attempted empirical verification, and the accommodation of prophecy. The
search is an exercise in thinking theologically about geography.
Roberto Rusconi, editor of Christopher Columbus’sBook of Prophecies—a
collection of biblical prophecies that Columbus annotated between his third
and fourth voyages—comments that, as his “eschatological awareness” ma-
tured, Columbus sought to find “a historic and theological context in which he
could locate his geographical discoveries.”^64 The principle applies to other
bodies of knowledge as well. Central are Columbus’s attempts “to locate his
geographical discoveries within a historic and theological context.” The dis-
coveries carried for Columbus a theological meaning because they took place
not only in a specific moment in time, but also in a special geographic location.
Columbus was thinking theologically about geography. Geographical theology
provides a mechanism for charting the evolution of the labors of loss connected
to the lost tribes over a long span of time. We will see that, up until the early
modern period, labors of the tribes’ loss consisted almost exclusively of locating
the tribes at a fixed but unreachable spot upon the earth. All of the unseen
places “beyond the Sambatyon” were candidates in this process. Geographical
imagination and place making were at play, but not simple enchanted think-
ing. Serious theological considerations were at work.
During the early modern period, as the world’s geography became both
ontologically and epistemologically destabilized, geographical theology did not
disappear. It did, however, acquire and develop new meanings and tools in the
search for the tribes. During the age of discovery, the possibility of finding the
tribes became more and more real. Again, the rise of modernity with all of
its signature trappings—science, rational thought, technology, navigation—
increasingly fostered the search for the tribes, its techniques deployed in the
service of finding them, accounting for their dispersion across the globe, and
paving the way for their ostensible repatriation.
Scholar of religion Mircea Eliade famously argued that, “for religious man,
space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some
parts of it are qualitatively different from others.”^65 Geographical theology is a
spatial parallel; the topography it produces is nonhomogeneous. But its objec-
tive is not to transform space into specifically sacred space. Instead, it aims at
interpreting space andspatial(as opposed to temporal) events according to
theological considerations.
The exile of the lost tribes; the exile of the remaining tribes under the
Romans; migrations, displacements, transformations of terrains; and, above
all, the discovery of new lands—all of these spatial events created an uneven
toposthat would be made smooth only with the repatriation of the tribes. The
coming of the Messiah, the second coming of Jesus—apocalyptic events—were
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