6

Hopes of Israel

My brethren, as thou call’st them, those ten tribes I must deliver,
if I mean to reign.
—John Milton,Paradise Regained( 1671 )

Biblical Culture and Political Perceptions of the Ten Tribes

During the late seventeenth century, England emerged as the site
of the hottest debate over the ten lost tribes. By Milton’s time and
beyond, even when ideas about the tribes were generated elsewhere
in Europe, they were echoed most strongly in the English-speaking
world, notably the United States and the empire.^1 The English phase
of the story, while not the last, was certainly the high point of the world
history of the ten tribes, intimately connected to the strong desire, as
Milton put it, to “deliver” them. While the ten tribes appear inParadise
Regained,they—or, more precisely, their lostness—are part of the
condition that characterizesParadise Lost.
In 1652 , the historian, geographer, and theologian Peter Heylyn
( 1600 – 1662 ) publishedCosmographie in Four Bookes,a “chronography
and history of the whole world.” The book, based onhis 1625
Microcosmusof theGreat World,taught the reader that the “apostacy
[sic] of the ten tribes at once from the Law of their God and the
extermination of the other two in short time, abundantly declare[s] the
frail condition and estate of the Jewish Church.” Reading on, one