the Bible itself. While we never hear from the ten tribes after their deportation,
the period of the Babylonian captivity is present, loud and clear, in the
biblical narrative. In this sense, the Babylonian captivity highlights the disap-
pearance of those other, earlier exiles. Where didtheygo, and what became
oftheirstory?
Against the backdrop of destruction and exile, prophecy provided an
element of consolation. And it was not simply those expelled during the
Babylonian exile, but those of the earlier exile, too, who were promised resolu-
tion. The biblical prophets admonish the people for their sins but also promise
them return and restitution at some point in the future. All of the great
prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel—promise an end to exile. They empha-
size that God will not leave forgottenanyof the scattered exiles.^44
The prophet Jeremiah, for example, declares ( 31 : 7 ): “Behold I will bring
them from the North Country and gather them from the coasts of the earth.”
(Here, we find the inspiration for Lindelof’s North Pole.) Ezekiel ( 37 : 15 – 22 )
elaborates on how God shall reunite Judah and Ephraim again. The Lord “will
take the children of Israel from among the heathen whither they be gone and
will gather them on every side and bring them into their own land... and they
shall be no more two nations neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms
any more at all.” Most famously, the prophet Isaiah declares in one of his
famous latter-days visions: “And it shall come to pass in that day that the great
trumpet shall be blown and they shall come which were ready to perish in the
land of Assyria and the outcasts in the land of Egypt and shall worship the Lord
in the holy mount at Jerusalem” (Isaiah 27 : 13 ).
Here, Isaiah coins a conceit that has become central to the ten tribes quest.
They are, as the Hebrew has it, “lost in Assyria.” The translators of the King
James Version render the Hebrewovdim(lost, pl.) as “ready to perish,” imply-
ing (imminent) destruction—another meaning of the word “lost.” The Vul-
gate, however, retains the geographical dimension of that loss: qui perditi
fuerant de terra Assyriorum, “those lostfromthe land of Assyria” (how the
original “in Assyria” turned into the Vulgate’s “from Assyria” becomes clearer
later in this book). Speaking of this, Rashi, the great eleventh-century biblical
commentator and exegete, wrote, “Because they were dispersed in a distant
land beyond the River Sambatyon, he [Isaiah] called themlost[ovdim].” This
understanding ofovdim,which emerged as dominant, suggests at once a past
and a present state and provides a glimpse of an ongoing present in which the
lost tribes are still lost, but still present (and hence “ready to perish” in King
James and not “perished”). The tribes are lost twice over—once as a collective
torn away from the body of Israel and a second time as a group physically lost
in the wilderness of exile.
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