Unlike the more familiar Jewish exile in the known places of Babylon or
Egypt, Arzareth is “another place” in the deeper sense of beingstrangeor
different.It is another place, but it is an Other place as well. Uninhabited and
removed from humanity’s reach, at the same time it is geographically close—
we learn that it took the tribes only a year and a half of walking to get there,
which was not so very far in the contemporary context. But to reach it would be
a far-fetched hope. After all, it was the Lord himself who led the journey thither,
performing miracles to get past the obstacles of geography and geology.
Clearly, it will take an equally miraculous journey for the tribes to get back.
Esdras tells us that God is “halting the river” (which has by now lost its name
and is not necessarily the Euphrates any more) so the tribes can “cross again.”
The Jews were exiled to known locations, not removed from the land of Israel
by impassable geographical barriers. The earthly mechanism that prevents
their return is a set of unfavorable political—theological—conditions created
by God as punishment. The lost tribes, on the other hand, are removed not so
much as punishment but as reward, while access to them is blocked by
geography alone. Their exilic state has become an emblem of their purity.
All told, Esdras seems to be crafting answers to the very questions that
Isaiah left open when he spoke of the people “lost in Assyria.” Why were the
tribes lost? Where did they go? How did they get there? Why have we heard
nothing from them since, and why can’t we communicate with them as we can
with our other diasporic exiles? Esdras also seems to be responding to Hosea’s
claim that Israel had been “swallowed by the nations,” disappearing through
assimilation. In Esdras, the tribes avoid such a fate, moving far away and
resolving to keep to the laws of God.
In the face of the problems of assimilation and the loss of tradition and
identity, Esdras imbues the lostness of the tribes with new meaning. Esdras’s
tribes are still lost, but not as a scattered group melting into the vast territories
or human landscape of a distant empire. Here, they come into clearer focus,
confined in one place outside the inhabited world: an enclosed nation.
However, in order to define a nation as enclosed within and yet shut off
from the world, you need first to have a “world” in place. That is, to shut
someone outside, an inside needs clearly to be defined. In his meticulous 1932
philological study,Alexander’s Gate,Andrew Anderson referred to the ten lost
tribes as one of the “Inclosed Nations” which the great conqueror had shut
outside the world—outside theoikoumene.Anderson documented sources
relating to “the exclu[sion] [of] Gog and Magog and other nations beyond the
pale, such as the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel.”^23 The study stood as an
“authority for more than sixty years” on the subject of the lost tribes and still
remains unique.^24
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