The claim usually arrives as an accusation with a verse attached. Real Israelites keep the law. You eat pork. So your faith is a copy of the real thing. The answer has two parts, and both come from reading the Old Testament more carefully than the accusation does. Deuteronomy 28, the passage the claim rests on, is a list of covenant curses. And the Old Testament law was never one undivided block that every generation was meant to keep in the same way.
Pastor Tyran Laws, a pastor on the south side of Chicago, co-wrote The Round Table with Rashan Ahad. It is a short book on the belief systems drawing young Black adults out of the church. He makes both of those arguments. He also makes a third that is harder for churchgoers to hear. The claim spreads in Black congregations partly because those congregations have not been taught how the Old Testament works.
What exactly is the claim?
The argument has a specific anchor. Lisa Fields identified it as the crux of Hebrew Israelite belief, and Laws agreed: “that is the bedrock scripture.” The verse is Deuteronomy 28:68:
And the LORD shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you.
Ships, slavery and sale. From those three details the argument draws a line to the transatlantic slave trade. Africans carried to the Americas in chains are then the true Hebrews, and their descendants are Israel. The next step follows easily. Israel’s identity is marked by keeping the law: the Sabbath, the feasts and the food laws. A Black church that ignores those laws has traded its birthright for a European religion.
The movement is not one organization with one creed. Lisa described a recent exchange with a man who argued from inside that line of thinking, adding, “I don’t know if he completely bought into the whole thing.” His jab was that her pastor surely eats pork. Her pastor is her father, and he does. That small exchange shows how the claim usually travels. It comes less as a full system than as fragments: a verse, a dietary challenge, a suggestion that someone has been lied to.
Why does this claim land with Black Christians in particular?
The pull of the claim is not mainly about pork.
Laws traces a related movement, the claim that Christianity was copied from the religions of ancient Egypt, to a broader search for Black empowerment. The idea of a stolen inheritance finds ready ears because Black Americans know that ideas, inventions and culture were taken from them without credit. On that history, Laws says, “we know that there is a lot of historical fact in that, right?” So when someone says the theft went further and included identity and religion, the suggestion does not sound outlandish. It sounds like the next chapter of a story people already know is true.
The Hebrew Israelite version touches the same nerve. Slavery cut lineages, erased names and severed people from any homeland they could point to. A teaching that hands back a name, a tribe and a covenant reaching behind the slave ships offers something people want for real reasons. Laws observes that these movements deliberately use young Black adults’ frustration with the church to draw them away.
That is why Lisa Fields pressed for an answer that does not caricature the people involved, “because some of them do have legitimate claims.” Laws grants one of them openly. The Jews of the first century and earlier, he says, looked far more like Black people than like the Charlton Heston figure of old Hollywood films. Then he draws a line the argument depends on erasing: “It’s another thing to say that every person, every black person is a Jew.”
Appearance and descent are different questions. Skin tone cannot establish that a modern population descends from a specific ancient people, let alone a specific tribe, across thousands of years. A person can accept that the Bible’s characters were not European and still ask for actual genealogical evidence. The movement depends on the first claim feeling like proof of the second.
What does Deuteronomy 28 actually say?
The first problem is method. “The whole problem with this is that it’s all about loose parallels,” Laws says. A reader spots a surface match, ships and bondage, and concludes the passage is about him. The habit is common because many readers never ask what a text meant to its first audience before asking what it means for them.
Then there is the text itself: “first of all, it doesn’t say America. It says Egypt.” To make the verse fit, Egypt has to become a symbol for America, and that move needs a justification the passage never supplies. Laws adds that reading the whole chapter turns up many details that do not line up. The argument survives only if the reader stops paying attention to them. One sits in the verse itself, which ends by saying that “no man shall buy you” (Deuteronomy 28:68). The curse pictures people offered for sale and refused, a final humiliation. That is an odd description of a trade that ran on eager buyers.
The larger problem is what kind of chapter this is. Deuteronomy 27 and 28 set out covenant blessings and covenant curses. The blessings are the rewards God promises Israel for faithfulness. The curses are the consequences he warns of for disobedience. Verse 68 belongs to the curses, addressed to Israel within the covenant Moses sets before the people.
So where do Christian interpreters look for the fulfillment? Most read the curses against Israel’s own later history. The chapter itself warns of a nation from far off and of being carried away to a king the people had not known, and readers commonly connect those warnings to the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests and exiles. For the return to Egypt in particular, some point to Jeremiah 42-44, where a remnant of Judah goes down into Egypt after Jerusalem falls, against the prophet’s warning. Others connect it to Jewish captives sold into slavery after later wars in the Roman period. Interpreters differ on which event, if any single one, the verse has in view, and the warning may describe a pattern more than a date. What these readings share is that they keep the curse attached to the people the chapter names.
Now apply the Hebrew Israelite reading consistently. If verse 68 describes the slave ships, then the Atlantic slave trade was God’s covenant punishment on Black people for their disobedience. Laws spells it out. On this reading God is to blame for slavery in America, and the enslaved suffered because of their own sin. His verdict is short: “That’s a very problematic theology.”
Lisa Fields sharpened the point. The reading condemns the slaveholders while turning the enslaved into the guilty party. As Lisa Fields put it, “You make not only yourself complicit, but you make God complicit.” A teaching that promises to restore dignity ends by declaring that the suffering of the enslaved was deserved. That is the hidden cost of the identity it offers.
