Davidic kingdom that had first created the ten tribes and their disappearance
thereafter.
In earlier periods, the search for the ten tribes was mostly fueled by the
desire to solve a biblical mystery or was an expression of Jewish messianic
hopes. The desire for restoration and restitution certainly existed in Jewish
thinking about the ten tribes, but by the later parts of the sixteenth century, the
ten tribes had become much more pronounced as a Christian code for restitu-
tion. Calvin played an important role in this shift. Recall that the first book
dedicated solely to a theological treatment of the ten tribes was the seven-
teenth-century Calvinist Hebraist theologian Witsius’s Dekaphylon: Sive De
Decem Tribubus.Restitution, however, was not unique to Calvin or Calvinism.
Calvin should be viewed as an expression of a much more general European
mood. He, of course, did not represent all of Christendom at the time, but his
Commentarieson the ten tribes shed light on a much larger frame of mind for
which he serves as an example. And, as one of the most influential early
modern Christian thinkers, Calvin’s overall impact is not to be underestimated.
Calvin’sCommentaryon Hosea (“Inasmuch as the body became torn
asunder... Together shall be gathered the children of Judah and the children
of Israel”) graphically expresses the anxieties produced by the ancient story of
David’s kingdom split into two parts, one eventually punished for its sins and
banished. For Calvin, the ten tribes were the perfect example of a people who
had sinned and been punished. The schism was a body torn asunder, an idea
repeated in hisCommentaryon Jeremiah 33 : 23 – 24 , which speaks of the “body
of the people that had been torn asunder.” No one had written about the schism
between the two and the ten tribes with such imagery, likening schism to the
dismemberment of the human body.
Calvin, a French Protestant who had left France and witnessed the migra-
tion of many French Protestants out of the realm of the “elder daughter of the
Church,” was very sensitive to divisions. Indeed, he tended to notice them
everywhere in the Bible:
Not only were the twelve tribes divided, but the tribe of Benjamin was
split in two also. Again not only was this tribe divided, but of the sons
of Joseph, Ephraim dominated his brother Manasseh. And although
members of the ten tribes wanted to worship in Jerusalem, Jeroboam
saw to it that they received their own religious sites. The tree of Israel,
grown from one root with various branches, was cut into pieces.^60
Yet, just as Calvin emphasized schisms and splits, he stressed restorations
and restitutions. While the body may be torn apart, there is the hope that unity
will be restored and that what was lost shall be returned. He can be read here as