beyond mountains of darkness, or in darkness itself. They are beyond a river, or
swallowed up, or covered by a cloud. The referencing of Isaiah’s prophecy about
the “prisoners” reminds us that the lost tribes are those that the king of Assyria
“took captive.” Yet theirs is not a simple captivity as commonly experienced by
Jews in the postexilic period, but an invisible one. The Lord himself orders
these captives to “show themselves.”
Thus, much like the biblical inaudibility we’ve already noted, Talmudic
invisibility becomes another feature of the ten tribes’ exile. Indeed, it becomes
its most dominant feature, because in the Talmudic literature, the exile of the
ten tribes has been reworked against a specifically Jewish exile and not only
against that of various diasporic communities. At the same time, Talmudic and
Midrashic conversations and debates on the topic represent another, much
more sophisticated reelaboration on the template of exile delineated in Esdras’s
vision, produced in the course of addressing new problems posed by the
emerging notion of the Jewish exile under the Romans.
What, and Where, Is Sambatyon?
The term “Sambatyon”—a Hellenized distorted version of “Sabbath” that re-
turned into Hebrew text—appears in conjunction with the ten lost tribes with
striking frequency. In Jewish folklore and imagination, as Avigdor Shahan’s
testimony powerfully attests, Sambatyon plays the role of Arzareth, the place
that must be reached, found, and crossed. At some point, the Euphrates ceased
to be simply the Euphrates and became instead, as it sneaked into Esdras’s
vision, simply the “river.”
Also clear is that Josephus’s “beyond Euphrates” refers not so much to the
actual River Euphrates itself but to a larger and ontologically deeper place than
the actual terrain on the river’s far banks. Just as the ten tribes’ place of exile
becomes ever more removed, the literal marker that initially separated it takes on
a more elaborate significance. The Sambatyon becomes the river mentioned in
Esdras, which God halted when the ten tribes crossed over and which he will
break into seven channels when they come back. The Sambatyon marks the edge
of the world. Neubauer aptly comments that the “river itself is as mysterious as
the existence of the Ten Tribes. It would be lost time... to trouble ourselves about
the identification of that stream.”^64 But the Sambatyon, like Arzareth, has allowed
for endless speculation: virtually every river on earth, from the Yangzi to the
Amazon, has at some point been identified as the real Sambatyon.
Sambatyon appears at times as a river and at others simply as a place
name. Similarly, there is an ambiguity about its function with regard to the ten