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Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
Claude Olivier
Ten Lost Tribes of Israel
The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is a reference to the ten of the twelve tribes deported from the Kingdom of Israel after its conquest by Assyria in 722 BC. It has been pointed out that the Hebrew Bible has relatively little to say on the matter.
In 1865, Brasseur de Bourbourg discovered some of Bishop Diego de Landa‘s lost documents. He studied the thoroughly flawed interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphics by de Landa, produced in the 16th century and proceeded to develop his own faulty translation.
Nigel Davies has revealed [1635] that Brasseur, as well as Lord Kingsborough (1795-1829), concluded that the native Americans were the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Kingsborough spent a £40,000 fortune publishing The Antiquities of Mexico in nine huge volumes, an extravagance that landed him in a Dublin debtors’ prison for non-payment of bills relating to publication costs and sadly, he died there.
The variety of identifications put forward for some or all of these groups is quite remarkable, ranging from the reasonable to the ridiculous. At one end of that spectrum, the view “is that the “lost tribes of Israel” were never really lost. Many of the Jews who remained in the land after the Assyrian conquest re-united with Judah in the south (2 Chronicles 34:6–9). Assyria was later conquered by Babylon, who went on to invade the Southern Kingdom of Israel, deporting the two remaining tribes: Judah and Benjamin (2 Kings 25:21). Remnants of the northern tribes would have thus been part of the Babylonian deportations. Seventy years later, when King Cyrus allowed the Israelites to return to Israel (Ezra 1), many (from all twelve tribes) returned to Israel to rebuild their homeland.” (a)
>>At this point I must mention Leo Frobenius, who, over a century ago, nominated the Yoruba territory of Nigeria as the home of Atlantis!<<
At the other end is the entertaining idea that the Lost Tribes inhabit the interior of a Hollow Earth, which is defended by flying saucers!(b)
Another unexpected claim, with a tenuous Atlantis connection, comes from “Dierk Lange(a)(h)*, Prof. Dr Emeritus, of Bayreuth University in Germany, who has performed extensive research concerning many West African groups and their origins in the Near East. In the abstract to one of his many essays, “Dierk Lange: Origin of the Yoruba and “The Lost Tribes of Israel”,” Dierk confirms the traditions of a Levantine (Israelite) origin of the Yoruba Nigerians.”(d)(e)
Nearly as extreme is the attempt to link the Lost Tribes with Atlantis, a combination that would not normally leap to mind. However, some have attempted to justify such a linkage in spite of the contradictions between Plato’s story and the details of this minority opinion.
This alleged relationship between Atlantis and Israel points out that the Biblical patriarch Jacob who had twelve sons, excluded two of them, Levi and Simeon. Jacob is then presented as having been Poseidon with the ten remaining sons ruling Atlantis. One of Jacob’s sons, Gad, is assumed to have been Gadeiros, one of the ten sons of Poseidon. After that, no further parallels are offered to connect Jacob’s other sons with the remainder of Poseidon’s offspring.
In Britain, “Richard Brothers (1757–1823), a retired naval officer and a radical Calvinist, revealed himself as a prophet of the lost tribes in 1794 in London. The fact that he was writing from the confinement of Fisher Mad-House, Islington, did not deter many from following him and producing the doctrine of Anglo-Israelism: a fiercely nationalist theology based on the idea that the British Isles were the home of the lost tribes.” (c)
A 2016 paper by Prof. W.A Liebenberg begins the Introduction(g) with “ Dolmens and Megalithic Monuments originated in Ancient Israel. The prophet Jeremiah (31:21) is instructed to make it clear that the Ten Tribes will construct a trail of Megalithic Monuments from their homeland Israel to their places of deportation and further migration into the nations, and evidence of this path will be a vivid reminder of their forefathers and will also enable them to return. Such a trail undoubtedly exists and is embedded in the earth’s crust! It is the Trail of the Dolmens from the Middle East to the various nations.”
To suggest that the megaliths mark the tribal dispersal routes is to my mind utter nonsense. Judging by the number of megaliths spread throughout the world there should be thousands of ‘lost tribes’, not to mention that the biblical lost tribes disappeared in the 8th century BC, even though the megaliths are scientifically dated to the 5th millennium BC!
Also See: Agartha, Baer, Baucum, Bible, Davidiy, Eurenius, Olivier, Salverda and Wauchope.
