The American Indian, our brethren of the House of Israel

THE AMERICAN INDIAN, OUR BRETHREN OF THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL How YAHWEH Planted the Lost Tribes of Israel in America Rev. John Shane Vaughn First Harvest Ministries International 1st Revision 10/12/2026 DOES THIS STORY SOUND FAMILIAR? THE STORY The enemy was behind them, and the great water was in front of them. Men, women, and children stood at the edge of it with nowhere left to run. They could hear the pursuers coming. They could see the waves stretching out before them with no end in sight. Then their leader lifted his staff and struck the water. The waters split apart. A road of dry ground opened through the deep, and the people walked through it on their own feet. When the last of them reached the far shore, the waters came crashing back together, and not one of their enemies could follow. First Harvest Ministries International • 1 They went on into a vast wilderness. They came to a high mountain, and the Creator came down upon it. Their leader climbed into the presence of the Most High, and the top of that mountain blazed bright as the sun. He came down carrying a law written on a smooth stone. More commands came to them written on skins. Fire fell from heaven, and they kept that holy fire burning for their sacrifices. And they carried that fire across the great water, all the way to THIS land. You may think I am reading to you from Exodus. I am not. This is what the Cherokee told the missionaries. It was printed in 1899 in George E. Foster's Story of the Cherokee Bible. The Cherokee said that the book the white man carried had once been THEIRS. They said their greatest prophet was a man named Wasi, who taught them about priests, feasts, and commandments. Now tell me how a people living in the mountains of America came to remember Moses. THE QUESTION THAT WILL NOT GO AWAY Do not rush past that question. A resemblance is something to examine. A testimony is something to hear. Neither should be dismissed merely because it arrives from a people whose history we have neglected. First Harvest Ministries International • 2 Who told the story? What did they say? What did they believe they had received from those who came before them? Those questions deserve more than a laugh. I am not asking you to surrender your discernment. I am asking you to use it. Open the record. Hear the witnesses. Consider the traditions. Then ask whether there is something here that deserves a place in our understanding of the scattered house of Israel. For too long, we have approached this subject as though the verdict had already been delivered before the witnesses entered the room. Let them enter. Let them speak. And let the Church be willing to hear a question before deciding that it has no answer. WHAT THIS MINISTRY HAS ALWAYS TAUGHT This ministry has long taught what the prophets declared and the Church refused to see. The lost tribes of Israel were scattered across the whole face of the earth, and that includes America. Long before Christopher Columbus, a Jew, set foot in this hemisphere, and long before Amerigo Vespucci gave this land its name, YAHWEH had already planted His people here. They did not wander here by accident. They were placed here supernaturally. YAHWEH set them First Harvest Ministries International • 3 on this land to hold it, to keep it, and to guard it for their brethren of the lost tribes who would arrive centuries later. "When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel." (Deuteronomy 32:8) "And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." (Acts 17:26) YAHWEH determined the bounds of their habitation. He chose the land, and He chose the time. Here is the mystery. All of this was known only to the mind of YAHWEH. The people we now call Indians, the Native Americans, did not know who they were. They carried the fragments of a memory: a parted sea, a mountain of fire, a law on stone, a sacred Name, a day of rest. But they did not know whose memory it was. They kept the pieces without knowing whose they were. YAHWEH knew. He always knew. "For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth." (Amos 9:9) Not the least grain. Not one. First Harvest Ministries International • 4 SCATTERED DOES NOT MEAN FORGOTTEN There is a difference between being lost to the knowledge of men and being lost to the knowledge of YAHWEH. A family may lose the record of its fathers. A people may cease to understand the meaning of a custom. A name may change. A language may change. The explanation may disappear while the practice remains. But the failure of human memory does not require a failure of divine memory. That is the force of the promise we have just read. The sieve shakes. The nations move. Generations pass. Yet the grain remains under the eye of the One who commanded the sifting. Our question, then, is not whether every scattered family could explain its own journey. Our question is whether YAHWEH could remain faithful through a journey that the family itself no longer understood. I believe He could. And that belief gives us a reason to investigate, not an excuse to stop investigating. If we believe He remembers, we should not be afraid to search. First Harvest Ministries International • 5 THE KING'S SON WHO FELL ASLEEP There is an ancient story that every scattered son of Israel ought to hear. It is preserved in the Acts of Thomas, an apocryphal book from the earliest centuries after YAHSHUA, and it is called the Hymn of the Pearl. A king's son is sent