Pashtuns and Other Lost 10 Tribes of Israel Today

Nadene Goldfoot

Original Assyria, in line with the Hittite Empire, Mitanni, and Babylonia and the Assyrian Empire below.

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                   

Assyria's Empire in Middle East

In the end times, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel should appear, and indeed, they have been.  It was back in 722 BCE, 2,737 years ago, that Assyria attacked Israel and carried off the young people into captivity.

King Solomon of Israel had died in 922 BCE, which was very bad, because then Israel divided itself into 2 states; Israel and Judah,  with the tribe of Judah living in the south being the largest and more religious.  Judah used Jerusalem as its capital while Israel used Samaria.  At times they fought each other for power.  This weakened them and Israel was overcome by Damascus first in 853 BCE when  Shalmaneser III attacked Ben-Hadad II and Ahab (876-853 BCE) of Israel had been supportive of Damascus.  In 806 BCE,  Israel was freed from Damascus control for a few years.

At this time when Assyria was powerful,  Ahaz  was king of Judah. He was the son of Jotham.   He was twenty years old when he became king (735 BCE-720 BCE) and he reigned for 16 years in Jerusalem.  Ahaz was attacked by Pekah of Israel in 735 BCE.  He didn't follow our Jewish precepts.  He did things more like the kings of Israel did, who were not very religious.  He made molten idols for Baal and burned incense in the Valley of Ben-hinnom and set his sons on fire (aflame).  This means he was into human sacrifice.  His actions were those of the people living there before the Jews, the Canaanites.  He was also into burning incense at high places, hilltops and under every leafy tree which was considered evil, as this might have been for worshipping many gods. In other words, he was into Baal worship of Canaan.This was the worship of one G-d of the sky and fertility.  Originally it was used for many local gods represented in the form of a bull or a man, worshipped as gods of fertility of the field and of women.  After Israelites  entered Canaan, they tended to adopt the deities of the locals, though the prophets were aghast.  It was not an easy job to convince these former slaves to change their ways and worship an unseen G-d almost 4,000 years ago.
                                                                     

Tiglath-Pileser

Then Ahaz  fell into the hands of the king of Aram of the Arameans (Syria)  who took a large number of captives of the Jews with him to Damascus. The Edomites and Philistines harried his southern territory.  He went to get help from the leader of the Assyrians, of Western Asia,  Tiglath-Pileser,  who then invaded Syria and Israel in 733 BCE.  This made Judah become an Assyrian vassal and was also subjected to Assyrian idolatry.  Tiglath-Pileser also ended Syria as a state and stripped Israel of Galilee and Gilead.    He was then delivered to the king of Israel, which would have been King Hezekiah who reigned from 720 BCE to 692 BCE.  Hezekiah, Ahaz's son,  gave him a great blow.  Hezekiah  was trying to wean away Judah's dependence on Assyria.  Hezekiah freed religious worship from the Assyrian influence, purged the palace and Temple of images and pagan altars and got the population back to monotheistic religion again.  This was supported by the prophets, especially Isaiah who had great influence in affairs of state.  His allies became neighboring rulers.  He fortified Jerusalem and built the Siloam tunnel to improve its water-supply.  In 712 BCE he joined the neighboring states in their uprising against Assyria.

King Pekah, of Israel (735-730 BCE) son of Remallah, possibly of Gileadite origin,  killed 120,000 mighty men of the tribe of Judah  in one day because they had forgotten the laws of Moses.  This is like the pot calling the kettle black.   Pekah was later murdered by Hoshea , king of Israel from 730 to 721 BCE, and was thought to have  reigned  for 20 years.  Zichri, a warrior from the tribe of Ephraim, killed Maaseiah, the king's son, Azrikam, the chamberlain of the palace, and Elkanah, the deputy to the king.  The children of Israel also captured 200,000 women, boys and girls.  They took many goods from them and brought the riches to Samaria.  Samaria was the capital of Israel.  Israel and Judah, 2 states at this time, were fighting each other.
                                                                             

10 Tribes Placed in Assyria and Media 

King Hosea of Israel in 726 BCE tried to throw off the yoke of Assyria which led to Shalmaneser V's siege of Samaria and its capture in 721 by his successor, Sargon.  Sargon annexed the country, deported 27,290 Israelites  (people of the 10 tribes of Israel) to Assyria and Media, replaced them with Syrian and Babylonian prisoners.  The state of Judah was ravaged but King Hezekiah was able to hold out and get moderate terms by paying tribute and ceding some territory.

We see Israel taking Judean  women and children prisoners and then the Assyrians taking prisoners from Israel who could have been made up of all 12 tribes.  The tribe of Judah was large.  Judah himself, Jacob's 4th son by Leah, was the one that kept Joseph from being left to die in a pit where he was trapped by his jealous half-brothers.  Judah said to sell him instead to the passing Ishmaelites.  It was Judah who received the blessing from his father, Jacob.  The tribe of Judah had been given one of the largest areas in Canaan and it eventually absorbed the inheritance of Simeon in the Negev.  David was from this tribe.  The tribe of Judah supported Solomon's son, Rehoboam as their king and that's how Judah was created out of the southern portion of Israel.

