But less I digress to much, I was raised around sheep, from my youth. I know something about sheep group mentality. I know how they respond to their shepherd. I know what happens when blood thirsty dogs get into them, how they will follow a sheep bell, the bell they get accustomed to, that they hear the loudest. I know how easilly they can get confused, and how easily they can become lost. Only a shepherd can find his sheep because only a shepherd knows how they think. Did a few sheep get lost in turkey, Russia, Mongolia, England, and a hundred other places…sure, easily.

The 10 tribes can be as easily lost from the minds of man as say the Jewish descendants of King Zedekiahs son who came to the Lands of the America’s with the Mulekites. How many Jewish descendants did he have that are lost to us today among the Lamanites. Think of it, a whole culture infused with a genetic Jewish link to the throne of David literally, and all because he happened to come here, probably with other Jewish folks, and we call them Mulekites. These lost Jews among the Lamanites are joining the kingdom of God in great numbers, because they hear the call of the shepherd who prepared a Book for them, a book that speaks to them, intimately, deeply, a bell they hear and want to follow.Think that literally there is a kingdom of Jews among the kingdom of God now who will help build a New Jerusalem, and restore a temple in old Jerusalem, who are now being nurtured in the ways and admonitions of the Lord. And many non Jewish members of the church may not be aware of it. Still lost to some but not to God and not to his servants! Yes a nation shall be born in a day when when comes and they behold the wounds in his hands and his feet, but today there are Jewish/Lamanite descendants who are already apart of that nation and who completly understand the wounds in His hands……

Interesting idea about Lehi escaping our of radar so to speak. Makes prophecies about his descendants even more important insofar as literal lineage is concerned (however many individuals with actual Lehite DNA passed on their genes.) But don’t forget that God is also of stones able to raise up seed to Abraham. The Law of Adoption is an important part of the miracle of the restoration of the House of Israel.

I am just a dabbler. I read widely but not deeply. I started out with Deseret book publications when I was young. I have been known to slip into Christian Book stores. I took Archeology magazines for a while. Harpers Bible commentary is another good source, although I can only pretend to have my mind around it. All night discussions while camping with non-LDS parents of boys the same age as my son who have read widely is also very educational.

I agree with the last part of your post. Just think about how completely unlikely and outrageous the story of Joseph Smith and the Restoration is on the surface. How many time do you think I have told that story with a straight face to a genuine friend and had them look at me and say something like: “..and you actually believe all of that?”

Probably no worse than the Old Testament.

Terrific post. Where can I go to read up on more of that stuff?

Also, you said “But God will save a reminant of them in some miraculous way that we have not considered,”

Perhaps the salvation of the other tribes will be similar to the salvation of the tribe of Joseph. Lehi was led away in a way that is completely unrecognized by recorded world history, and thereby the remnant of Joseph was preserved.

One thing to keep in mind about the 10 tribes is how they were actually lost in the first place. I am not an expert on ancient civilizations. But it is my understanding that the Assyrians who conquered them were a vicious group of people who practiced a thorough scorched earth policy. I heard somewhere that Assyrian soldiers were not paid until after the battle and only so much for each head they cut off. Men, women, and children. Assyrian or otherwise. So if you were in the thick of it and some of your comrades fell by the sword, you whacked off their heads too for extra pay. If you didn’t whack at least one head off, you got no pay and you might starve and thence become a source of military pay for the next guy. The Assyrians did not herd the Israelites back home individually or as a group as might be depicted in some epic film of my imagination. This would require feeding them and guarding them and the Assyrians were not inclined to do it. The Assyrian armies completely anniliated the people they conquered including the Israelites.

It is my understanding that the only Israelites who survived the Assyrian firestorm fled to the safety of Jerusalem (the Mountain of the Lord) which was an extremely secure military stronghold. Joshua and his successors in the Book of Judges never conquered Jeruslem for Israel. It wasn’t until the time of King David and his more creative or inspired approach to warfare that Jeruslem fell and this is one reason why Jerusalem is called the City of David. And so Jerusalem held against the Assyrians, barely.

A few generations later the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem 2 or 3 times and they are thought to have been much more benign than the Assyrians. But more effective. The Israelites thought they could not be conquered and they were almost right. The Babylonians led some few of the survivers back home into captivity unlike the Assyrians, and life was not too bad for some of them. For example Daniel or Shadrack, Meshack, and Abindigo. Not bad at all if you could get along with hungry lions and didn’t mind getting baked in a fiery furnace, etc. You can read about the horrors of this more benign Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in the Book of Lamantations; mothers so desperate that they ate their own children and so forth, but at least they survived to write.

The only possible survivors of the Assyrian conquest would be cute little teenage girls who were worth more alive as sex slaves to brutal Assyrian soldiers willing to cut off the heads of their own fellow soldiers than they were worth dead. You can imagine the horror of their life if they were allowed to live. A few might have been able to produce children in abject slavery and so forth. But they would have lost their history of who they were in a single generation and the next generations had to survive the down fall of Assyrian which was unpleasant to say the least, considering how they had treated everyone else. The few girls that they raped and impregnated and left to starve in Palestine became the ancestors of the hated Samaritians some 700 years later in New Testament times.

I think these Biblical stories have symbolic meaning. First, If you want to survive the temptations and the turmoil of the last days you have got to flee to some place safe like Jerusalem. Maybe not physically safe, since I don’t think Salt Lake City or Provo is much better than a variety of other similar American cities. But somewhere spiritually safe in your mind. The temple might be a good modern symbol of the safety of Jerusalem but even that is not guaranteed. Jerusalem did fall. Again and again.

Second, the entirely lost state of the 10 tribes is also symbolic, in addition to historic. The 10 tribes are lost in every way that we can imagine. More than physically and spiritually lost. But God will save a reminant of them in some miraculous way that we have not considered. To me this means that no matter how lost you think you might be, or how messed up your life has become, that you and I are not as lost as those 10 tribes. And God can certainly save us if he can save some of them. The utter loss and promised literal restoration of the 10 tribes is the symbolic representation of the miracle of the Atonement of Christ.

These two symbolic events are paradoxical if you think of it. Prevention and Redemption. (Why do I need to repent if I am keeping the commandments?) But most truth is paradoxical at the deeper levels.

i’ve always been struck by how people in the book of mormon could care so deeply about stuff that would happen hundreds, even thousands, of years in the future. if we care at all about this sort of thing–and i’m with you, i’m not sure how to do that in practical terms–it would probably be similar to the way nephi cared about stuff that would happen 2600 years after he died.

Oh – my teacher didn’t endorse it — just listed it among the wild theories he’d heard. The only other one I recall involved an inhabited asteroid, taken from where the Gulf of Mexico now is.

Given latter-day Genocide; and scriptural records indicating previous genocides (in the Bible, the People of Jared, etc.), it seems far more likely that the other tribes where not just socially and culturally; but physically destroyed.