away from his father's house in the East. His parents take off his royal robe and send him down into Egypt to bring back one precious pearl, a pearl guarded by a serpent in the sea. He goes down alone. To keep from being noticed as a foreigner, he dresses himself in the clothes of the Egyptians. But the Egyptians discover he is not one of them. They deal with him in deceit, and they give him their food to eat. He eats it, and he forgets. He forgets that he is a son of kings, and he begins to serve their king. He forgets the pearl he was sent to find. And under the heaviness of their food, he falls into a deep sleep. His father does not forget him. The king sends a letter, and the letter flies to him like an eagle and speaks to him in his sleep: "remember that thou art a son of kings." Remember the pearl. Remember your robe. Remember your father's house. At the sound of that word he wakes. He remembers who he is. He goes down to the serpent, and he overcomes it by calling out over it the name of his father. He takes the pearl, strips off the filthy garments of Egypt, and starts for home, and his royal robe is waiting for him on the road. First Harvest Ministries International • 6 Do you see it? This is the story of the scattered house of Israel. Sent into a strange land. Clothed like the nations. Fed at the table of a foreign king, as Daniel refused to be (Daniel 1:8). Lulled to sleep until they forgot whose children they were. But the Father sent a letter. He sent His Word. And the serpent is not overcome by the strength of the son, but by the Name of the Father. The sons of the house of Israel are not lost to YAHWEH. They are asleep. And the letter is already on its way. ANOTHER LAND: THE WITNESS OF EZRA There is a book the modern Church no longer reads. It stood in the King James Bible of 1611. It was printed in English Bibles for more than two hundred years, until 1826, when the British and Foreign Bible Society resolved to stop circulating Bibles that contained the Apocrypha. It is the Second Book of Esdras, and in its thirteenth chapter it tells us what the men of that age believed became of the ten tribes, and where they believed them to be. "And whereas thou sawest that he gathered another peaceable multitude unto him; those are the ten tribes, which were carried away prisoners out of their own land in the time of Osea the king, whom Salmanasar the king of Assyria led away captive, and he carried them over the waters, and so came they into another land. But they took this counsel First Harvest Ministries International • 7 among themselves, that they would leave the multitude of the heathen, and go forth into a further country, where never mankind dwelt, that they might there keep their statutes, which they never kept in their own land. And they entered into Euphrates by the narrow places of the river. For the most High then shewed signs for them, and held still the flood, till they were passed over. For through that country there was a great way to go, namely, of a year and a half: and the same region is called Arsareth. Then dwelt they there until the latter time; and now when they shall begin to come, the Highest shall stay the springs of the stream again, that they may go through: therefore sawest thou the multitude with peace." (2 Esdras 13:39–47) Read it again, slowly. They were carried over the waters. They went into another land. They sought a further country, where never mankind dwelt. They went there for one purpose: to keep their statutes. And when they came to the river, the Most High held still the flood, till they were passed over. Now go back to the Cherokee. Their fathers said their people traveled until they came to a great river they could not cross, until the Creator dried up the waters and they crossed on dry ground. Ezra said the Most High held still the flood until the tribes passed over. The same crossing. The same miracle. One record kept on parchment in the East, the other kept in the memory of a people in the mountains of America. Mark when this was written. The scholars date this part of Esdras to around the end of the first century, eight hundred years after Assyria carried First Harvest Ministries International • 8 Israel away. Eight centuries later, the Jews had not written the ten tribes out of history. They did not say the tribes had melted into the nations and disappeared. They said the tribes were still alive, still a people, dwelling in a far country and waiting for the latter time. And Ezra does not stand alone. In the same generation, the Jewish historian Josephus wrote: "...the ten tribes are beyond Euphrates till now, and are an immense multitude, and not to be estimated by numbers." (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 11.5.2) Two witnesses from the first century, one in prophecy and one in history. Neither says the ten tribes were lost to YAHWEH. Both say the tribes were out there, an immense multitude, beyond the reach of the world they knew. And mark the name of that land: Arsareth. Scholars have long traced it to the Hebrew eretz acheret, "another land," the very words Moses used when he foretold the scattering: "And YAHWEH rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day." (Deuteronomy 29:28) Another land. Not a land with a known name. Not a land on the maps of the ancient world. A land where never mankind dwelt, set apart by YAHWEH and hidden until the latter time. Now the scholar will raise his hand. "Preacher, America was not empty. Men dwelt here long before the Assyrians ever