(a) https://www.gotquestions.org/lost-tribes-Israel.html
(b) https://www.ourhollowearth.com/ourhollo/index.html
Bible
The Bible offers no direct reference to Atlantis under that name, but this is not to be seen as proof of its non-existence, when you consider that in spite of the fact that the Hebrews were in Egypt for hundreds of years, the Bible does not mention the pyramids either and they most certainly did then and still do, exist.
The Bible has been invoked as a justification for everything from war to slavery. It has been one of the most divisive books ever, having been instrumental in the creation of hundreds, if not thousands, of competing Christian sects over the last two millennia. It is assumed that any theory, religious or secular that can be shown to have a biblical foundation will automatically have enhanced credibility.
Jean De Serres, the 16th-century historian, was probably the first to link Atlantis with the Bible when he wrote that Atlantis had been located in the Holy Land. Lewis Spence[259.33] accused Huet, Borchart and Vossius, in the 16th and 17th centuries of using ‘ingenious misreading of the Pentateuch’ to claim that the Platonic story of Atlantis was, in reality, a version of patriarchal history. In a similar vein, in 1726 a French lawyer, Claude Olivier, wrote of his conviction that the ten tribes of Israel were to be equated with the ten kingdoms of Atlantis.
The Book of Genesis in particular has inspired speculation regarding a possible link between the Bible and the Atlantis narrative. Ignatius Donnelly in his seminal Atlantis: The Antidiluvian World, devoted Chapter Six to ‘demonstrating’ that Genesis held a history of Atlantis(o).
Therefore, I advise that any new scriptural interpretation must be treated with extreme caution. With that in mind, I mention that an American researcher, J. D. Brady, who claims to be a scriptural scholar and as such has identified Atlantis, drawing on chapters 26-28 of Ezekiel. He refers to the Atlanteans as Tyrrhenians and names their leader as Satan! He claims that the Tyre referred to in these chapters was an island named Tyrus that Plato knew as Atlantis. He offers a range of data to suggest that this Tyrus was not the Tyre we know today located in Lebanon. Brady claims with great certainty that the remains of Atlantis are to be found in the Bay of Troy! A 2014 book[1016] by David Hershiser, Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, has taken up this idea that the reference in Ezekiel was concerned with Atlantis.
Not content with identifying Atlantis, Brady also claims to know the location of the Ark of the Covenant, saying that “It is currently secreted in an underground treasure crypt on Lemnos Island.”(b)
H.S. Bellamy, the Austrian researcher, also produced a volume[097], The Book of Revelation is History, devoted to demonstrating that the last book of the New Testament is a coded description of the catastrophes that accompanied the capture of our Moon! He claimed that the reference to the ten horns is an allusion to the ten Atlantean kings. He also interpreted the Book of Jeremiah I & II as well as Ezekiel as containing references to aspects of the Atlantis story. Earlier, Kurt Bilau had also been seduced by the theories of Hans Hörbiger and also like Bellamy endeavoured to use the Book of Revelations to support this belief.
However, R Cedric Leonard does offer(a) an interesting comparison of a passage in the Old Testament with the classical writers:
“And it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose…
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same mighty men (heroes) which were of old, men of renown.” (Genesis 6:1-2,4)
This passage has been frequently invoked to support the daft idea that extraterrestrial visitors had intercourse with human females, a contention that was debunked by Klaus Aschenbrenner some years ago(l).
“The mixture between gods and men, which is reported in the sixth chapter of Genesis of the Old Testament, is to be interpreted in a similar way: “Then the children of God looked after the daughters of men, how beautiful they were, and took them for wives, which they wanted … and begot them children.”
The fact that offspring resulted from this union clearly speaks for the earthly origin of those Divine beings. There is a genetic barrier that makes it difficult for similar species to mix. For example, if one tries to cross closely related animal species, such as horses and donkeys, the stallions of the resulting mixed forms of mule or hinny are sterile. We must therefore not expect any offspring from a connection between humans and higher extraterrestrial beings because of the certainly greater genetic differences.”
Leonard points out that this same passage in Genesis coincides with Plato’s history of the Atlanteans and highlights that Hesiod referred to the Titans, of which Atlas was one, as the ‘sons of heaven’.
Leonard also offers a more rational translation of Job 26:5-6 that strengthens this view that the Atlanteans and Titans are identical:
“The Titans tremble beneath the waters and the inhabitants thereof. Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering”.
