One of the most distorted narratives in Christian theology is the conflation of Israel with Judea, the failure to distinguish between the lost sheep of the house of Israel and the southern kingdom, and the misunderstanding of what Jesus was actually restoring. The implications of this reach into everything: eschatology, identity, and the very purpose of the Messiah.
When Jesus declared that he came for the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 15:24), he wasn’t merely speaking about the Judeans (later called “Jews” in the Greco-Roman world). He was invoking a restoration promised throughout the prophets—one that concerned the lost northern tribes, the scattered remnants of Jacob, and the reunification of the commonwealth of Israel under the old faith. This was not just a spiritual abstraction; it was a literal fulfillment of a covenantal history that had been fractured by exile, corruption, and centuries of dispersion.
Israel and the Northern Kingdom: Scattered but Not Forgotten
The division of the kingdom after Solomon’s reign left Israel in two parts: the northern kingdom (Israel, often called Ephraim) and the southern kingdom (Judah). The Assyrian captivity in the 8th century BCE resulted in the near-total obliteration of the northern kingdom, with its ten tribes scattered among the nations (2 Kings 17:6). Unlike Judah, which returned from Babylonian exile, these tribes never came back in any unified form.
This absence created a mystery: Where did they go? Speculations have ranged from their integration into other Semitic peoples, their movement into Central Asia, and even their possible migrations into Europe. The presence of groups like the Samaritans hints at the remnant of northern Israel still longing for a restoration, though separated from Jerusalem’s priesthood and temple authority.
Jesus’ mission, then, was more than just a ministry to the Judeans—it was the first step in fulfilling the prophetic vision of a regathered Israel, one that had lost any pure genealogical line but was being reconstituted through faith in the Messiah.
Judah, the Jews, and the Etymology of “Jew”
This distinction became even sharper after the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE. With no national homeland, Jewish identity became tied to rabbinic authority, temple-less worship, and a preserved tribal consciousness within a diaspora reality.
However, the question remained: What about the lost tribes?
If we follow the biblical trajectory, the real “Israel” wasn’t just Judah but the entirety of the twelve tribes. And Jesus’ work was not merely a Judean movement but the restoration of all Israel, the reunification of a fragmented people.
Messiah’s Restoration: The Old Faith and the Davidic Fulfillment
Jesus’ mission as Messiah wasn’t just about personal salvation—it was about bringing back the whole house of Israel into covenant. He wasn’t gathering a pure ethnic Israel because that no longer existed. The genealogy had been mixed, corrupted, scattered, and absorbed into the nations. But he himself stood as the purified line of David, the true Kohenim, the unbroken priest-king, fulfilling both the restoration of the northern kingdom and the corruption within Judah’s leadership.
This is why he was called a Nazarene—a Galilean, from the northern lands—but was still registered in Bethlehem, the city of David, for the Roman census (Luke 2:4-5). He embodied the fractured reality of Israel, a northern man with southern Davidic blood, the walking fulfillment of the regathered kingdom.
Christian supersessionism completely erased this narrative, abstracting Israel into a spiritual metaphor and severing the eschatological promise of a literal regathering.
Who Is Israel Today? The Global Scattering of the Tribes
The question then arises: who is Israel today? If the northern kingdom was scattered and mixed into the nations, and if Judah itself was later dispersed, who actually constitutes Israel?
