We have read one of Candida Moss’ books and many of her articles. She has yet to write about any ancient topic correctly. The following article is just another in a long series of poor scholarship
Were There Actually 12 Tribes of Israel? is just the latest in using bad logic, misreading the evidence, and misunderstanding how biblical authors wrote. She is no Kenneth Kitchen, Bryant Wood, or James Hoffmeier.
She does not go for the truth so her writings are always jumbled, filled with unnecessary information, and more. Her writings also show a lack of understanding of the topic as she freely places her own ideas into the ancient narrative and does not pull the information out of the sources.
Yes, there were 12 tribes of Israel. Just because Ms. Moss cannot understand the bible or historical writings does not eliminate that fact from the historical record. She does not add anything to the topic but just does what scholars do, and that is to confuse the people of the present about the people (and their activities) of the past.
Her introduction and conclusion
In 1644 Antonio Montezinos, a Portuguese traveler originally known as Aharon Levi, returned to Amsterdam with an astonishing story about the people he had encountered in the proverbial depths of South America. During his visit a native guide, named Francisco, took him deep into the mountains. A week into the journey he met a community of indigenous people who identified themselves to him as the Lost Tribes of Israel. Montezinos, who was originally known as Aharon Levi, was startled and astonished.
The story might have amounted to nothing had he not passed it along to a prominent rabbi named Menasseh Ben Israel. Ben Israel used it as the basis for his influential work Hope of Israel, a compendium of information about the whereabouts of the Lost Tribes of Israel, which was published in 1650. The book was intended to inspire his fellow Jews who had suffered and would continue to suffer social marginalization, legal oppression, and violent persecution at the hands of antisemitic Christian Europeans. But it was also taken up by Christians: first British colonizers who claimed that Native Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. And, more famously, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who both identify themselves (who, genealogically were the descendants of European settlers) and Native Americans with Israel. For Ben Israel the “Jewish Indian” theory was about hope, for the British it was related to anxieties about linking the “New World” to the “Old.” The idea that America—or any people or nation—could “Become Israel” was enormously popular…
Equally important, he added, is that scholars are thinking in more complicated ways about identity: “We now know ‘national’ identities change all the time, whether you’re biologically descended from some original group or not, so if presenting that identity differently from the original group means you’re not ‘really’ them – well, every identity is fake then.” In other words, Tobolowsky isn’t saying that more traditional understandings of Jewish identity are somehow fraudulent, he is saying that identity is constantly in flux and constantly being built out of inherited notions of the past. “We can set aside questions of who that past really belongs to in order to dig into what is being built and how that is happening.”
The question of what’s historically true, he said, is sort of beside the point. It’s tempting to distinguish between the “biblical story” and the story of the “Lost Tribes” but, whatever their histories, “all of all these groups are using the exact same tradition in the exact same ways for many of the same reasons.” The story of the Israels of the world is fantastic and arguably brings people together to think about their commonalities and shared traditions. But that will not happen if we can’t see that history and insist on policing a single vision of Israel’s history.
theoarch 