preserved and partially canonized by the various Christian churches and thus
remained an important source of information about the ten tribes. Together
with other “postbiblical” texts, such as the New Testament and rabbinic litera-
ture, Esdras contains critical further elaborations on the tribes’ story as it
appears in the Bible.
The legacy of these texts is the emergence of the term “ten tribes” and its
Greek and Latin equivalents (dekaphylon, decem tribubus) as both a social entity
and a theological category—a people and an exile. While, in the entire Hebrew
biblical canon, the term “ten tribes” occurs only twice (and in one scene), in the
postbiblical literature, it appears with striking frequency. The rudiments of a
tale about the loss of an Israelite group were encoded in the biblical era. But the
emergence of a distinct entity known as “the lost tribes” or the “ten tribes” is a
legacy of the postbiblical period, and it is only then that the ten tribes come into
being as a distinct collective category within “the people of Israel” and are
assigned a distinct place within world geography and a role in world history.
These transformations are intimately tied to the emergence during the Roman
period of the Jews as a nation.
A crucial factor in the transformation of the ten tribes into a people is the
emergence of the Jews as a community, certainly not homogeneous or unified,
but defined by an acute sense of diasporic existence.^2 Had the Jews as a group
not already been so clearly defined as in some sense diasporic, the inscription
of the tribes as lost would not have been possible. The known lostness—the
diasporicity—of the Jews rendered the unknown and complete lostness of
the tribes potent and meaningful. The tribes became the ultimate missing
diaspora. In the words of Flavius Josephus, the great Jewish historian of
antiquity: “wherefore there are but two tribes in Asia and Europe subject to
the Romans, while the ten tribes are beyond [the] Euphrates till now, and are an
immense multitude, and not to be estimated by numbers.”^3
Josephus’s geography of the people of Israel—Asia, Europe, and beyond
Euphrates—is embedded in a larger world geography, that of the Greco-Roman
world, first created by the Assyrian Empire and the crucible for the forging of
the ten tribes as a known and motivating category. By Josephus’s time, the
world was a much larger one: the Greco-Romanoikoumene. The postbiblical
period, broadly defined as from the late Second Temple period through Roman
times and then well into the postexilic era, is the main time frame for the
formation of the ten tribes as a category. It begins around the time of the Greek
conquest of Palestine and ends shortly after the Arab conquest.^4 At its starting
point, the story of the twelve Israelite tribes, and the disappearance of ten, was
recorded in full with the completion and compilation of all the canonical
biblical books. In the final phase of this period, in roughly the seventh and
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