The book of 2 Baruch is replete with the warnings, admonitions, and
promises of doom and destruction that are familiar from the period’s literature.
What concerns us, however, is an epistle to the lost tribes that begins in
chapter 78 ( 1 – 2 ): “These are the words of that epistle which Baruch the son
of Neriah sent to the nine and a half tribes, which were across the river
Euphrates... : ‘Mercy and peace.’ I bear in mind, my brethren; the love of
Him who created us.... And truly I know that behold all we the twelve tribes
are bound by one bond, inasmuch as we are born from one father”.
The letter in effect, updates the lost tribes on Israel’s misfortunes since
their disappearance. It is also an expression of missing them—speaking of the
twelve tribes longingly as “bound by one bond.” The author, Pseudo-Baruch,
reassures the tribes, and himself, that the Lord “will never forget or forsake
[them], but with much mercy will gather together again those who were
dispersed.” The lost brethren need to know all this, he writes, “[ f]or what
befell you we also suffer in a preeminent degree, for it befell us also” ( 2 Baruch
79 : 1 – 3 ). The narrative of lostness has become the narrative not just of the lost
tribes, but also of Israel as a whole. Also significant is the link to the prophet
Jeremiah and the framing of the text as anepistleto the tribes. As we have seen,
already before the destruction of 586 BCE, Jeremiah was in contact with the
diasporic communities in Egypt and in Babylon: he wrote them letters. He did
not correspond, however, with the earlier third exile that supposedly existed—
the ten tribes. They do not write letters, and no one writes to them.
Jeremiah, a prophet of the Lord endowed with supernatural powers, had
corresponded with all diasporic communities but not with the exiles of Assyria.
Baruch, his secretary, finishes the job: in 2 Baruch, we find at last the missing
epistle written to the absent tribes by Jeremiah’s faithful secretary. The “newly
found” letter reestablishes the relationship between a far-flung community of
exiles and a center in Jerusalem. The context of Jerusalem’s destruction by the
Romans fostered a sense of loss, prompting the yearning to speak with the
tribes. Remembering the loss of the tribes provides a vocabulary for expressing
the much more immediate loss of the temple and of political autonomy. And
the promise of reestablished contact with the tribes bears the parallel promise
of redemption from woes far more immediate. Thetoposof sending epistles to
the ten tribes would reoccur throughout their long mythic history.^10
Arzareth: The Making of an “Other Land”
The book of 2 Esdras, Pseudo-Ezra, goes much further than 2 Baruch and
solves a much bigger mystery. As Herman Melville attested in his poem, the