MICHAEL FREUND: Ezekiel is commanded by God to take two sticks. On one, he is to write "For Judah," and on the other "For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim." Then comes the crucial instruction: "Bring them together into one stick so that they become one in your hand" (37:17). Ezekiel's vision is not one of uniformity. The two sticks do not cease to be what they are. Judah remains Judah; Joseph remains Joseph. Unity does not erase difference – it sanctifies and elevates it by placing it within a larger shared destiny.
Ketriel Blad: In other words, in order for a total restoration to take place, the restored Ephraimites from among the nations will have to become Jewish, in the legal sense of the word, thus accepting the Jewish authorities and becoming obedient to Jewish halachah. In the prophecy of Ezekiel 37:19 the Hebrew text can be understood as HaShem giving Yehuda's stick the function of being over Ephraim's stick and this way both sticks will become one. This teaches us that the Ephraimite movement that comes from heaven cannot rise apart from the Jewish people without submission to the Jewish leaders' authority. This is not for all the gentiles.
Mendel Kaplan: There is this notion of us going into Galut, not only because Hashem has to punish us or teach us a lesson, but also because there is a prophet to be made, so the understanding is that in G-d’s world, there are little sparks of holiness and those sparks of holiness have to be elevated and, oftentimes, those sparks of holiness are not easily found. They have to be extracted. They have to be lifted. They have to be removed from where they are embedded and brought back into the orbit of holiness, so there was this notion that when we went into Bavel and we came into Contact with Babylonian culture or Persian culture that the sages understood that there were certain sparks or certain elements of holiness that could be lifted from those local cultures and could be absorbed into the Jewish culture ~ into a Torah culture ~ and that they actually would have, sort of, a holiness, and the metaphor that’s used is that you build a home with stones; that’s how it is in Israel. With regard to language, the Kabbalah refers to letters as stones, words as homes.
Neil Asher Silberman, Israel Finkelstein, David Ussishkin, and Baruch Halpern: The Book of Joshua (12:21) specifically mentions the defeat of the king of Megiddo and the allotment of his territory to the tribe of Manasseh;
NETANYA MUNICIPALITY: thanks to the Lord for giving them {Netan~ya, lot. "gift of God"} the ability to continue the legacy of the 12 tribes who settled in the Land of Israel, and particularly of the half~tribe of Manasseh, which settled in the region.
Stephen Epstein: Some went down the Mekong River into Vietnam, the Philippines, Siam, Thailand and Malaysia, while some of the Israelites moved to Burma and west to India.