Ephraim was the younger son of Joseph and through him became the tribe of Ephraim.  It was the more northern of the 2 Israelite kingdoms.  It included the hill-country in central Israel and was noted for its fertility.  In the period of the Judges before king Saul, Ephraim claimed priority among the Israelite tribes, partly because their religious center was situated at Shiloh in its territory.  Shiloh was the first center of the Israelite religion before they used Jerusalem.  .  It was 25 miles north of Jerusalem in the mountains of Ephraim.  The secession of the northern tribes after Solomon's death  in 922 BCE centered on the tribe of Ephraim, to which Jeroboam, the first king of the northern kingdom of Israel, belonged.  The prophets later spoke of the House of Judah and the House of Ephraim as representing the 2 branches of the Hebrew people.  Joseph, Jacob's 11th son but first born of Rachel, Jacob's 2nd wife and most beloved of his 4 women, had become viceroy of the pharaoh.  His descendants became slaves of the future pharaoh along with the descendants of his brothers.  Joseph died at age 110 and his body was later brought by the Israelites to Canaan for reburial.  Jacob is said to have lived during the Hyksos domination of Egypt of the 18th to 16th centuries BCE., and  Moses, who came along 400 years after their entrance to Egypt, is said by Jewish historians to have lived from 1391 to 1271 BCE.

Assyrian power was later replaced by Babylon who attacked in 597 BCE and again in 586 BCE.  They also exiled many Jews to Babylon.  We know the 10 tribes were exiled previously, , and we know that amid the 10 there were some of the descendants of the children of Judah who had been taken by Israel.  The Babylonian Jews constituted another large Jewish population with many remaining in Babylon even after King Cyrus allowed a return to Israel/Judah.  The Babylonian Jews kept in touch with the Israel/Judah group who returned to their homeland and even supplied some of their leaders.such as Hillel who had returned.  He is said to have written the "Golden Rule: "Do not do unto others that which you would not have them do unto you."

Many of the Lost ten tribes are showing up.  The Pashtos of Afghanistan and Pakistan, especially the tribe of Afridi, is said to have been from  Joseph through his 2nd son, Ephriam.  According to the Bible, some Judean children would have been among the lost 10 tribes.  They should have all carried the Cohen gene, showing descendancy from Jacob.
                                                                         

Today we have DNA testing of such things called haplotypes and haplogroups.  Both men and women can be tested.  It's like a stamp in your cells of who your first ancestor was long ago. We can wander all over the face of the earth, but we carry this stamp or DNA telling where we had first come from.   The Cohen gene of J1 has been discovered and is carried by both Jews and Arabs.  Remember that Abraham had Ishmael first by Hagar, an Egyptian princess, who is said to be the father of the Arabs.  Then Abraham's wife, Sarah, finally had Isaac, father of the Jewish people.  Jew comes from the tribe of Judah.
                                                                   

Aaron carrying Cohen gene from Abraham

In the Jewish religion, Aaron, the brother of Moses, was chosen to be the priest for the Israelites and he and his male descendants were given specific jobs.  For 2,000 years, we still find at over 50% of the Cohens in the synagogue carrying the J1 DNA, the Cohen haplogroup.  The bible had prophesied that the Isreaelite Cohanim would be "a covenant of everlasting Priesthood."  It appears to be just that.

 The Arabs, having no such stipulations about marriage, etc, have the same haplogroup but do have a tag on it showing they are of the Arab stock and not the Jewish one.  A haplogroup is just a population group defined by specific SNP mutations of those genes.  SNPs or (Snip) are single nucleotide polymorphisms, a very slowly mutating location that is used to define haplogroups.  I'm afraid you may have to be a geneticist to understand these words.  However, a length of DNA is called STRs or short tandem repeats.  It has a repeating sequence of chemical bases.  All this must be understood to read this stamp in our cells. Luckily, DNA companies make it very easy for us to read what our haplogroup is when we test.  Don't worry about it.

The question had come up on a video that the Pashtuns seem to be missing Cohens in their group.  I ask if a large population of Pashtuns have been DNA tested to search for Cohens.  Otherwise, how would this be known?  We don't have a mark otherwise saying who is a Cohen and who isn't a Cohen.  We need DNA evidence.  Not many have been tested in Pakistan.

One would think that all Jews should be carrying J1 being we came from Abraham, but that is not the case.  There are other haplogroups that are also very common with us.  Men are found to be carrying G, E, Q1b, and types of R over and over, and women are found to be carrying a different type of DNA with haplogroups of K, H, J, W, and N1b which are all very common with Jewish women.  Read the reference below and go to my website and you will see reasons for different types other than J1.  The same thing could have happened to the Israelites who were carried off in 722 BCE.  They may not all be J1s.  What could they be carrying?