The Jewish world today is not monolithic. The exilic dispersions created multiple distinct streams of identity:
1. Beta Israel (The Isolated Covenant)
Region: Ethiopia and East Africa
Key Feature: Preservation of Torah identity without Rabbinic centralizationHistorical Roots: Claimed link to Tribe of Dan; isolation from Talmudic JudaismTheological Echo: God’s covenant preserved in isolation, without empire or synagogue bureaucracyFree Church Parallel: Anabaptists, Waldensians, early Sabbatarian groupsInsight: When the people are cut off from the center, they preserve by embodying the core—Torah, Sabbath, priesthood
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2. Sephardim (The Diasporic Navigators)
Region: Iberia, North Africa, Middle East, Lembo (Zimbabwe), Latin AmericaKey Feature: Hybrid identity—Judean core adapting to Islamic and Catholic imperial contextsHistorical Roots: Post-Second Temple migrations; Islamic convivencia; expulsion from Spain (1492)Theological Echo: Fidelity through adaptation—hidden Torah, public survivalFree Church Parallel: Crypto-Jews, Latin American house churches, subaltern Pentecostal movementsInsight: The covenant endures not just through exile but through creative fidelity under pressure
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3. Mizrahi (The Ancient Continuum)
Region: Babylon, Persia, Himyar, Egypt, India, Central AsiaKey Feature: Continuity with exile communities rooted in biblical historyHistorical Roots: Babylonian exile never returned; communities grew under Zoroastrian, Islamic, and Hindu empiresTheological Echo: A quiet flame—faith maintained through prophetic memory and covenantal realismFree Church Parallel: Thomas Christians, Aramaic-speaking Christians, modern underground churchesInsight: Some truths are sustained quietly across centuries, under imperial shadow but not consumed by it
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4. Ashkenazim (The Imperial Intertwined)
Region: Rhineland, Slavic lands, Khazaria, Northern MediterraneanKey Feature: From Romaniote Torah communities to medieval Ashkenazi Talmudism and later distortionsHistorical Roots: Mixture of Koine-speaking Jews, Khazar converts, and medieval scholastic evolutionTheological Echo: Complex tension between Torah faithfulness and entanglement with empire and abstractionFree Church Parallel: Reformers and Protestants influenced by scholasticism, both resisting and mimicking RomeInsight: Where the covenant intersects with empire, distortion and renewal are both possible
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5. The Hidden and the Hybrid (The Crypto-Remnant)
Region: Everywhere and nowhere—Samaritans, Karaites, Sabians, Al-Kitabi sects, Marranos, Ethiopian crypto-ChristiansKey Feature: Surviving through concealment, hybridity, or incomplete disclosureHistorical Roots: Scattered throughout history—rejecting both Rome and Rabbinism while clinging to fragments of Torah and MessiahTheological Echo: God’s truth burns even in distorted lamps—waiting to be purified and re-ignitedFree Church Parallel: Marginal believers, borderland communities, non-creedal house fellowshipsInsight: Remnants survive through tension, paradox, and partial light—and yet are not forgotten
This last category, the Ashkenazim, raises major questions. The expansion of Ashkenazi Jewry into a dominant role in Jewish identity coincided with an infiltration of non-Israelite elements, particularly from the Gog-Magog regions (Ezekiel 38-39).
The Days of Revelation: What’s Being Unveiled Now
We are living in the days when this reality is being revealed. The true Israel is not defined by modern Jewish nationalism or by Ashkenazi political dominance but by the spiritual and historical restoration of the commonwealth of Israel under the Messiah.
We are living in the days when this reality is being revealed. The true Israel is not defined by modern Jewish nationalism or by Ashkenazi political dominance but by the spiritual and historical restoration of the commonwealth of Israel under the Messiah.
This is what evangelicals have missed entirely. They are chasing a false temple, a false Israel, and a false eschatology, all while ignoring the actual regathering happening under Jesus, the one who was sent to restore all the tribes, all the covenant, and all the lost sheep—not through genetics, but through the ancient faith of the Hebrews.
And that means the question of “Who is a Jew?” or “Who is Israel?” cannot be answered by modern statehood or ethnic claims. It must be answered by who is truly in covenant with the Messiah, who has brought the whole house of Israel back into its fullness.
If Christians understood this, they would stop looking to geopolitical Israel for prophecy and start realizing that the real commonwealth of Israel is being restored through Jesus right now.
The term “Jew” (from Yehudi) originates from the southern kingdom of Judah, which encompassed the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and portions of Levi. Nevertheless this a root But in exile, Yehudi came to represent not just the people of Judah but anyone who remained faithful to the Torah and the traditions of the Temple. By the time of Jesus, the term was already an amalgamation—Judeans were politically and religiously distinct from the broader scattered Israelites.
Nevertheless, the word "Jew" derives from Genesis 29:35, which states that the matriarch Leah, Judah's mother, named him Yehudah (in Hebrew), which is Judah in English. Still, the word's etymology also connects to one of two of Esau's wives in Gen. 26:34, who were not accepted by Issac, showing the concept used among Canaanites as a name. Such derivations later deviated into nationalist connections with the Kingdom of Judah.
But Jesus’ work was about both—restoring the spiritual and the historical identity of Israel.
This is where Satan’s corruption entered through empire, banking and merchant power, emerging into Zionist political distortions, moving the definition of Jewishness away from covenant and toward nationalism. This is a very sensitive subject and needs clear information NOT conspiracy theory driven research.
The so-called “lost tribes” are not lost—they have been seeded throughout the world, and their regathering is happening not through political Zionism but through the recognition of Jesus as the King of Israel.