Do Christians have to keep the Old Testament law?
Lisa Fields answered the pork challenge with the gospel: “Jesus came because we couldn’t keep the law.” Laws agreed and went further. Christians should understand how the law is built, so they can answer the challenge on its own terms.
He warns against two opposite mistakes. One ignores the new covenant Christ brought in and treats the Old Testament as if nothing has changed. The other is the error of Marcion, a teacher in the early church who wanted to discard the Old Testament as useless to Christians. Laws rejects that second error just as firmly, down to the pocket Bibles that print only the New Testament and Psalms. Jesus himself said, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17). Paul wrote, “Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good” (Romans 7:12). The law is to be valued and read in context.
Context starts with seeing that the law contains different kinds of commands. Many are case laws, written as if-then rulings for particular situations. Take a law about an ox that falls into a pit. A rule like that limits itself, Laws points out, “because what happens if I don’t have an ox?” In his words, “some of the laws were never intended to be followed for all times.”
He puts the food laws in that group, for a specific reason: “the food laws were connected to the temple.” In the ancient world, he explains, people ate what their gods were thought to eat. Israel’s God does not eat, but the logic of the system was that “what’s good for sacrifice is what’s good for consumption.” Clean food and acceptable sacrifice belonged to the same system.
Then a plain fact. No Jewish community today offers bulls and lambs, because the temple no longer stands. When the temple system ended, the laws tied to it could not be kept as written, by anyone. Commands bound to no circumstance at all are different. Lisa named examples: laws about sexuality, lying, gossip and murder. These stood before there was a temple, and none of them depends on an altar.
The New Testament speaks to the same questions. In Mark 7, Jesus teaches that food cannot defile a person, “Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats?” (Mark 7:19). In older English, “meats” means foods in general, and many modern translations render the last phrase as Mark’s own comment that Jesus declared all foods clean. Paul writes, “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (Colossians 2:16-17).
Jewish tradition itself never treated every rule as equal in weight, Laws notes. There are commandments, there are case laws, and there are customs that grew up and gained the force of law. His illustration is a hypothetical: an exiled people unsure whether a holy day fell on the third or the fourth, who keep both days to be safe until the two-day observance becomes the custom. Some of what gets enforced as “the law” turns out to be custom that hardened, never commands God intended for every generation.
Isn’t sorting the law into categories just a way to keep what you like?
This is the strongest reply a Hebrew Israelite teacher can make. Christians, the objection goes, invented the line between moral and ceremonial law so they could keep the commands they like and drop the ones that inconvenience them.
The answer starts with the law’s own wording. A rule about a neighbor’s ox announces its own limits. A rule tied to sacrifice depends on an altar and a priesthood that no longer exist. Christians did not invent those limits. They are written into the commands.
The accuser faces the same problem. Lisa observed that the law contains many commands that people in this line of thinking are not keeping either. Laws calls this one of the most useful tools in the whole conversation. Movements like this build a system, he says, and yet “you’re not even holding onto the integrity of the very framework that you’re lifting up.” So the believer does not always have to start on defense: “oftentimes we don’t even have to try to defend what we believe we can just call into question, Hey, this is your framework. Your framework doesn’t make sense.” If keeping the law is the test of true Israel, the accuser has to explain how anyone passes it without a temple.
That reply has a limit. Faithful Christians describe the law’s relationship to the new covenant in more than one way. Some use the historic division of the law into moral, civil and ceremonial commands, close to Laws’s approach. Others say the whole Mosaic law is fulfilled in Christ, and that what binds believers now is the moral teaching Jesus and the apostles carry forward. Still others stress more continuity. This question does not require settling those debates.
What these readings share answers the charge of counterfeit faith. None of them makes the food laws the door into God’s people, and the New Testament argues the point directly. Paul writes, “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified” (Galatians 2:16). When the early church met in Jerusalem to decide whether Gentile believers had to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, Peter’s argument was that God had purified their hearts by faith, and the council declined to lay that yoke on them (Acts 15:5-11). By the apostles’ own reckoning, what marks a person as belonging to God’s people is faith in Christ, not what is on the plate.
Why does the church keep getting caught off guard?
Laws is blunt about where the weakness lies. These teachers create so much suspicion “particularly in the black church,” he says, “because we have a very anemic understanding of the Old Testament.” He goes further: “most of the time they know the Old Testament more than we, better than we do.”
That is not a claim that Black Christians are uniquely careless readers. Lisa points out that evangelical teaching in general leans heavily on Paul’s letters, an emphasis that can produce clear doctrine and still leave people weak on the Old Testament. The gap is widespread. It matters most where a movement is aiming its arguments.
Laws lays much of the blame on pastors, himself included. He has often heard preachers and teachers say their people cannot handle real information about how the Bible works. His response: “Yes, they can.” If they struggle with it, he adds, “You’re the pastor. You’re supposed to teach them and put it in a way that they can.” When the church holds back, someone outside it eventually offers an interpretation, and members have nothing to test it with.
That is the real cultural stake. The Hebrew Israelite claim speaks to a history of theft, a longing for an older name and a suspicion that the church kept something back. Mocking the longing does not answer it. Teaching does: the whole of Deuteronomy, the structure of the law, and the Christ the law points toward. A believer who has read Deuteronomy 28 to the end can hear “real Israelites keep the law” as a claim to examine, not a verdict on their identity.