"G2b is a major Y chromosome haplogroup, and yet unique. It was found among Pashtuns and on much lower scale among all major Jewish groups, Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians."  " G2b makes up about 7% of all Ashkenazi Jewish Y chromosome haplotypes, as was found in Behar, et al researchers.  G2b's highest findings were in Pashtuns and Sephardic Jews.  The extreme rarity of G2b in northern Pakistan could indicate that G2b in this area originates outside the region and was brought there in the historic period, perhaps from further west (Pakistan was part of both the Achaemenid Persian Empire, conquered by Alexander the Great, and then formed a part of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom). These two reported Pakistani G2b haplotypes are quite divergent from the Ashkenazi Jewish clade, and therefore do not at all indicate a recent common origin."  Do the researches remember that Jews were in Persia and could have come in contact with people later called the Pashtuns?  

"The Assyrian king, Shalmaneser, during the tenure of Hoshea as King of Israel in the 700s BCE carried the Israelites off to his kingdom and replaced the Israelites who were living in Samaria with persons brought from various Babylonian locales. This event also led to a permanent population of Jews within today's Iran. The presence of the non-Israelites in Samaria could have provided an opportunity for additional population admixture on the return of the Israelites."
                                 
Tudor Parfitt was exploring in southern Africa and came across the Lemba tribe in his search to find the Lost Ark of Moses.  He had Lemba members DNA tested and many turned out to be carrying J1 haplogroup.  One can only imagine how that happened.  Jews searching out trading routes and goods arrived and settled down, evidently.  When the Lembas were tested, almost exactly the same proportion of Lemba males carried the CMH (Cohen Model Haplotype) as did the overall Jewish population.  The CMH   was found in more than 50% of the Buba clan, who were the Lemba priests, the guardians of the ngoma lungundu, what they thought to be the ark.  Buba was the founder of the Lemba priestly clan, who they say was the individual who originally led the Lemba ancestors out of Israel.  The CMH is virtually nonexistent in non-Jewish populations.

Other lost tribal members might be Kurds of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Armenia.  7,000 Kurdish Jews have already been brought to Israel betwen 1948 and 1950. We do know that the royal house of Adiabene in ancient Kurdistan converted to Judaism 2,000 years ago.  They have been DNA tested and the result was "doesn't appear to have had considerable effect on the Y chromosome pool of the Kurdish Jews.."  What they did find was Arab Kurds and Jews have only distant genetic links.  Very little hanky panky went on between the 2 groups.  Genes of non-Arab populations living in the northern part of the region show that Jews are close blood cousins to Christian Kurds, Armenians and Turks.

We have a group of Japanese claiming to be a lost tribe.  It's the Yamato clan and the Hada say they are children of Zebulun.  Makoya, a Zionist Christian sect are following Jewish things but there is no evidence of claims of descent.  Professor Odlum of Canada thinks some Japanese are from the tribe of Menasseh who became Samurai.  DNA says no.

China and the Silk road may have some lost tribes.  Small bands of Jews settled in china around 240 BCE.  They had trading enclaves in the capital in the 7th century CE and Jewish traders  were there during the 11th and 12th centuries.  There was found the Chiang community in  the NW Szechuan Province claiming to be descendants of Abraham, who could be from the northern tribe of Menasseh.  They could have headed for Afghanistan and then to Tibet where they settled along the border.  They have not been DNA tested yet.

Another Jewish settlement in China was in Kaifeng, the capital of Hunan Province in eastern China.  They pray in Hebrew and they had a synagogue.  Now, less than 100 people claim to be Jewish, not enough for a good DNA testing program.  More likely their ancestors met up with some Jewish traders on the Silk Road.
India has the Cochin Jews of South India and the Bene Israel of West India.  The Cochin say they came from the people of the 2nd Temple destruction.  In 1948 there were 2,500 and they resettled in Israel.  DNA shows there has been a lot of intermarriage over the centuries.  Bene Israel number about 4,000 and are descendants of Judeans from Galilee of the northern tribes north of Samaria and left around 175 BCE and fled to Egypt and boarded a ship for India but didn't make it.

Update: 9/13/16: found on Y haplogroup G2b-M377 of familytreedna, The Pashtuns who claim "Israelite" ancestry in fact claim to be descended from a regular Jewish ("Benjaminite") community in Khroasan (Eastern Greater Iran) who converted to Islam at the time of the Mongol Invasion in 1220 CE. They are not from "Lost Tribes". 

Resource: II Chronicles; 28: 1-8.
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2010/01/jewish-genes-what-haplogroup-could-they.html
Abraham's Children, race, identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People.  by Jon Entine
The Lost Ark of the Covenant by Tudor Parfitt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_G-M377
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_with_Haplogroup_G