left, from Assyria; like as it was to Israel in the day that he came up out
of the land of Egypt. (Esdras 11 : 15 – 16 )
Esdras’s vision encapsulates several important new features of the ten
tribes’ condition. It affirms their existence “to this very day” and reinforces
the promise of their return. It then explains why they did not return with Ezra
the scribe during Persian times and reveals that they have migrated yet farther
off, into the strange land of Arzareth, a land “never inhabited by man.” Finally,
we learn that a river runs between this uninhabited Arzareth and the inhabited
world. Implicit, but pretty clear, is the notion that this river cannot be forded by
humans—indeed, the Most High has to stop it so the ten tribes can pass
through on their way to Arzareth. When the time comes, he will stop it again
and allow their return. In the meantime, until that day, Arzareth is what
Herodotus would call aneschatiai—a most distant land. And the ten tribes
themselves become what the Greeks would calleschatoi andro ̄n—the furthest of
peoples, like the Ethiopians. Perhaps this is what God means when he crypti-
cally says in Amos ( 9 : 7 ), “Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians [Cushites]
unto me, O children of Israel?”
The Place of an Invisible Exile
Esdras solves the problems created by the partial return to Zion under Ezra the
scribe by establishing the existence of the tribes and asserting their impending
return. These solutions mark one high point of the discussion concerning the
ten tribes that began at the time of the writing of Esdras and ensued in the
following centuries.
The basic idea here is that the ten tribes had moved away from their
original place of exile and away from the Assyrian world. The Vulgate’s fifth-
century translation of Isaiah’s “lost in Assyria” speaks ofqui perditi fuerant de
terra Assyriorum—those lostfrom the land of Assyria. Similarly, the great
ecclesiastical writer Sulpitius Severus (c. 360 – 420 ) writes in hisSacred History
that “the ten which had previously been carried away being scattered among
the Parthians, Medes, Indians, and Ethiopians never returned to their native
country, and are to this day held under the sway of barbarous nations.”^49 Note
how Severus adds the Indians and the Ethiopians—that is, the eastern and
southern boundaries of the Greco-Romanoikoumene—to the more biblical
Parthians and Medes.
A less veiled echoing of Esdras is found in the writings of the Christian
poet Commodianus (fl. 250 CE), who retells the story of how God “concealed”