What Are the 10 Northern Tribes of Israel?

What is a Tribe of Israel?

In some cultures, family clans are called tribes. Such was the case in ancient Israel. Abraham was the first Jewish person, and every ethnically Jewish person today descends from his line. God renamed Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, giving him the name Israel. Jacob’s 12 sons became known as the 12 Tribes of Israel. When God led the Israelites out of Egypt and into the Promised Land, He gave each tribe a geographic “inheritance” in which to settle.

A Kingdom Divided

After settling in the Land, the 12 Tribes lived as one nation under God’s leadership. Then, in the 11th century B.C.E., the people asked Samuel the prophet to appoint a king to rule over them so they could be like other nations. After their third king, Solomon, died, factions erupted, and the kingdom divided in two.

What are the 10 Northern Tribes of Israel

The 10 tribes in the north appointed a king and retained the name Israel. Israel comprised the tribes of Reuben, Simeon, Manasseh, Issachar, Zebulun, Ephraim, Dan, Asher, Naphtali and Gad. The two remaining tribes, Judah and Benjamin, took the name of the larger of them and became known as the Kingdom of Judah.

For centuries, these two kingdoms existed side by side until the Assyrians conquered Israel in 722 B.C.E. At that time, members of the 10 Northern Tribes of Israel dispersed throughout the known world. They fled captivity or were taken from their Land and redistributed in other parts of the Assyrian Empire. The recorded history of the 10 Northern Tribes ceased at this point, and they appeared lost due to complete assimilation into the cultures and people groups where they resettled.

However, in recent decades, Jewish communities have been discovered from these “Lost Tribes of Israel” and revealed that they have retained their Jewish identity, faith, and religious and cultural practices throughout the millennia.

Why the 10 Northern Tribes of Israel Matter

Why does this bit of Israel’s history matter to us today? It matters because Israel is central to the timeline of God’s plans to redeem the world and make all things new. In other words, Israel is God’s timepiece in marking the events of the Last Days of this present world. And the return of the people of Israel to the Land of Israel is a key prophecy, one which we’re seeing fulfilled today.

God spoke through the prophets, declaring that He would regather the scattered people of Israel back to the Land He’d given to their forefathers.

“This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will take the Israelites out of the nations where they have gone. I will gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land.”

— Ezekiel 37:21

In that day  the Lord will reach out His hand a second time to reclaim the surviving remnant of His people from Assyria, from Lower Egypt, from Upper Egypt, from Cush, from Elam, from Babylonia, from Hamath and from the islands of the Mediterranean. He will raise a banner for the nations and gather the exiles of Israel; He will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth.

— Isaiah 11:11–12

After Israel was reborn as a country, overnight in 1948 (fulfilling the prophecy found in Isaiah 66:8), Jewish people throughout the world immigrated to what they’d always considered their homeland despite perhaps never living there before. It is the homeland of our people, the homeland of our faith and the place where God chose to “put His name forever” (2 Chronicles 33:7).

Jewish people from all over the world immigrate to Israel every year. This process is called “making aliyah.” The word aliyah means “to go up” and refers to the journey into Jerusalem, Israel’s capital city, which sits higher in elevation than the routes leading to it.

Members of the 10 Northern Tribes of Israel — scattered throughout the world in places like Africa, India, China, South America and even predominately Muslim places in Central Asia for thousands of years — are returning to the Land of Israel. God is fulfilling what He said in the Scriptures He would do.

The fulfillment of Bible prophecy proves that God is who He says He is and will do what He says He will do. The regathering of the 10 Northern Tribes of Israel to the Land is one of the most significant prophetic signs that we are in the latter days and that His promised return to make all things new is close at hand.