proceeds to a list of actual place names; and concludes with “the four quarters
of the earth.”
The tension between known, specific locations and general, abstract,
unknown ones reflects the two diasporic geographies with which Isaiah was
familiar: the known and unknown, close and distant. Judah marked the first,
and Israel the second: “On that day a great trumpet will be sounded and those
who are lost in Assyria [the Israelites] and those dispersed in Egypt [the
Judahites] will come to worship the Lord on Jerusalem’s holy mountain” (Isaiah
27 : 12 – 13 ).
The Judahites are “dispersed” in a familiar and close terrain, Egypt; the
Israelites are “lost” in the outer reaches of an empire that stretched to the end
of the earth. Isaiah’s marking of two distinct diasporic conditions has been
retained to the present day. The Judahites are the Jews scattered around the
world, identifiable and diffuse. The Israelites—the lost tribes—are gone,
hidden en masse.Isaiah’s formulation underscores the emergence of Jerusa-
lem as the geographic site par excellence around which messianic activity
revolves: the definitive ingathering will bring Judah and Israel alike back to
Jerusalem. If 2 Kings is theur-text for the existence of the tribes, Isaiah is the
ur-text for their single most defining attribute, their lostness.
The prophetic treatment of the historical event of the fall of the Israelite
kingdom laid the theological infrastructure for all future speculation
concerning the whereabouts and identity of the ten tribes. This theology was
largely a tool for the education of the people of Judah: the deportations were
synthesized into a single event, a divine punishment and exile that came with
the messianic promise of ultimate return. Prophetic discussions took Assyrian
imperial discourse as its point of departure, turning an Assyrian story of
military conquest and territorial expansion into an Israelite story of messianic
history unfolding in accordance with God’s will. In the prophetic literature,
theology and geography work in tandem.
From the prophets, the tribes made their way into the Torah itself. Deuter-
onomy, which depicts the history of the Jewish people as an exilic one framed
by sin, punishment, and redemption, declares: “And the Lord rooted them out
of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them
intoanother land,as it is this day” (Deuteronomy 29 : 28 ). As we shall see,
though they are not mentioned in it, this verse became intimately linked with
the ten tribes because of a clear hint to their fate in the words “as it is this day.”
The fate of the ten tribes thus was granted the highest possible authority as
part of God’s direct word, the Torah, which was handed to Moses on Sinai.