the ten tribes, keeping them “enclosed [behind] a river across Persia” (trans
Persida flumine clausi).^50 Commodianus is but one early instance of Christian
apocalyptic writings relating to Esdras, which attached the ten tribes to visions
of the end of the world. In the emergence of Jewish rabbinic tradition and its
ongoing struggle with questions of exile and return in the wake of the temple’s
destruction, the question of the ten lost tribes was a complication.
Rabbinic sages, as cited in the Talmudic and Midrashic literature, obses-
sively reelaborated the questions and stories concerning the ten tribes. Like the
author of Esdras, the sages contended with the questions posed by the partial
return during Ezra’s time. They belabored the question of return in the specific
context of the reworking of the notion of Jewish exile and return after the
Romans’ destruction of the temple. This again raised the question as to why
the ten tribes didn’t return with Ezra the scribe, and it recast their original exile
as well. These concerns were closely linked to the question of the full Jewish
restoration promised in messianic times. If the exile under the Romans was to
be framed by the parameters of the Babylonian exile, then surely it must
ultimately end in the same way—with a triumphant, divinely led return.
If in later centuries, and in the Christian context, the obsessive quest
would focus on the location of the tribes, for the rabbinic tradition the core
question had to do with the notion of exile itself. Place was far less interesting,
and its Talmudic treatment is quite literal. The literature nonchalantly identi-
fies the place names of 2 Kings—“Halah is Halvan, Habor is Hadaib, the river
of Gozan is Ginzak, and the ‘cities of Media’ is Hamadan and its surroundings,
[though]... some say... it is Nahavand and its surroundings.”^51 One might
expect that the mention of these places, much less their clear identification
with contemporary locales, would have led, as it did in the modern period, to
deliberations about the ethnic groups living in these places and their possible
relationship to the ten tribes. But in the Talmud, we see nothing of this sort.
The places named in 2 Kings seem almost trivial to the sages. The rabbis seem
to think that they know, with little pondering, the whereabouts of Gozan and
the other places to which the Israelites had been deported. But, like the
prophets before them, they are more interested in drawing lessons from the
fact of the ten tribes’ exile.
In one instance from the Talmud, the rabbis build on two dimensions of
the story that are familiar from Esdras: the idea that the ten tribes migrated yet
farther away after their initial deportation, and the implication that the place of
their exile is beyond the rims of the oikoumene.In aGemara(rabbinical
commentary on and analysis of the older Mishnah) authored in Babylon, we
come upon the rabbis in discussion of the names of various Assyrian kings, all
of whom were connected to various deportations. The rabbis discuss the drama
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