This is a very recent teaching that, despite its real fringe status, is gaining a growing (but still very tiny) number of adherents. It is variously called the Ephraimite, Restoration of Israel, Two Covenant Israel, or Two House movement. According to this teaching, not only do Gentile Christians spiritually represent Old Testament Ephraim, but they actually are Ephraim. In other words, all Gentile believers are actually descendants of biblical Ephraim, or, more precisely, descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes. Interestingly, this movement “has recently gained ground in some areas among ardent Christian Zionists”[258] who have obviously gone one big step too far in their identification with Israel.
A position paper written by Messianic Jewish leaders gives further details:
The movement’s proponents . . . argue that these dispersed “Israelites,” or “Ephraimites,” whose identities have remained undisclosed even to themselves until recent times, primarily settled in areas now recognized as largely populated by Anglo-Saxons. At times they argue that all Anglo-Saxons, and even all of humanity, are descended from these lost Ephraimites. At other times, that only born-again Christians can claim descent. In either case, Christians from Anglo-Saxon lands, such as Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States, can feel assured that they are most likely direct blood descendants of the ancient people of Ephraim.
It is now incumbent upon these members of “Ephraim,” they argue, to “accept their birthright” and live as members of Israel. They urge Gentile Christians to keep the Torah in obedience to the Hebrew scriptures, to strive to re-educate Jews and other Christians about their new, “latter-day prophecy,” and to work toward the repatriation of the land of Israel by their own number.[259]
What exactly does this mean? Let us say you are a Gentile who was raised in an atheistic home in America, but at the age of twenty you had a wonderful, born-again experience, joined a local church and were enjoying your walk with the Lord. You loved the Jewish people and prayed for Israel, feeling a special spiritual connection with God’s ancient, covenant people, but that, of course, seemed quite natural. Then you heard this Two House teaching, and the light went on.
“Could it be that I’m actually a real Israelite? Could it be that, unbeknown to all of my family members for many generations, we are not really Gentiles but actually descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes? Now I understand! And if I’m an Israelite, then I’m responsible to observe the Torah—and I even have a birthright to the land of Israel!”
Does this sound bizarre? It certainly is. Yet the proponents of this teaching claim to have scriptural justification. Let us briefly examine some of their claims, recognizing that the Two House teachers would expand on each of these arguments and add many other arguments, all of which can be refuted by the careful study of Scripture.[260]
(1) The promises to the patriarchs speak of their descendants being a multitude of (Gentile) nations, which means that the Israelites will become a multitude of “Gentile” nations—and the Jews are neither a multitude nor are they Gentiles. Support for this is drawn from Genesis 48:19, where Jacob prophesies over the baby Ephraim that his “descendants will become a group of nations”; note that the Hebrew for “nation” here is goy, the word used for “Gentile” in parts of the Bible and in Jewish history until today. In refutation of this is the fact that goy in the Tanakh frequently refers to Israel and the Jewish people (see Deuteronomy 32:28, cf. 32:45; Joshua 10:12–13; Isaiah 1:4; 26:2; Jeremiah 31:36; Zephaniah 2:9). In fact, God promised Abram that He would make him a great goy in Genesis 12:2—obviously not meaning a great Gentile nation![261] To take this further, at the time of the patriarchs, there was no such thing as “Gentile,” since there was no such thing as the nation of Israel or the Jewish people in any formal or distinct way. So, “the term ‘Gentile’ is anachronistic as [Two House teachers] employ it in this context.”[262] Other verses erroneously cited in similar fashion include Genesis 17:5; 28:3; 35:11.
The Two House teachers also argue that the promises to the patriarchs about innumerable descendants (see Genesis 13:16) could not apply to the Jewish people, since their numbers today are approximately fourteen million. This must, therefore, apply to other Gentile nations who number in the hundreds of millions. Of course, simple logic would tell you that, if we can count the number of people on the earth today—roughly 6.5 billion—then they are not innumerable, which means that the promise to Abraham in Genesis 13:16 was meant as a figure of speech: From one man, millions and millions will spring up! Moses actually marveled at how God had made the people of Israel into a great multitude, using some of the very same language that was used in the promises to the patriarchs: “The Lord your God has increased your numbers so that today you are as many as the stars in the sky” (Deuteronomy 1:10; note also the language used in 2 Chronicles 1:9, and remember that in Old Testament times, the population of Israel was substantially less than the worldwide Jewish population today).
There is also a spiritual dimension to the promises to Abraham in which he becomes the father of all who believe in Jesus, both Jews and Gentiles, as Paul explains in Romans and Galatians (see Romans 4:9–17; Galatians 3:6–9, 26–29), but to apply this in a physical, lineal way, as if all believers were his blood descendants, is to negate completely Paul’s message.