2011 saw the publication of Atlantis: The Eyewitnesses[749] by Walter Parks in which he also quoted extensively from the Book of Job, having claimed that it was written in 9619 BC and contained an eyewitness account of the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis!
In 2007, David Stewart Jnr., a prominent Mormon writer, offered support for Flem-Ath’s ‘Atlantis in Antarctica’ theory in an article on his scripture history website(p).
Thorwald C. Franke has reviewed a range of theories that have sought to associate various aspects of Bible history with elements of the Atlantis story. Most are rather speculative, but Franke concludes(d) that “the Bible should not be underestimated: There could indeed be indirect hints to Plato’s Atlantis in the Bible!” Furthermore, he also suggested that “A basic error is to consider the Bible as a source of information on the most ancient times of humankind. In truth, vast parts of the Bible were written only very late (since the 6th century BC). For the question of Atlantis, this is much too late!”
The biblical references to Tarshish are also used by those who equate it with Tartessos and in turn identify it as Atlantis. The location of Tarshish is a highly contentious issue with scholars unable to arrive at any clear consensus. However, there is some agreement that Tartessos had been located in Southern Spain. Some proponents of that idea not only consider Tarshish identical to Tartessos but to Atlantis as well. Richard Freund is a proponent of a Spanish Tartessos, which he also identifies with Atlantis and of course with the biblical Tarshish. This Bible connection was taken further in James Cameron’s 2017 (a) documentary, Atlantis Rising, which shows Simcha Jacobovici also linking Tarshish with Atlantis(h) and offering as ‘evidence’ for a linkage between Atlantis and the Jewish Temple, the design of the Hebrew menorah(g), which he claims is a representation of one half the concentric rings of Plato’s city of Atlantis. This foolish idea is not new, as it has already been suggested by Prof. Yahya Ababni(f). Georgeos Diaz-Montexano has also considered this as a possibility(k).
Turning the tables on the idea of the Bible supporting the story of Atlantis, Marjorie Braymer[198.30] wrote that Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th cent. AD) was the first to use Plato’s Atlantis to support the veracity of the Bible.
Another line of investigation might be the suggested parallels between Greek mythology and Genesis(c). A 2023 paper by Neil Godfrey offers some comments on Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts [2066] by Russell E. Gmirkin supporting the idea that the creation of the world and the story of the first humans in Genesis both draw directly on Plato’s famous account of the origins of the universe, mortal life and evil containing equal parts science, theology and myth(n).
A paper on the Academia.edu website(e) by M. De Rosa argues that Atlantis was the ‘Beast’ in the Book Of Revelation!
More recently, a Dutch commentator, Leon Elshout, has also written extensively, in Dutch and English, linking Atlantis and Babylon(i) with details in the Book of Revelation. He claims “that there is a dualistic principle behind Atlantis, expressed by the twin pillars of Hercules and the twin kings, so that Atlantis was mirrored in time and space from Babylon AND Jerusalem.” He also claims that chapters 2 & 7 of the Book of Daniel offer mirror images of the Athenian-Atlantean conflict(m). Among various odd ideas expressed by him is the suggestion that Tarshish was in Britain(j).
>>Other events and people in the Bible that have been associated with aspects of the Atlantis story include the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Flood, Abraham, the Exodus, Amalekites, Sodom and the Ark of the Covenant.<<
(a) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20170607013948/https://www.atlantisquest.com:80/Myth.html
(b) The Ark of the Covenant – on the trail again! – Ritmeyer Archaeological Design (archive.org)
(c) https://njbiblescience.org/presentations/Greek%20Mythology%20and%20Genesis.pdf
(d) https://www.atlantis-scout.de/atlantis_bible.htm
(e) (DOC) ATLANTIS AS THE BEAST IN REVELATIONS | Michael Joseph DeRosa – Academia.edu (archive.org) *
(f) https://mosestablet.info/en/menorah-tablet.html
(g) https://www.wnd.com/2017/02/ocean-explorer-atlantis-found-and-linked-to-jewish-temple/
(h) Lost City of Atlantis And Its Incredible Connection to Jewish Temple (archive.org)
(j) (8) Tarshish as Great Britain and the paradox with Atlantis – Rood Goud van Parvaïm (archive.org)
(l) They didn’t come from other stars – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
(m) 1903.0463v1.pdf (vixra.org)
(o) https://sacred-texts.com/atl/ataw/ataw306.htm
(p) http://scripturehistory.com/atlantisinantarctica.php (link broken)