The Black Tribe of Judah

The Tribe of Judah, which is the tribe that Jesus descended from, was a Black Tribe of Hebrews.  Historian Wilson Armistead states quite plainly: “The descendants of a colony of Jews, originally from Judea, settled on the coast of Africa, are black.” (A Tribute for the Negro: Being a Vindication of the Moral, Intellectual, and Religious Capabilities of the Colored Portion of Mankind; with Particular Reference to the African Race by Wilson Armistead. Manchester and London: W. Irwin, 1848, pg. 66)

Judah was the largest Israelite tribe to leave Egypt, which means that of the mixed multitude that left with Moses, Judah was the tribe that was most mixed.  Judah married two different Canaanite women.  Judah had five children between these two women.  All of Judah’s children were Black.  What also needs to be taken into consideration is that out of the 12 tribes of Hebrews that left Egypt, Judah was the largest tribe.  There were over 74,000 people in the Tribe of Judah.  Large numbers of Egyptians left Egypt with the Hebrews during the Exodus, and Judah had the highest population of all the tribes, so it certainly stands to reason that there were large numbers of Blacks among the ranks of Judah.

Sir Godfrey Higgins quoted Mr. Maurice: “The Yadavas were the most venerable emigrants from India; they were the blameless and pious Ethiopians, whom Homer mentions, and calls the remotest of mankind.  Part of them, say the old Hindu writers, remained in this country; and hence we read of two Ethiopian nations, the Western and the Oriental.  Some of them lived far to the East; and they are the Yadavas who stayed in India, while others resided far to the West.  The fact of part of the tribe yet remaining in existence is one of the pieces of circumstances of this kind that I ground my system.  They surpass all written evidence, for they cannot have been forged.  This emigrating tribe of Yadu or Yuda, we shall find of the first importance, for they were no other than the Jews.” (Anacalypsis, Vol. I. by Sir Godfrey Higgins, London:1836, reprinted. Brooklyn:A&B Books Publishers, 1992, pg. 392)

So we can clearly see in this passage that Maurice is stating that the Tribe of Yuda (Judah) and the “blameless and pious Ethiopians” were the same.  Later in the same chapter, Higgins states that there were many Black tribes of Jews in India, who were evidently from the tribe of Judah, who did not have the Pentateuch. (ibid, pg. 399)  This would indicate that they were original Jews, perhaps descendants of Abraham or Jacob, who had branched off from the larger group of Jews before Moses gave the Pentateuch.  This would give us further reason to believe that the earliest Jews were Black.

Judah married Shua, a Canaanite woman.  Shua bore Juda three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah.  When Judah selected a wife for his eldest son Er, he once again chose a Canaanite woman, Tamar.  When Er died, Tamar was a childless widow.  In order to assure the continuity of the family, God established marriage duties of the surviving brother, known as levirate marriages, with the Israelites.   The Bible outlines levirate marriages as follows:

             “If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the widow of the dead man shall not be married to a stranger outside the family; her husband’s brother shall go into her, take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her.  And it shall be that the firstborn son which she bears will succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel”  (Deut. 25:5-6).

 Based on this practice, it was Judah’s responsibility to see that this was done.  Judah tried to settle this situation by giving Tamar to Er’s brother Onan, but Onan “knew that the heir would not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in to his brother’s wife, that he emitted on the ground, lest he should give an heir to his brother.  And the thing which he did displeased the Lord; therefore he killed him also” (Gen. 38:9-10).

 After the death of Onan, Judah told Tamar to wait until his younger son, Shelah was grown. In the meantime, the Tribe of Judah was in jeopardy of extinction.  Tamar decided to take matters into her own hands and tricked Judah into sleeping with her, and Judah impregnated her.  She bore twins for Judah: Perez and Zerah.  Perez was an ancestor of Jesus Christ.  Perez and Zerah were half Canaanite, which means that even if Judah were not Black, they would have been at least half Black. 

It also appears that there was an admixture of the Black Midianites with the Tribe of Judah.  Hobab, a Midianite, was a guide for Moses and the Hebrews on their journey to the Promised Land.  Moses promised Hobab land among the Israelites in the Promised Land in exchange for his service (Numbers 10:29).  In Judges 1:16, it shows Hobab’s descendants settled in Israel and became a part of the Tribe of Judah.  Hobab is also called a Kenite, as is Jethro, so it is understood that the Midianites and the Kenites were the same tribe.

 Some Black Judeans fled into Egypt after the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 587 B.C.  There, they blended in with the other Black people of Egypt.  A half millennium later, Joseph and Mary, both from the tribe of Judah, would travel back into Egypt to protect Jesus from persecution from King Herod.  It would only make sense to flee to a land where you could blend in and avoid detection, which lets us know that Joseph, Mary and Jesus could racially blend in among the Egyptians.  It should also be noted that Strabo mentioned that the people of western Judea are partly from Egyptian ancestry.

When we combine this evidence with the fact that the first century Roman historian Tacitus said that everyone in Rome knew that the Hebrews originated in Ethiopia, we can positively state that the Tribe of Judah was a black tribe, and the original Hebrews were black.

This article is an excerpt taken from Black Bloodlines: Abrahamand the Racial Profiles of the Ancient Hebrews by Calvin R. Evans, McKinney: Saggigga Publishing, 2009, pp. 53-55.