An even more bluntly political use of the ten tribes story came after the
ascension of the house of Hanover to the English Crown amid political uphea-
vals. In 1714 , the year George I ( 1660 – 1727 ) was installed as the first Hanover
monarch, George Ridpath (d. 1726 ), a prolific journalist and pamphleteer,
published a lengthy treatise “in Defence of the late Revolution and the Hanover
succession” that he sent to all members of the English Parliament. “The late
King James...came with a French power to wreath the yoke of popery and
slavery on our necks,” wrote Ridpath, “an overt act more express than that of
Rehoboam.” And, as he pointed out, Jeroboam had been given the divine order
to secede in direct response to Rehoboam. Ridpath traced the history of the ten
tribes down to their exile, reminding his readers that “the Israelites were
forever dispers’d among Foreign Nations for their concurrence with their
kings in Idolatry, Tyranny, and the Breach of Leagues.”^11 Never mind that
theur-text in 2 Kings mentions no crimes other than idolatry. The addition of
the political crimes of tyranny and deceitful diplomacy to the ten tribes’ story
nicely shows the politicization of the story characteristic of eighteenth-century
England. After all, what could be more authoritative than the Bible? Ridpath’s
justification of the Hanovers’ coming to power did not make them immune to
the criticism that had befallen their predecessors: the ten tribes could be used
to undermine any regime and justify any revolt.^12
Just as the pains of schism were not lost on Calvin during the sixteenth
century, political thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth focused on the
legitimacy of the tribes’ secession from and revolt against a rightful king. On
December 12 , 1776 , the Scottish priest William Thom ( 1710 – 1790 ) delivered a
lengthy sermon on “The Revolt of the Ten Tribes”: “Is there not cause to look on
this war...which threatens a division of the British Empire, as a judgment of
heaven, for our impiety and wickedness?”^13 Thom was not the only one to tie
the impending schism to the split in ancient Israel. The great Scottish jurist
and theologian John Erskine ( 1721 – 1803 ) discussed the case of the ten tribes as
an example of the sort of bad administrative “measures that have unhappily
occasioned the American revolt.”^14 One magazine of 1777 opined that the ten
tribes’ revolt was “a defensive war exactly upon the same ground as that of the
Americans, a refusal to submit to the arbitrary imposition of taxes.”^15 Across
the Atlantic, the famous revolutionary preacher and New York politician
Abraham Keteltas ( 1732 – 1798 ) reminded his listeners that “when Rehoboam
and Judah went out to fight against [the ten tribes] to bring them back to
subjection, God sent his prophet...saying ‘ye shall not go up and fight against
your brethren.’”^16 Perhaps within the political rhetoric surrounding the revo-
lutions of 1688 and 1776 lurk the roots of both the United States’ and Eng-
land’s nineteenth-century identification with the ten tribes. As a theological
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