marched on Samaria." Then read the verse again. Ezra sets two things against each other. The tribes resolved to "leave First Harvest Ministries International • 9 the multitude of the heathen" and go to a country "where never mankind dwelt." The mankind Ezra speaks of is the multitude of the heathen, the nations of the known world, the empires that had swallowed Israel. The tribes went beyond their reach, to a land none of those nations had ever settled or ruled. And this ministry has always taught that the first who held this land were not here by accident either. YAHWEH placed them, and He kept the land for the brethren who would come after. The same Elohim who "hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation" (Acts 17:26) does not need the permission of an archaeologist's calendar to keep a land for His people. And hear how the passage ends. When they begin to come home, "the Highest shall stay the springs of the stream again, that they may go through." Again. As He did the first time. That is the same promise Isaiah gave: YAHWEH will smite the river and "make men go over dryshod." Two prophets, one promise. The waters stood still when they went out, and the waters will stand still when they come home. LET THE WITNESSES BE HEARD The testimony that follows comes in different forms. Some men recorded what they heard. Others compared customs. Others interpreted objects, inscriptions, or accounts of encounters. They did not all stand in the same place, speak to the same people, or approach the question with the same purpose. First Harvest Ministries International • 10 We should hear each witness for what he actually offers. But we should also notice the question that runs through this collection: Could the story of Israel’s scattering be larger than the boundaries within which we have learned to imagine it? That is the question before us. Read these accounts with your Bible open and your discernment awake. Do not mistake age for proof. But do not mistake unfamiliarity for disproof. A serious question deserves serious consideration. THE EVIDENCE As more history is unveiled, more evidence comes to light. Here it is, laid out in order. 1. The Cherokee Exodus Traditions (Foster, 1899) Foster republished the traditions that missionary Daniel Sabin Buttrick gathered among the Cherokee between 1817 and 1847. His collection was published in 1884 as Antiquities of the Cherokee Indians. They tell of: •a great river crossed on dry ground after YAHWEH dried up the waters; •a sea struck with a staff, divided, and closed again upon their enemies; First Harvest Ministries International • 11 •a wilderness, and a mountain where the Creator came down and the summit shone like the sun; •a law written on stone, with further instructions written on skins; •holy fire from heaven, preserved for sacrifice and carried across the great water to this continent; •Wasi, their greatest prophet, who taught them of priests, feasts, and commandments. They also said the book the white man carried was once theirs. 2. The Sacred Name: "Ye-ho-wa" In Buttrick's collection, Thomas Nutsawi testified to a divine Name, Ye-ho-wa. It was too holy for common speech, and it was tied to a command to rest every seventh day. The Name of YAHWEH and the Sabbath were both preserved in the mountains of the Cherokee. 3. The Portable Sanctuary Buttrick's collection records that the Creator gave their leader another command. He was to raise up a building covered with a cloth made of deer's hair and turkey feathers. It was set up when the people rested, and it was taken down and carried when they journeyed. A house of worship, built at the Creator's command, carried with the people through the wilderness. Their covering was deer's hair and turkey feathers instead of goats' hair and rams' skins, but the pattern is the pattern of the tabernacle in the wilderness. "And when the cloud was taken up from the tabernacle, then after that the children of First Harvest Ministries International • 12 Israel journeyed: and in the place where the cloud abode, there the children of Israel pitched their tents." (Numbers 9:17) 4. Twelve Tribes That Became Seven The same collection makes a statement that should stop every reader cold: "Originally they had twelve tribes but on account of disobedience with regard to marriage, it was resolved to have but seven." Twelve tribes. Israel was twelve tribes. The Cherokee are known to this day by seven clans, with strict laws governing marriage within them, and their own tradition says those seven were once twelve. 5. Aqua-ha-ye, the Father of Their Fathers Wasi was not the only great name they remembered. The collection records that Aqua- ha-ye was the greatest among their ancestors, but nothing more could be told of him. The record identifies him as Abraham. An elder named Kotiski also spoke of this ancestral father, called Aqua, in his account of the prayers of the people. The greatest of their fathers. His story lost. His name preserved. 