Where Have All the Children…(of Israel) Gone?

Theories, bizarre encounters and bona fide discoveries with diverse theological interpretations over the whereabouts of the mystery tribes of Jacob range from fascination to fact or fantasy. Are they for real and/or what is their relevance?

While the reports of and research into Northern Europe and Central Asia has received the most speculation, the actual ingathering of the Jews of Ethiopia, the Falash Mura and the Bnai Menashe of India has merited the most actual response. However, the least known—but hardly the least fascinating—of all chronicled movements, has surfaced in the islands of the South Pacific.

I have in the past led annual tour groups of exceedingly enthusiastic Pacific Islanders to the Christian celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem. On one such tour in 1991, I stumbled onto what I presumed to be photographs of three Papua New Guinean girls in a vast collage that covered one entire wall of not-to-be-forgotten old photos in the office of a photographer friend. I had never seen these seemingly familiar faces on any of my tours, and I knew that my friend had never ventured into the rugged PNG Highlands. On inquiring where he got these shots of PNG girls, he replied, “Sorry, they’re not from PNG, but Ethiopian Jews!”

Taken aback, I promptly ushered several from that year’s tour group over to his office to test their sense of ethnic acumen. I was sure they would also declare the nationality of the three girls to be Papua New Guinean. Well, not quite!

Without any prompts of my own assumptions, I asked my trio of test candidates where they thought these girls might be from? Drifting even deeper into delusion, they “identified” two of the three faces with actual areas—specific villages—in the Southern Highlands! The third, they concluded, looked a bit different, maybe more Melanesian from the PNG coast!

Which surprise response opened up a can of words!

My three fellow travelers revealed to me that their ancient tribal ancestor was Avram Pamu. He left a legacy not to kill, steal, take another man’s wife or tell lies. I didn’t have a clue on the Pamu bit, but Avram and the added moral flavor obviously rang a bell!

They then proceeded to tell me several legends in their tribal lore that bore fascinating overtones of the Genesis account—the first parents, the flood, the tower of Babel and shades of Jacob and Esau. But this latter lore was hardly a surprise since I had lived 30 years as a Bible translator in the next tribe to the east, where years earlier I had already heard identical accounts of Bible stories intertwined in their own tales of ages past.

Never mind that abba was the word for father in the dialect of my 3 friends, while it had linguistically changed to ab in our own dialect. In another dialect shift it changed it to abu in the tribe beyond us! As a linguist I discovered even more features in the dialects throughout that particular area that hinted hazily of Hebrew.

But even more striking similarities are the Semitic facial features in these and related Highland tribes, quite in contrast to African or even coastal Melanesian identity in the hundreds of other tribes that comprise the linguistic collage that is Papua New Guinea.

And since those days, we have encountered even more intriguing signposts pointing toward a mixture of Middle East origins within the Pacific Islands.

In Malaita of the Solomon Islands are the sacred stones that have long bourn the legend of being ancient altars modeled after Abraham’s covenantal passage into Canaan.

However, my most recent discovery emerged in early 2003. In my book, “Where Is the Body?” I had briefly touched on these “lost tribe” phenomena on the Pacific, noting also the Karen tribe in Myanmar and similar speculation in hinterland China. So when a sharp public servant in the Republic of Vanuatu stumbled upon this information in my book, he was ecstatic for the corroboration of what he had already read.

He excitedly photocopied and mailed me several pages of a pre-WW2 book by Dr. J. Graham Miller, a Presbyterian missionary in the New Hebrides [now Vanuatu] from 1941-1972. Dr. Miller documented from his earliest contacts, that he was astounded to learn from the very primitive natives that they had long associated their origins with the “ten lost tribes of Israel”. Moreover, in the Vakamai dialect of the Shepherd Tribe, the name they had reported to their earliest missionaries for their “high God” was Yehova Ariki; while in another distant island, the tribe there had identified their “high God” as Iehowa Asori. These names, of course, had been rooted in those languages before Western contact. Ironically, the above two spellings didn’t even make it past my “secular” spelling checker, suggesting I ought to be spelling those two initial names with a J!

And for one more fascinating reflection of Father Abraham, Miller also discovered that circumcision was widely practiced throughout the New Hebrides!

But finally, a totally distinctive demonstration of identity with the offspring of Abraham is the unique attraction of Papua New Guinea and her sister Pacific Island nations to the prophetic reality of an Israel re-gathered in 1948, plus the 1967 encore of a Jerusalem restored. In observing the nationwide responses, one can hardly dismiss out of hand some sort of a latent sense of spiritual belonging. Reflecting that relationship, in the July 2004 Islamic sponsored UN resolution condemning Israel’s protective security fence, of the 15 nations that either stood with Israel or by abstention avoided condemning her, over half were from the South Pacific Islands. Sheer coincidence? I have my doubts!

Yet lest we oversimplify all losses and wanderings with the exile of ten only idolatrous tribes prodded up to Assyria in 721 BC, there are other possibilities. The rabbis have also suggested that not all of the Israelites may have left Egypt with Moses some 560 years previous. Now that’s an option. Those who for whatever reason might have missed the Moses-march, may have had to take a multi-thousand mile Southeast Asian detour to catch up—not to mention an additional 3000-year sojourn in Stone Age exile before the next bus home! But to judge the spiritual enthusiasm of the Pacific Islanders, that day is drawing closer.

But really, the bottom line is that the Most High God always seems to know where His wandering kids have gone when He wants to find them!

Victor Schlatter, Bible Translator and Senior Advisor to the Tiliba Christian Church, Nipa, SHP, and current Director of South Pacific Island Ministries, Inc., Cairns, Qld. Australia.