The imagery of a man leading people to the promised land is clear: Ezra is
nothing less than a new Moses, and he is seen as such in Jewish tradition.^35
The book of Ezra depicts him as “a ready scribe in the law of Moses,” who “had
prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, to teach in Israel
statutes and judgments” (Ezra 7 : 6 , 12 ). His journey, as head of a large select
group of returnees from Babylon, is depicted as an “exodus.” The voyage is
completed, like the Exodus out of Egypt, with the direct help of God.
At one point along the way home, we even find a dramatic river crossing
fashioned on the fording of the Red Sea. But while Moses came out of Egypt
with twelve tribes, Ezra comes out of Babylon with only two—Judah and
Benjamin (Ezra 2 : 1 ). “All the men of Judah and Benjamin” gather in Jerusalem
to hear his admonitions ( 10 : 9 ). Moses got to admonish all twelve tribes; Ezra
painfully misses ten of them. Lurking behind the dramatic tale of return
are unanswered questions: where are the other ten tribes, and why haven’t
theyreturned?
During the period following Ezra’s return to Judah, such questions be-
came pervasive. The deepened sense of the tribes’ emphatic lostness is cap-
tured in the Greek translation of Isaiah. The original Hebrew, as we have seen,
speaks of the ten tribes as being “lost.” The Septuagint translates the same
word very differently—here, the tribes are literally “those left behind” (Greek,
Apolo ́menoi). This mistranslation makes sense only if read against the partial
return described in Ezra, after which the remaining tribes appear even more
deserted. The settling of Benjamin and Judah in Jerusalem sets up another
apposition. While, before, the ten tribes were missing from the body of a
collective—Israel—now they are also missing from a specificplace,Jerusalem.
The end of the Babylonian exile leaves the Assyrian one emphatically ongoing
and renders its locative dimensions in sharper strokes.
The book of Ezra provides no answers as to why this second Moses left the
other ten tribes behind, despite the strong specter of the Assyrian deportations
that is present in the book. Rather then erasing any memory of the Assyrian
deportations and the ten tribes with it, the book contains plenty of references
and allusions to the more distant event. A locale frequently mentioned in Ezra
is “beyond-the-river,” once the core territory of Assyria and now a Persian
province. While, for the Persians, “beyond-the-river” was likely a mere geo-
graphic/administrative unit, for the Jewish reader, it is a reminder of that first
resettling of exiles, the ten tribes, in Assyrian times.
Moreover, the leaders of the returnee community in Yehud engage in
constant battles with groups of local provincials, identified by the biblical
author as the “adversaries of Judah and Benjamin.” These people identify
themselves as deportees brought earlier to Judah by “Esarhaddon king of
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