6. The Rest of the Road from Egypt to Canaan The parted waters were only the beginning. The same collection records that the people suffered and triumphed along a road every Bible reader knows: •deadly serpents afflicting the people on their journey (Numbers 21); First Harvest Ministries International • 13 •the earth opening and swallowing some of them (Numbers 16); •a spring flowing from a rock when water was desperately needed (Exodus 17); •a final river crossing before entering the promised country (Joshua 3); •a leader causing the sun to stand still (Joshua 10); •a hailstorm destroying their enemies (Joshua 10). This is not one parallel. It is the whole road, from the sea to the promised land. 7. The Sinew of the Thigh Buttrick's collection says plainly that the Indians never used to eat a certain sinew in the thigh. They called it u-wa-sta-to. The explanation they gave for it was a woman who had suffered a cramp in that sinew. But Israel has kept the same abstinence since the night Jacob wrestled: "Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh in the sinew that shrank." (Genesis 32:32) The explanation changed. The practice remained. 8. James Adair, The History of the American Indians (1775) Adair was a trader who lived among the southern tribes, the Chickasaw and the Cherokee, for decades. He heard them sing the sacred Name, which he wrote as "Yohewah." He laid out more First Harvest Ministries International • 14 than twenty arguments that these nations descended from Israel, including: •division into tribes; •feasts of firstfruits; •laws of purification and uncleanness; •separation of women during their impurity; •sacred towns of refuge where a manslayer could find safety. He wrote all of this before the American Revolution was even won. 9. The Green Corn Festival Among the southeastern nations, no one ate the new harvest until the firstfruits had been offered at a great annual festival of renewal, purification, and the rekindling of sacred fire. Adair saw Israel's appointed times in it. 10. Christopher Columbus and the Book of Ezra (1492) The man who opened the way to this land was a reader of prophecy. In his Book of Prophecies, Columbus gathered the Scriptures he believed foretold his voyages. He leaned on the Book of Ezra itself: "six parts hast thou dried up" (2 Esdras 6:42). From it he argued that the sea to the west was narrow enough to cross. And when he sailed in 1492, he took with him Luis de Torres, a Jew forced into baptism under the Inquisition, chosen because he knew Hebrew and Chaldean. Columbus carried a Hebrew tongue across the great water to the shores of another land. First Harvest Ministries International • 15 11. Gregorio García (1607) More than forty years before the English writers took up the question, the Dominican friar Gregorio García published Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo in Valencia in 1607. He weighed every origin that had been proposed for the peoples of the New World, and he devoted one of the books of his work to the case for Hebrew descent. The question is older than the Puritans. It is as old as the Spanish encounter itself. 12. Antonio de Montezinos and Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel (1644–1650) Montezinos was a Jewish traveler. In 1644 he reported that in the mountains of South America he had met natives who recited the Shema ("Hear, O Israel") and claimed descent from the tribe of Reuben. Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam took this testimony seriously enough to publish The Hope of Israel in 1650. He declared that the scattering of Israel to the ends of the earth, America included, was a sign that their regathering was near. 13. Thomas Thorowgood, Jewes in America (1650) In the same generation, Thorowgood, an English minister, published his case that the natives of America were Israelites. The manuscript so stirred John Dury, a divine of wide reputation, that he urged its publication and sent along two remarkable reports he had heard in Holland. One told of a messenger from the ten tribes who had appeared in the land of Israel asking after the remnant left behind. The other First Harvest Ministries International • 16 was the testimony of Antonio de Montezinos, printed with the book. 14. John Eliot (1660) John Eliot, remembered as the apostle to the Indians of Massachusetts, labored alongside Thomas Mayhew of Martha's Vineyard in carrying the Gospel to the native peoples. Eliot translated the Scriptures into their tongue. In 1660 he took up the question of their Israelite origin in print, carrying forward the work of Thorowgood and Menasseh ben Israel. The man who labored hardest to give them the Bible believed it may once have been theirs. 15. William Penn (1683) The founder of Pennsylvania lived among the Lenape. He wrote that their faces, customs, and observances so resembled the Jews that he was ready to believe them of the Jewish race. 16. Samuel Sewall (1697) In 1697 Judge Samuel Sewall of Massachusetts published his Phaenomena. He saw America as the future inheritance of the ancient people of YAHWEH. He included both the native peoples and the Jews in that hope, and he looked for the New Jerusalem to rise not in Boston but in Mexico City. For Sewall this was no curiosity. It was prophecy, and it was the last days. 17. Diego Durán and Lord Kingsborough In the 1500s, the Dominican friar Diego Durán, who recorded the history of the Aztecs, suggested that the peoples of Mexico were Hebrews. First Harvest Ministries International • 17 In the 1830s, Lord Kingsborough poured his fortune into the massive Antiquities of Mexico to prove that the ancient Mexicans descended from Israel. 