the theological anxieties they generate.^42 Their absence is (differently) significant
for Jews and Christians alike, and its theological implications are many.^43
Any discussion of the tribes and the searches which they’ve inspired must
begin with the scriptural foundations of their story: the biblical narratives that
provide the history of the tribes and the prophecies understood to relate to
them. Theology—in the sense of both the application of doctrine and dogma to
reality, and more so as a set of tools designed for the interpretation and shaping
of reality according to the word of God—guides the search, informs it, and
shapes it. The power of the tribes as a mystery, unlike, say, the myth of the
lost Excalibur, owes its persistence to the authority of the biblical narrative—
theur-text of the tribes’ story.
The biblical narrative not only describes the tribes’ history “as it hap-
pened.” It also lays out the present and future of the lost tribes as read into
the various biblical prophecies concerning them. Moreover, biblical authority
plays a crucial role in the history of searches for the tribes. For centuries, the
Bible was seen as proof of the facticity of the ten tribes’ story, and the validity of
the related biblical prophecies remained beyond doubt throughout most of the
history discussed here. For many, it is beyond doubt even today. The theological
referents of the story of the ten lost tribes is taken as evidentiary, and the Bible
provides recourse to “facts”—a feature of ten-tribes-ism that bridges the sup-
posed divide between the religious and secular realms. For centuries, to talk of
the ten tribes was to talk theologically, but it was also to talk scientifically and
factually—and for many, it still is.
Similarly, the sense of loss is embedded in the historical core of the story.
The ten tribes fleetingly appear in the biblical narrative only to disappear
definitively from it thereafter. The story begins with the tearing apart of a
whole people into two, vividly and viscerally echoed in the tearing of Jeroboam’s
robe, and continues with the deportation of one part to somewhere else. How
are the pieces to be put back together? The sense of loss that pervades the story
derives not so much from any termination of the tribes, but rather from their
ongoing—but unreachable—existence. This, then, is the true and most
wrenching loss of the story—the history of this unknown-but-known and
missing people, which is unfolding in a distant-but-close and unfound place.
As the history of the remaining children of Israel, the people of Judah, unfolds,
unfolding silently alongside it is the ever-present if unknown history of the
missing tribes. The river that must be crossed is the river that divides those
parallel histories.
The people of Judah fared only slightly better in comparison to
their brethren from the north. They also went into exile—the Babylonian
captivity—in 586 bce. However, the Judahite exiles do not disappear from
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