Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/219

Rh VII. That the amalgamation, or union into one people, of all the Israelites, was in strict accordance with the predictions of the prophets, declared by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others; which predictions, all their subsequent history shows to have been then fulfilled.

VIII. That the remnant of the Israelites left in Babylonia and Assyria, though smaller in number than that portion of them gathered together in Judæa under the favour of Cyrus and his successors, might yet have increased to an immense multitude in the 600 years which elapsed between the first restoration and the time of Josephus, as their fathers did in the 430 years of their sojourning in Egypt. But that the descendants of that remnant left beyond the Euphrates cannot properly be considered as representing the ten tribes, and much less to have been the entire body of the ten tribes, as Josephus calls them, inasmuch as the principal portion of them had returned to Judæa and become united with that still greater portion of all the tribes which had all along remained in Judæa and the neighbouring districts.

IX. That in the time of Josephus all distinctions of the other tribes having become lost, except those of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi, he erroneously supposed they were the only tribes that had returned, and that the other ten tribes all still remained beyond the Euphrates; for that even if the authority of Josephus were higher than it is, and unquestioned in this part of his book, still we have other weightier evidence to the contrary, and the unexceptionable testimony of Scripture.

X. That in any case the dream of Esdras respecting the ten tribes "having taken counsel among themselves and having gone into a further country where never mankind dwelt," was a mere dream, unsubstantiated by any corroborative consideration whatever, and in fact, as Prideaux says of the eleventh book of Josephus, "contrary to Scripture, to history, and to common sense," with which dream therefore all the theories founded upon it must be classed.

If the above conclusions, and the arguments upon which they are founded, be correct, it follows that the supposition of there being any people now existing as a separate people representing the ten tribes is a groundless hallucination, unworthy of the times in which it has obtained so extensive a credence.