Anderson defined the known world as the “oikoumene, the civilized world
of common interests”; the gate marks its utmost limit. The quintessential
Hellenistic creation, theoikoumene was “a new conception brought into
being” by the “union established between Greece and the Near East by Alex-
ander’s conquests.” Alexander was not only the “creator” of this “New World,”
but eventually became its “guardian genius to protect its civilization and to
keep its frontiers inviolate against the barbarians dwelling outside.” As such,
Alexander gave “to the idea of world empire... a new, wider, deeper signifi-
cance” and provided new meanings for the Babylonian, Egyptian, and Persian
pasts. “The Roman Empire founded by Julius and Augustus Caesar was
essentially the realization of his political ideal.”^25 In world historical terms,
Alexander’soikoumenewas the huge river into which previous world empires—
the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian—flowed as tributaries.
This world’s edges were strictly connected to human habitation and
knowledge of it, not necessarily to the physical boundaries of the earth.
Historian James Romm has shown that, beginning with Herodotus, the
undefined Homeric boundaries of the earth vanish and an increasingly
intense discussion concerning the boundaries of the world emerges
among Greco-Roman authors. For Herodotus, theoikoumenewas “an inner
and outer space based not on the physical boundary between earth and sea...
but on the presence of human inhabitants and resulting availability of eyewit-
ness information.”^26 Herodotus introduced the notion ofeschatiai(literally,
“most distant lands”). These lands “surround the rest of the world and
enclose it within.”^27 Though “attached to the known world, they are
also distinct from it, much as the frame of a painting is distinct from the
canvas.”^28 Herodotus’s distant lands were without inhabitants, like Arzareth,
which had no residents to undermine the ten tribes’ compliance with the law
of Sinai.
Equally important was the enclosure of the ten tribes as specifically a
“nation.” In Esdras’s presentation, they were migrants, wandering, homeless.
The coming into being of the world as shared home—asoikoumene—enabled
the positioning of the a-oikos(Diogenes’ expression for “homeless”) in a
specific location. Seneca the Younger (c. 4 bce– 65 CE) observed that his world
“was for the most part populated by people who were displaced,” in which
“whole tribes and nations [had] changed their abodes.”^29
The author of Esdras, a contemporary of Seneca’s and a Jew in Palestine
after the destruction of 70 CE, understood the ten tribes as removed from the
oikoumene.If so many “tribes and nations [had] changed their abodes,” as Seneca
wrote, so too had the ten tribes. But while all humans were dispersed—and
certainly, the Jews were—the ten tribes remained isolated and intact.
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