 I was curious about why Dr. Hyzer thinks there were lost tribes of Israel after the northern kingdom got carried away by Assyria. I always thought all 12 tribes were still represented in the southern kingdom. That's where the people who wanted to stay true to Yahweh stayed at. Those who wanted to go to the north to follow pagan gods and those in the south who wanted to stay with the one true God. When the northern kingdom got taken away by Assyria, the southern kingdom still stayed around with all the tribes still represented, correct or not? In Zechariah 10-6, when Mike said that the house of Joseph was referring to the northern tribe, how is it that they come back after their assimilation into Assyria? This verse talks about the house of Joseph being brought back by God, but I thought it was only the southern kingdom that returned from captivity. How is it then that the house of Joseph is referring to the northern tribe here in this verse? I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding of what I'm thinking in regard to the return element of this. We'll go back to the beginning of the question. I follow the logic. If you were living, the kingdom splits apart after Solomon dies. The question sort of thinks like this or proceeds along these lines. If you were living in the north, the 10 northern tribes defect, they form their own political entity under Jeroboam. Then Jeroboam sets up an alternative system of worship and so on and so forth that, of course, is contrary to what God wants because the temple is in Jerusalem. If you're living in the north but you didn't want to be in apostate, then you'd either not worship in the north or you would move to the south. The question assumes that they're moving to the south. That's kind of a bit naive. It might have been true, and again, this is all speculation, but it might have been true when it happened. People have this sense that, oh, man, I'm not going to worship up here because the temple's down there, so I'm going to move. Now, it assumes certain things. It assumes mobility like you actually could make the move. What if your ancestral land is in the north and you go down to south and you ain't got none? What if your entire livelihood? This is a subsistence economy. People are tied to the land. They don't just go up and start another business or transport their farm to some other place. Mobility is not what you think it was. It's a significant issue. It assumes a certain amount of mobility that may or may not have been true and probably in most cases wasn't true. It assumes, again, that you don't—let's say you could move. Let's say you had a business and you could relocate to the south. You're abandoning your ancestral homeland. That is the land God gave you. It's a sacred trust in your mind. And so there would be a lot of people who—it would not be a light thing. It would not be—some people would say it's a spiritually wrong thing to abandon your ancestral land that God gave you. So there's that issue. It assumes the ineffectiveness of northern political and religious figures, the authorities, to keep people in the north for worship. This is what Jeroboam does. They have their own festivals. They've got their own worship spots, the high places. They have their own priesthood, all this sort of stuff. And that is done specifically so that people won't go down to Jerusalem for the annual festivals and try to keep them up here. Well, and you say, well, if you were really godly, that wouldn't work. Well, again, that brings us to another assumption, and that is you're assuming the ineffectiveness or the incoherence of the northern apostate polemic that cast itself as legitimate worship of Yahweh. And you say, well, how is that possible? They're up there worshiping idols and the calves of Bashan and the Baal worship and all this kind of stuff. Well, again, to the initial generation caught in these circumstances, they would have known what's going on here. But the history of the divided kingdom spans a couple hundred years. So you have a generational change that goes on and the polemic is effective because some of the same language used of Yahweh is used of Baal in Canaanite religion. Even the use of bulls. Think about how easily people were duped at Sinai, the golden calf incident. Well, part of the reason for that is because one of the titles of the god of Jacob was the bull of Jacob. The bull of Israel. We've got bull there, bull here. What difference does it make? So there are things about Canaanite religion and the language used in Canaanite religion that was also used in Israelite religion. And that would have been blurred. In other words, the clarity of the lines over the course of generations would have been blurred. And they're also going to add Yahweh to what they're doing. Well, we worship Yahweh here. Yeah, we might do it a different way than down in Jerusalem, but we're still worshiping Yahweh. There were different forms of Yahwism. We know this from archaeology. That to someone in the priesthood or the temple, someone who would have really been zealous about keeping the