by
CGG Weekly, November 25, 2011


"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."
Bertrand Russell


This is what we know concerning what God has revealed about the whereabouts of the modern-day house of Israel:

  • Where Israel migrated after its fall: to the north and west of Jerusalem and to far off islands and coastlands.
  • Where God moved the throne of David upon Judah's fall: Ireland, then Scotland, then England.
  • When God will stop withholding the conditional blessings: around AD 1802.

Armed with this information, we are finally ready to address the question: Where is the house of Israel today?

Assembling all the search criteria into one list demonstrates the detail, the level of specificity, that God has provided us. In the previous essays, we have isolated the following characteristics of modern-day Israel:

  • They are multitudes of peoples (Genesis 13:16 17:6; 22:17; 26:4; 28:14), living in
  • a nation and a company of nations—multitudes of nations (Genesis 35:11; 48:19)—whose
  • geographic focus lies to the north and west of Jerusalem (Hosea 12:1; Jeremiah 3:12-18; 31:8) but whose
  • lands spread to all compass points (Genesis 13:14; 28:14; Jeremiah 31:8; Isaiah 41:1, 8-9). Israel's people own
  • possessions over rivers, across seas, in the islands and coastlands (Jeremiah 31:10). At least some tribes of Israel will enjoy widespread
  • wealth and prosperity (Genesis 49:22-26; Deuteronomy 33:13-17) and will possess
  • gates, that is, strategic commercial and military positions, in the midst of their enemies (Genesis 22:17; 24:60). They are a people who have been
  • ruled without interruption by a monarchy whose roots lie in the tribe of Judah (Genesis 49:10; II Samuel 7:8-17; Psalm 89:34-37; Jeremiah 33:17). That monarchy will be
  • currently centered in Britain (Ezekiel 21:25-26). Finally, they are a people whose
  • dominance, politically, militarily, and economically, did not begin until about AD 1802 (Numbers 14:34; Leviticus 26:18, 21, 24, 28).

None of these criteria is a vague abstraction or a riddle, as one finds in the writings of Nostradamus and other false prophets. No, these are specific, well-defined search criteria that will point decisively to the folk of Israel today. The people we identify as those of Israel today will meet—or will have met sometime in their history—these criteria.

The Israelite tribes, migrating generally west and north of Jerusalem, settled into northern Europe. From there, they more recently migrated to the "isles" and "coastlands" of the New World. God nowhere promises or prophesies that each tribe would become a separate nation. Quite the contrary, He prophesied through the prophet Amos that He would "sift the house of Israel among all nations, as grain is sifted in a sieve" (Amos 9:9). We cannot expect, therefore, a precise mapping between each Israelite tribe and modern states in Europe or elsewhere. Some tribes are quite scattered, their peoples habitually crossing national boundaries. Other tribes appear more concentrated in a general region. Generally, the tribes map to European nations in this way:

Tribe

Nation

Asher

Belgium/Luxembourg

Benjamin

Norway

Dan

Ireland

Gad

Switzerland

Issachar

Finland

Judah

Scattered internationally, with some concentration in the State of Israel

Naphtali

Sweden

Reuben

France

Simeon/Levi

Scattered; no national home.

Zebulun

Holland (The Netherlands)

Ephraim

England and her related political entities

Manasseh

The United States of America

There are also numbers of Israelites in Spain, which has long been a stomping ground for Israelites: The people of Zerah founded settlements there, and Jeremiah stopped there on his way to Ireland. Northern Germany, the old Prussia before it was unified with Germany by Bismarck, is probably largely Israelite, as well as parts of northern Italy near its borders with France and Switzerland.

Next time, we will concentrate on the whereabouts of the tribe of Ephraim, descended from Joseph's younger son.