18. Charles Beatty (1768) The Presbyterian missionary Charles Beatty published his journal in 1768. He recorded a tradition of the Nanticoke people: their fathers came to a great water, and in one night the Creator made a bridge for them to cross. When they had passed over, the bridge was taken away. Not parted waters this time, but the same deliverance: a people brought across the great water by the hand of the Creator, and the way closed behind them. Buttrick's collection also quotes Beatty on circumcision. An elderly native man told of an uncle, who died around 1728, who said that circumcision had once been practiced among them until the young men turned away from it. 19. Benjamin Rush and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803) In May 1803, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, handed Meriwether Lewis a list of questions to carry west. He asked about the worship of the tribes, their sacred objects, and how they buried their dead. Those inquiries belonged to a wider effort to learn whether native customs and languages could shed light on a connection with Israel. The question was serious enough to be written into the preparations of the greatest expedition in American history. First Harvest Ministries International • 18 20. Elias Boudinot, A Star in the West (1816) Boudinot was a former President of the Continental Congress. He published a full volume arguing that the American Indians were the lost ten tribes of Israel. 21. Ethan Smith, View of the Hebrews (1823) A New England minister argued the same, publishing in Vermont. 22. Mordecai Noah (1825, 1837) Noah was the most prominent American Jew of his day. In 1825 he proclaimed a refuge for the Jewish people at Grand Island, New York, and called the Indians to join it as their lost brethren. In 1837 he published his Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. 23. The Witnesses to the Golden Plates (1829) This ministry lends no credence to Joseph Smith. But mark what was testified. Three men, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris, signed a statement that they had seen the plates. Eight more signed that they had handled them with their own hands. The book those plates produced was addressed to the native peoples of America and called them "a remnant of the house of Israel." David Whitmer still affirmed his testimony shortly before his death. Whether that book was truly angelic or merely a collection of stories, one thing is certain. Someone, somewhere, was thinking about these glorious truths long before us. First Harvest Ministries International • 19 24. The Smithsonian's Own Volume (1856) In 1856 the Smithsonian Institution published Samuel F. Haven's Archaeology of the United States in the eighth volume of its Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. Haven was no believer. He concluded that the peoples of America came out of Asia. That makes him a hostile witness, and a hostile witness who still has to admit the facts is the strongest witness of all. Haven confessed that of all the opinions founded in sacred history, the one tracing the Indian tribes to the lost ten tribes of Israel "has found the warmest and most numerous supporters." He called it "among the oldest hypotheses," and said it was held to find its "strongest corroboration in the customs and traditions of the Indians." Then he set down its four pillars: •the ten tribes were carried by Shalmaneser into the northeastern provinces of Assyria, and from there vanished toward the part of Asia nearest America; •the Book of Ezra records that they resolved to go into a further country where never man dwelt, passing over the waters into another land; •many customs of the Indians point to a Hebrew origin; •numerous Hebrew words and idioms are found in their languages. He named the long line of men who had traced the tribes to America, from Génébrard and Thevet in the 1500s to the labors of Mayhew and Eliot in New England. The Smithsonian did not accept it. But the Smithsonian could not leave it out. First Harvest Ministries International • 20 25. The Bat Creek Stone (Tennessee, 1889) It was dug from a burial mound in Cherokee country in 1889 by John W. Emmert, working for the Smithsonian's own mound survey. The renowned Semitic scholar Cyrus Gordon read its inscription as Paleo-Hebrew, with the words "for Judea." This is no roadside curiosity. The stone sits in the Smithsonian Institution's own collection to this day, catalogued as the Bat Creek Tablet, catalog number A134902-0. The Bat Creek Stone. Image: Odyssey. 26. The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone (New Mexico) On the face of a boulder on Hidden Mountain, near Los Lunas, New Mexico, an abbreviated Ten Commandments is carved in an ancient Hebrew- style script. It opens with the words YAHWEH spoke from Sinai: "I am YAHWEH your Elohim, who brought you out of the land of Egypt." First Harvest Ministries International • 21 The Sacred Name, cut into stone in the American desert. It is the Law on stone, in the American wilderness. The inscribed face of the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone, Hidden Mountain, near Los Lunas, New Mexico. Photograph: Dan Raber. 