law of Moses and all the rules for the priesthood and worship, they would have rejected. But again, you have people distanced from that. Not everybody has a Bible. Nobody has a Bible. You know what they have? They have their priest. So the priest in the north, two or three generations down the road from the split of the kingdom. If you have a theological question, you're not going to say, well, let me look that up in the Torah. No, you're going to go ask your priest and the priest is going to say, well, look here, you know, Moses and Sinai, this is what happened. We worship Yahweh here, and this is where we worship him here down there. They worship him in that temple. We worship him in these shrines here, but it's the same God. What's the problem? In other words, a lot of the apostate worship was not overt worship of other deities. It was worship of Yahweh in aberrant ways. Again, aberrant by the standards of the Torah. And the question sort of assumes that people are going to be able to parse this easily. They're not. They're going to have grown up with the language that their priests give them. They're going to have only their priests, you know, as to the, you know, to ask theological questions, if they even pop into their head, if they even care at that point because they don't have revelation. They don't have bibles. You know, they might have an occasional prophet running around the country saying, what we're doing is wrong here. And again, but the only way they're going to buy that is with acts of power like Elijah, you know, just things like this. This is why you had prophets because people don't have information. They've got generational, you know, generations now of tradition of this is the way we do it. We're two kingdoms. We don't get along. That's the same God, though, because we come from the same stock. We're, you know, we're all tribes of Jacob and Israel and God took us out of Egypt and all that stuff. So we have, we have a difference of opinion here on the niceties of how we practice our worship to Yahweh. But hey, at least we're doing it. At least we worship Yahweh. So again, it's not, it's not as clear cut as you might think to the average Israelite. And so it's clear cut in God's mind. It's clear cut in the minds of the prophets whom God sends to them to rebuke them. If you know about that, if you know you're wrong or if you become convinced you're wrong, well, then you would have the impulse maybe to go to the South or at least to avoid idolatry in the North. But that reaction, we can't assume that that reaction would be a typical one or a frequent one. Generations removed from, you know, the whole situation when it would have been much clearer to see what was right and what was wrong. You know, and the whole thing about, well, you know, we go down there and people from the Northern tribes are going to go down there and live in the South and then the South, you know, maybe they get carried away to Babylon. They come back. So all the tribes actually come back anyway. That idea actually isn't reflected in the language of the prophets, the prophetic books who still speak of Israel in distinction from Judah. I mean, when you see the phrase Israel or Ephraim and Judah, that actually means something. It doesn't mean that Israel is subsumed in Judah and we're just talking about Israel because we have to because it's geography. Okay. The phrase is actually mean something. You don't really have a verse, you know, that sort of conveys this idea that, well, all the 12 tribes are really resident only, you know, now in the two remaining tribes only in Jacob or Judah after the exile, you still get both entities spoken of in distinction from each other and in combination and with other phrases like the 12 tribes or that are used to link the 12 tribes. So the language has to mean something and it does. It does mean something. So we don't get that picture from the text. Let's talk about the return, the eschatological element. You know, these passages that we've been talking about, whether they're in Obadiah, passages about Edom, again, our discussion of eschatology about what is all Israel and the 12 tribes language, the Kingdom of Joseph and Jacob and all that kind of stuff. What I'm saying is that it's very clear that the two tribes come back physically from Babylon, you know, Ezra and Nehemiah and other references. So that's very clear. What I'm suggesting though is that the other tribes are scattered among the nations like the Old Testament has them and their return to Yahweh, their return to Yahweh and even in some respect, their return to the land is initiated at Pentecost. You have Jews from every nation, all the places where the other tribes, the 10 tribes were scattered. They were scattered in all these regions. See, Assyria didn't do things like the Babylonians did them. And the Old Testament describes this too. The Babylonians took the people back to Babylon. Okay, you're going to live here now. The Assyrians didn't do that. The Assyrians took people from one conquered location and moved them to a different one. Then they