word Arzareth, first coined in Esdras, became a ubiquitous code guiding
the search for the tribes. Alastair Hamilton has shown that this was particularly
true in Britain during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when “feelings
about [the lost tribes] ran high.”^11 Esdras was a decisive factor in the elabora-
tion of both the theological and geographical dimensions of the ten tribes’
story. Even though the visions it contained were ultimately rejected from the
biblical canon, Esdras is crucial to the story, providing important clues as to
how the story of the ten lost tribes was received during the postbiblical
era, the questions it evoked, and the ways in which they were framed. In this
regard, Esdras stands as a bookend opposite Isaiah—the first to declare
the tribes lost and to frame the search for them. While Isaiah spoke generally
of redemptive “latter days,” including the gathering of the “lost in Assyria”
as one of their features, Esdras speaks with specificity about how the tribes
will return and explains where they are “now.” The gathering of the ten tribes
and their return is the culmination point of Esdras’s marvelous apocalyptic
vision.^12
Esdras’s visions stand at the intersection of postbiblical debates about the
ten tribes. They draw on biblical history and geography and inform, directly or
indirectly, future rabbinic and Christian discussions on the topic.^13 By Esdras’s
time, the essential parameters of the messianic idea and the redemption of the
world had been popularized in the ancient Near East.^14 Here, too, begins the
packaging of the ten lost tribes as a key narrative within a messianic world
vision. The ten tribes thereafter would become attached both to peaceful messi-
anic visions and to apocalyptic and eschatological ones. A well-known example
is the image of the ten tribes as a mighty army of superhuman entities coming
with the Antichrist. Such images were spread among various medieval Chris-
tian European communities, but had their roots in late antiquity.^15 Esdras’s
geography is not a matter of maps and accurate (or not) descriptions of the
physical world. Historian James Romm emphasizes that “for the ancient
Greeks and to a lesser degree for Romans as well,” geography was “a literary
genre more than a branch of physical science.” This type ofgeo ̄graphia,Romm
explains, “should be also seen as largely a narrative rather than a merely
descriptive genre.”^16 In approaching Esdras and anterior texts, we need to
look for the geographical context, writ large, within which the tribes’ lostness
is embedded.
In the main frame of his vision, Esdras sees a man “coming from the sea,”
flying above the earth, wind coming out of his mouth, fighting a multitude of
enemies.^17 Having defeated them, the man next “collect[s] a different company,
a peaceful one”:
lu
(lu)
#1