Lost Tribes

It's fascinating to read of the research into the lost ten tribes of Israel, who were exiled from the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, and where they have been traced to, using historical records, place and family names, religious practices and customs as well as genealogical research.

There's an extraordinary amount of evidence of their migrations east of the Euphrates river, through Iraq and Iran and into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir (which fits beautifully the ancient descriptions of the Promised Land), India, China and Myanmar (Burma). Ultimately there's also compelling evidence of them reaching Japan, well researched and observed at first hand by Jewish rabbis tracing the history of their peoples from the mists of time.

There's also very old and very new research indicating the migrations down the Nile valley and into the heartlands of Africa, including the Lemba tribe, who've been swab tested and found to descend directly from the Cohanim, or priestly caste of Israel.

One of the greatest ironies is that with all the close, traceable genetic inheritance across so many diverse peoples of all colours and races, the world's bitterest dispute in the Middle East is effectively between cousins. It's a family affair. Islam is in many ways barely distinguishable from historic Judaism. Moslems and Christians have as much in common as Christians and Jews, but you wouldn't know from the shrill rhetoric. And all fathered by Abraham, born in what would today be either Iraq or Iran.

You can speculate, of course, and not all that wildly, to saying that, in a curious echo of the Garden of Eden story, genetic research will soon be able to tie us all back to an original mother and father, none of whose siblings survived and who consequently became the progenitors of the human race. So we're all cousins in the end, all perhaps member of the same lost tribe. When we understand a little more about our origins, perhaps we won't feel so lost.