took people from that location and moved them back into yours. They mixed the populations and they did this deliberately. This is a matter of record in Assyrian records and in the Old Testament. So the 10 tribes are literally scattered through all the nations of the world, of the known world of the time, because the Assyrians do that. It doesn't happen with the other two. They go to Babylon and they come back. So when you have Jews later at Pentecost, come to Pentecost. I mean, they're free to do so. They're free to travel. But they live in these nations. They come to Pentecost. They hear about Jesus. They believe. They accept that this was the Messiah of Israel. You know, come for our salvation. And all the other baggage, it goes with it. Okay, now we, this is the Messiah. There must be something that's going to happen later with the Messiah to restore Israel and blah, blah, blah. They believe that. Then they go back to their homeland. And of course, then they become points of, they become cell groups. They become people planted in the nations to begin the return of the nations, the repatriation of the nations, the Gentiles, you know, back to them. So when the nations return, think about this. And we talked about this in our discussion of Romans, Romans 9, Romans 11, all Israel. Paul quotes Hosea chapter 1, verse 10, for instance. And it's this passage where the Northern tribes are now called not my people. In other words, think of God saying, you're Gentiles now, not my people. Then Paul quotes that passage of the Gentiles and says now that God views the Gentiles as my people. So he actually swaps in the Gentiles, okay, into the people of God when he quotes the passage the way he does. And so that would include all of the tribes. Why? The rest of the 10. Why? Because they live in the nations. Well, when people in the nations start to come back to Yahweh, some of them are going to be Jews. And every tribe is going to have some of them that come back. So it's an eschatological return. You know, the interpretive question, you know, do Jews living all over the known world count today? Or, you know, do these callous just make it more general? Do Jews living all over the known world count as the missing tribes that didn't return under Ezra and Zorova? I would say that it would seem so because that's what the Assyrians did. The Assyrians scattered everybody. And they are involved in either the national conversion, quote unquote, Gentile conversion, conversion of the nations, the nations that come to worship Yahweh. If you have 10 tribe members among those, then they're included. That is their return. So Pentecost sort of starts this process, this thing, this redefining of what it means for all of the tribes to come back. The ones that are, quote unquote, missing are among the nations. And the nations are coming back. The gospel is for the Gentiles, too. And it's going to gobble up Jews from all tribes in it. Okay, this conversion process is not going to omit members of these other 10 tribes. It's going to include them and Gentiles, pure Gentiles, if I can use that phrase, that are not attached to the tribes of Israel at all. They all come back. They're all one people of God. It's one kingdom. And since it's global, since it involves the nations, it is not tied to a specific parcel of land. So the return of the 10 tribes, if the New Testament thinking, if the New Testament appropriation of these concepts is correct, and I would say it is because it's the New Testament, the New Testament's an inspired commentary note. If all that's correct, and then the return and the regathering of Israel, spoken of in the prophets, is accomplished through the church. It is not accomplished through a physical return to Israel to Palestine. Again, that's where the theological disconnect between systems of eschatology really is located at, because the one crowd, again, just to use an umbrella term, the dispensational crowd, will say that these return passages are all future, and they're all about 1948 or post 1948 or whatever. They're all about a physical regathering of all Jews or all the tribes in the physical land of Israel. But that is not, again, what Paul says about what's happening with the church. The church levels all that. The tribes are caught up in the salvation of the nations with those Gentiles. They are brought back. So the real question at the end of the day for eschatology is, is what we see in the New Testament, how the church fulfills these things, is that all there is? In other words, is there any role for national Israel in prophecy or not? Replacement theologians will say, no, all done, taken care of, done, story over, whatnot. I think that goes too far. I think there are passages that speak of a future of national Israel in biblical prophecy. So while it's very clear to me that the church replaces Israel in some sense, in certain senses, I think it exaggerates the data. It extrapolates to the unnecessary to say that Israel as an entity, as a national entity has nothing to do with biblical prophecy in the future. I think that goes too far.