27. The Newark Holy Stones (Ohio, 1860) In 1860, near the ancient earthworks of Newark, Ohio, David Wyrick unearthed stones bearing Hebrew lettering. The first, called the Keystone, bears the words Holy of Holies, King of the Earth, the Law of YAHWEH, and the Word of YAHWEH, as translated by Rev. J. W. McCarty in 1860. First Harvest Ministries International • 22 The Keystone, front face. Photograph: Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum. Each of the four inscriptions is cut into its own face of the stone. The Keystone: side 1, side 2, and back. Photographs: Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum. Months later, buried in a mound in a sandstone box, came the Decalogue Stone: a figure of Moses, his name above him, surrounded by an abbreviated Ten Commandments. The inscription First Harvest Ministries International • 23 winds around the carved figure and continues across the other sides of the stone. Both stones, the sandstone box, and a stone bowl are held today by the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Coshocton, Ohio. The Newark Holy Stones at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum, Coshocton, Ohio: (1) the Decalogue Stone, (2) the Keystone, its sandstone box, and (5) a stone bowl. Photograph: Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum. MORE THAN A QUESTION OF ANCESTRY There is another question beneath this one. What changes when we begin to speak of a people as brethren? The word must mean more than a connection we find interesting. It must place a demand upon the speaker. First Harvest Ministries International • 24 If I call you my brother, I cannot treat your suffering as an interruption. I cannot borrow your history to strengthen my sermon and then refuse to hear your own account of it. I must listen. I must recognize that you are not merely a figure in my explanation of the world. You are a person whose life, family, and dignity matter before YAHWEH. This ministry’s conviction about Israel should make us more attentive to the people we discuss, not less attentive. It should make us slower to dismiss them, slower to speak over them, and more willing to meet them with humility. Otherwise, “brethren” becomes a word upon a cover rather than a responsibility within the heart. We must not allow that to happen. WHAT THE PROPHETS SAID WOULD HAPPEN "And it shall come to pass in that day, that YAHWEH shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people... from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth." (Isaiah 11:11–12) "Behold, these shall come from far: and, lo, these from the north and from the west." (Isaiah 49:12) First Harvest Ministries International • 25 The prophet said the four corners of the earth. He said the islands of the sea. He said from far, and from the west. Then he told us how YAHWEH would do it: "...with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the river, and shall smite it in the seven streams, and make men go over dryshod. And there shall be an highway for the remnant of his people... like as it was to Israel in the day that he came up out of the land of Egypt." (Isaiah 11:15–16) Dryshod. On dry ground. The Cherokee remembered crossing the waters on dry ground. Isaiah promised that the remnant would cross on dry ground again. THE GOD WHO MAKES A WAY Notice where the promise places the emphasis. Not upon the strength of the scattered. Not upon their ability to find the road by themselves. But upon the hand of YAHWEH. The river is an obstacle until He acts. The way is closed until He opens it. The remnant needs more than a destination; it needs a passage. That is why the language of the Exodus carries such power in this discussion. It asks us to remember deliverance as the work of the Deliverer. First Harvest Ministries International • 26 The people walk, but He makes the way. And when we read a promise of restoration, we should not picture merely a people becoming interested in their past. We should consider the deeper question of a people being called toward faithfulness. What would it mean to come home? Not merely to claim a name. Not merely to win an argument. But to hear the voice of the Shepherd and answer it. THERE IS MUCH TO BE CONSIDERED HERE The scholars will say "coincidence." They will say "missionary influence." They will close the book and walk away. I will not. A people do not invent the parting of the sea. A people do not dream up a law on stone, a fire from heaven, and a Name too holy to speak. These are the fingerprints of YAHWEH, pressed into the memory of a people who did not even know whose fingerprints they carried. YAHSHUA said: "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." (Matthew 15:24) First Harvest Ministries International • 27 The Shepherd knows where every one of His sheep went. He knows the mountains of the Cherokee, the plains, the deserts, and the islands of the sea. He planted them, He kept them, and He is calling them home. WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THIS QUESTION? I have placed these testimonies before you because I believe they deserve to be heard. I do not ask you to pretend that every question has been settled. I ask you not to pretend that a question becomes worthless because it challenges the history you were taught. Examine what can be examined. Distinguish what a witness reported from what another man concluded. Read the Scriptures carefully. And remember the people whose lives stand behind this discussion. They are not props in a prophetic argument. They are not relics of a vanished world. We must not speak about brethren while forgetting to speak with compassion. If this message awakens anything in us, let it awaken both diligence and love. Diligence, because truth deserves our labor. Love, because the word “brethren” deserves our obedience. First Harvest Ministries International • 28 Then let the Church listen—not with contempt, not with careless certainty, but with the seriousness that such a question requires. Let the Church stop laughing at the testimony of the nations and start listening. Rev. John Shane Vaughn Founding Apostolic Overseer First Harvest Ministries International P.O. Box 2757, Bay St. Louis, MS 39521 First Harvest Ministries International • 29