searching for them. More important, it presents and analyzes the ways in
which these defeats and losses were theologized and belabored in the biblical
narrative describing the events.
The initial context for the tribes’ story and tradition was the Assyrian
imperial one and theoikoumenethat derived from it. It was within this context
that the tribes were deported, and it was into thisoikoumenethat their loss was
written. The story of Assyrian ascendancy, conquest, and dominance was most
potently, from the biblical perspective, the context within which the fate of the
Israelite kingdom was sealed, interpreted, and written. This history takes two
basic forms: the first is made up of the concrete events of war and deportation,
and the second of the overlay of biblical embroidery upon them. The biblical
authors’ ideological/theological agenda is exposed in the manner in which the
events were recorded and interpreted. In approaching the biblical sources, which
are inexhaustible, I will limit my discussion mostly to the books of 2 Kings,
Hosea, Amos, and Isaiah. These texts set the parameters of the ten tribes story
and the prophecies attached to it as they were followed by later biblical texts—
such as Chronicles, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—and by much-later searchers alike.
By scholarly consensus, the time of the writing of these four books places them
closest in time to the actual events of the late eighth centuryBCE.
My aim is not so much to reconstruct a historical reality as to identify several
key moments, initial phases of labors of loss, as it were, in the development of the
historical deportations from a past event into an ongoing story of exile and loss.
These are not moments in a diachronic history, but they identify and outline the
core components and parameters of the ten lost tribes’ story as they were handed
down to later readers. The biblical narrative matters less as a chronology of
past events than as a living blueprint used in endless interpretations as circum-
stances changed. But bear in mind that this distinction is not one that would have
held meaning during much of the history discussed in this book, when the
historicity of the narrative in all its forms was scarcely called into question.
Assyrian Deportations
Sargon’s war with the Israelite kingdom was a chapter in a series of Assyrian
campaigns against it and other neighboring kingdoms over several decades.
The first Assyrian ruler to make a significant appearance on the eastern shores
of the Mediterranean was Tiglath-pileser III (r. 745 – 727 ), who marked the
beginning of a new era in Assyrian history, launching several campaigns
against the empire’s western neighbors.^5 In the wake of these early Assyrian
forays, Israel, a relatively prosperous kingdom in the northern part of Palestine,