Juan Suárez de Peralta was the earliest identifiable Spaniard to endorse the Lost Tribes of Israel theory, and even his acceptance was qualified. He based his opinion “in the authority of Chapter xiii of the fourth book of Esdras” (1949:1-2). The passages to which Suárez de Peralta referred read:Those are the ten tribes, which were carried away prisoners out of their own land in the time of Husha the king, whom Shalman'ecer the king of Ashshur led away captive, and he carried them over the waters, and so came they into another land. 'But they took this counsel 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 guard their statutes, which they never kept in their own land. 'And they entered into Perath by the narrow places of the river. 'For EL ELYON then showed 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 Arzareth. Ezra Reviy'iy (4 EZRA) 13:40-45Origins of the American Indians, European Concepts, 1492-1729 Pages 36, 37Author: Lee E. HuddlestonLatin American Monographs, No. IIInstitute of Latin American StudiesThe University of TexasDiego Durán was much less equivocal in his theorizing. Since, he said, he had not received a revelation from God, which was the only way to determine for certain where the Indians originated, he would resort to conjecture. He concluded that the Indians must be descended from Jews. His opinion was based on the strange ways and customs and the lowly conversations of the natives; their “way of life, ceremonies, rites, and superstitions, omens, and hypocrisies;” all so like the Jews’ that the Indians themselves must be Jews (1951:I,I).Durán found support for his belief in observations of Indian cultures which, he thought, matched very well with the biblical descriptions of the Jews. Unlike Suárez de Peralta who used the apocryphal Esdras IV on which to base his theory, Durán relied on the Bible itself. His source was the second book of Kings (RSV, 17:6, 18): “In the ninth year of Hoshe′a the king of Assyria captured Samar′ia, and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria…… Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight; none was left but the tribe of Judah only.”Durán found additional confirmation in the story of Hosea (Hosea 1:10) that God had promised to multiply the people of Israel like the sands of the sea. Surely, he argued, this promised was fulfilled by the multitudes the Spanish found in the New World (1951:I, 2-3) Furthermore, he noted, the Indians (of Mexico) had traditions of long journeys, such as the one from Assyria to Arsareth.   Origins of the American Indians, European Concepts, 1492-1729 Pages 38, 39The only other writer this author found who accepted the Issachar variation of the Ten Lost Tribes was Balthassar de Medina in his Chrónica de la Santa Provincia de San Diego de Mexico of 1682. Although Medina (1682:fol. 223v) thought South Americans and Yucatecans were decendents of the gentile Iectan (father of Ophir), “the Mexicans are originally of the ten tribes captured by Salmanazar,” and of the family of Issachar, “whom the Indians recognized as their special ancestor.”Origins of the American Indians, European Concepts, 1492-1729 Page 88