75. Ber. R. 73.
76. Jer. Sanb 29 c.
Later Jewish notices connect the final discovery and the return of the `lost tribes' with their
conversion under that second Messiah who, in contradistinction to `the Son of David' is styled
`the Son of Joseph,' to whom Jewish tradition ascribes what it cannot reconcile with the royal
dignity of `the Son of David,' and which, if applied to Him, would almost inevitably lead up to
the most wide concessions in the Christian argument.77 As regards the ten tribes there is this
truth underlying the strange hypothesis, that, as their persistent apostasy from the God of Israel
and His worship had cut them off from his people, so the fulfilment of the Divine promises to
them in the latter days would imply, as it were, a second birth to make them once more Israel.
Beyond this we are travelling chiefly into the region of conjecture. Modern investigations have
pointed to the Nestorians,78 and latterly with almost convincing evidence (so far as such is
possible) to the Afghans, as descended from the lost tribes.79 Such mixture with, and lapse into,
Gentile nationalities seems to have been before the minds of those Rabbis who ordered that, if
at present a non-Jew weds a Jewess, such a union was to be respected, since the stranger might
be a descendant of the ten tribes.80 Besides, there is reason to believe that part of them, at least,
had coalesced with their brethren of the later exile;81 while we know that individuals who had
settled in Palestine and, presumably, elsewhere, were able to trace descent from them.82 Still the
great mass of the ten tribes was in the days of Christ, as in our own, lost to the Hebrew nation.
77. This is not the place to discuss the later Jewish fiction of a second or `suffering' Messiah, `the son
of Joseph,' whose special mission it would be to bring back the ten tribes, and to subject them to
Messiah, `the son of David,' but who would perish in the war against Gog and Magog.
78. Comp. the work of Dr. Asahel Grant on the Nestorians. His arguments have been well summarised
and expanded in an interesting note in Mr. Nutt's Sketch of Samaritan History, pp. 2-4.
79. I would here call special attentio n to a most interesting paper on the subject (`A New Afghan
Question'), by Mr. H. W. Bellew, in the `Journal of the United Service Institution of India,' for 1881, pp.
49-97.
80. Yebam 16 b.
81. Kidd. 69 b.
82. So Anna from the tribe of Aser, St. Luke ii. 36. Lutterbeck (Neutest. Lehrbegr. pp. 102, 103) argues
that the ten tribes had become wholly undistinguishable from the other two. But his arguments are not
convincing, and his opinion was certainly not that of those who lived in the time of Christ, or who
reflected their ideas.