Old Canaan in a New World Review: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel (Book Review) (original) (raw)

Elizabeth Fenton’s book is the study of an error that emerged during the colonial period and persists in some circles to this day. “If American people were the lost tribes of Israel,” Fenton writes, “the hemisphere’s absence from biblical accounts of creation would make sense, because it would have been—eternally and by design—the designated hiding place for the tribes." She pulls from various expressions of the theory to demonstrate how the idea was contrived and used to consolidate a Christian eschatological scheme (sacred time) with colonial pursuits (secular time). The book ends with a discussion of how discoveries in DNA have revived interest in Native American origins and breathed new life into the Hebraic Indian theory. No grand conclusions are drawn from these observations, other than highlighting the theory’s malleability and staying power. In general, the book is more concerned with charting the history, permutations, rise and fall, and persistence of the theory than stressing why the reader should be aware of these intricacies.