“I found myself in possession of light that I had received in boyhood...[and]
the matter grew upon me until...I clearly saw that Identity of the Lost Tribes
of Israel was one grand essential of the age.”^113
In 1891 , an essayist writing on “The Art of Conversation” compared the
“believer in Anglo-Israel identity” to the “vegetarian, or the anti-tobbacoist,”
categories of people fixated on one topic which, endlessly, they discussed.^114 In
the Anglo-Israel theory, a long and complex history of geographical theology
was brought together.
Isaiah’s prophecies concerning the Israelites on the isles of the sea became
the most basic geographical tenet of the Anglo-Israelist creed. Mormonism
offered new revelations in order to override science. Anglo-Israelism, on the
other hand, used science, or scientific modes of argumentation, in order to
support its arguments. The grounds for this were already formulated in 1836
by William Carpenter ( 1797 – 1874 ), who, like many biblical scholars, was also a
natural scientist. HisBiblical Companioninstructed the reader on how to read
the Bible in conjunction with, among other things, “biblical criticism, history
and natural sciences.”^115 Carpenter announced in 1874 that “the Israelites
found in the Anglo-Saxons were of the isles of the sea.” In a manner that
may seem paradoxical today, modern science and modern disciplines such as
biblical criticism together helped Carpenter to ground his argument. Carpen-
ter was the first, for instance, to incorporate Sargon’s inscriptions about the
deportations, which were discovered in 1845 by archaeologists in northern
Mesopotamia. That Sargon’s number of deportees— 27 , 280 or slightly
more—dwarfed the grandiosity of the theory did not discourage Carpenter.
After all, the prophet Isaiah had said, “The little one shall become a thousand; /
And the small one a strong nation.”^116 That strong nation was the Anglo-
Saxon race.
Like Rudbeck Jr. before him, Carpenter also focused first on Gothic history
and ethnography, albeit in a more informed and detailed way, in order to show
the relationship between the Goths and Israelites. Yet he eventually focused on
the fact that the Britons, as opposed to other European nations, dwelled on
isles—which must be the isles of the sea mentioned by Isaiah. Several years
later, the relentless Edward Hine collected all the biblical verses in which isles
were mentioned in his discussion of “identification the fifth,” which concerned
the British isles. “Listen O Isles, unto me,” he quoted Isaiah ( 49 : 1 ) and
explained, “Israel must be found in the Isles.” The following identification
relied on Isaiah 24 : 15 to show that these isles must be northwest of Palestine
since “the name of the lord God is in the Isles of the Western seas.” The
absence of the north from the verse should not discourage the believer. Isaiah,
as we have seen, also prophesied that the ten tribes shall come from the north.
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