(2) The term Ephraim, which is frequently used to describe the northern kingdom of Israel (i.e., the ten tribes) as a whole, is never used for Jews, and therefore the promises to Ephraim must be fulfilled through another people group. Actually, while Ephraim primarily refers to the northern kingdom of Israel, it is often used in the context of the nation as a whole, decidedly not to the exclusion of the Jewish people. A simple, straightforward reading of Jeremiah 31 makes this clear (and remember: this chapter was written more than a century after the exile and dispersion of the ten northern tribes and the immediate context had to do with the Babylonian exile of Judah). More significantly, since Ephraim is often used interchangeably with the names Israel and Jacob in the prophetic literature (again, Jeremiah 31 provides a good example of this), and if, as the Two House teachers claim, Ephraim/Israel is distinct from the Jewish people, then it would stand to follow that Israel or the house of Israel would not be used synonymously with the Jewish people. The opposite is actually true, in very decisive terms. In fact, the southern kingdom of Judah could actually be addressed as “all the clans of the house of Israel” (see Jeremiah 2:2, 4: “Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem”—that means the southern kingdom of Judah—“Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, all you clans of the house of Israel”). So, the Jewish people are being addressed in their capital city of Jerusalem, but they are addressed corporately as the “house of Jacob” and as “all you clans of the house of Israel.”
If the Two House teachers were correct, then Jeremiah’s audience should have stopped him and said, “What are you talking about? We are not all the clans of the house of Israel; we are just Judah. There are multitudes of other peoples, already scattered among the nations, that you should be addressing. They are the real house of Israel, the Ephraimites. We are just Jews.” Hardly! Similar instances could be cited throughout the prophetic books. (Note again the first verse of Jeremiah 31, a chapter just referenced, above: “ ‘At that time,’ declares the Lord, ‘I will be the God of all the clans of Israel, and they will be my people.’ ” The chapter then unfolds in the context of the exile of the Judeans. For other aspects to this discussion, along with the question of Jewish national identity, see #26 and #27.)
Carrying this over to the New Testament, we can see that Jesus referred to the Jewish people as “the lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 10:6). In fact, He distinguished “the lost sheep of Israel” from the Gentiles! Had the Two House teachers been correct, He should have said, “Now, don’t go to the Gentiles, who are actually the Ten Lost Tribes, but go instead to the Jews.” Instead, He said, “Don’t go to the Gentiles but only go to the lost sheep of Israel” (see Matthew 10:5–6). These verses alone are a sufficient refutation of the Two House teaching. Notice also that Paul spoke of his Jewish people as “our twelve tribes . . . [who] earnestly serve God day and night” (Acts 26:7), while Jacob (James) addresses his letter, which was written to Jewish believers, “To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations” (James 1:1). The Jewish people contained elements of all twelve tribes, and they were addressed and recognized as representing all twelve tribes (see #26 and #27).
Having said this, it is certainly possible that the promises to Ephraim or Israel in the prophetic books prefigure the promises to the Gentile branch of the Body—Paul quotes words applied to Israel, once alienated from God, and then applies them to the Gentiles in Romans 9, and Peter might do this as well in 1 Peter 2—but it is completely wrong to think the prophets were actually calling the Gentiles Ephraim or Israel.
For the sake of brevity, and because this is such a fringe teaching, this short, representative sampling will have to suffice. The position paper, referenced above, is a good place to start (giving a number of key references to proponents of the Two House teaching). Two final comments are in order.
First, as has been emphasized a number of times in this book, in Jesus the Messiah, Jew and Gentile are one, with equal standing and equal status in Him. One is not better than the other, and the only thing that ultimately matters is being rightly connected with Him—the Branch, the Bread of Life, the Redeemer, the Savior, the Head of the Body, the King (see #53). Rather than accepting their exalted status in the Lord as spiritual children of Abraham, these Two House teachers have felt the need to become physical children of Abraham. In so doing, not only do they believe something that is false, but they minimize the reality of their place in God, seeking a lower place rather than the higher place to which He has called them.
Second, there is one good thing that has been accomplished by the Two House theory, and that is to draw attention to passages such as Ezekiel 37:15–25, where God speaks of the reunification of Judah with Ephraim. The Two House proponents do get these texts wrong, but the question must be asked: Were verses such as these fulfilled in the return of the Jews from Babylonian exile, since among them were Israelite exiles as well, or do they point to a yet future restoration, one that could be ongoing this very day, in which scattered remnants of the so-called Ten Lost Tribes—from India and Africa—are returning to the Land?
Questions such as this are worth asking. Adherents to the Two House theory, however, would do best to abandon their error and focus on the Source of their life in God. (For the question of Torah observance, see #48.)