized by a Sadducean high-priest from a text differing from that finally established by the Pharisees. It is often supposed that the Samaritans borrowed their doctrine from the Sadducees, but it seems more rational to admit that they were a sect originally identical, because originally Israelite. The animosity of Josephus, who was a Pharisee; the fierce denunciation of the Talmud, written by Pharisees; the destruction of the Gerizim temple by Hyrcanus, also a Pharisee—all combine to indicate that the Jewish hatred had nothing to do with any foreign origin of the race, but was rather roused by the religious differences of a people whom they knew to be their own kith and kin.

If we adopt this theory the fate of the ten tribes is no longer a mystery. As we know that before the captivity they were addicted to strange gods and strange marriages, it is not improbable that a large proportion lost their tribal identity while in captivity by intermarrying with the people by whom they were surrounded, and became merged with them. It is also probable that a certain number, according to the Samaritan chronicle three hundred thousand (but it need not be so large a number), returned from their captivity at the time when the two tribes received permission from Cyrus to return. It is also likely that others who still retained their religion did not return, and are the ancestors of certain Hebrew nomads still wandering in the desert. The Jews from Yemen, for instance, assert that they are of the tribe of Dan, while there are Jewish shepherds in Mesopotamia whose ancestry seems not distinctly traceable to the two tribes.