eighth centuriesCE, came the fusing of the ten tribes to the coming of the
Messiah.
The story’s basics were laid out in 2 Kings and popularized largely through
the creation of the Septuagint—the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible produced
between the third and first centuriesbce.^5 Early on, the twelve (and ten) tribes had
appeared in other Greek texts as well, notably in the writings of Flavius Josephus
and other apocryphal texts.^6 The New Testament speaks of the “Twelve Tribes of
Israel,” which further popularized the notion that ten of the twelve tribes were
missing—and laid the groundwork for them to later become a pivotal part of the
Western Christian cultural and geographic imaginary.^7
The popularization of the myth of the lost tribes made them a missing part
of the whole of “Israel.” “Knowledge” of the tribes was formed and generated
within several contexts at once and recorded in a complicated set of dialogues
among and between various postbiblical communities—what came to be
“Jews” and “Christians.”^8 Apocryphal texts, dressed in the guise of biblical
books and even revelations, played an important role in the early stages of the
creation of this new knowledge concerning the ten lost tribes. The story of
Tobit (Tuviah), a righteous man living in Nineveh after the exile, was probably
written during the second centurybceand is one of the earliest apocryphal
books. Already, then, the ten tribes were an importanttoposin the imagination
of those living in Judea. As revelations, such apocryphal books seem to attempt
to tell us what the canonical biblical texts do not about the fate of the ten tribes:
where they are and what happened to them. Above all, the books express a
deepening sense of loss in relation to the ten tribes, marked by the tendency to
use them as a mirror for the remaining two tribes: “Hast thou seen all that this
people are doing to Me [the Lord], that the evils which these two tribes which
remained have done are greater than [those of] the ten tribes which were
carried away captive? For the former tribes were forced by their kings to
commit sin, but these two of themselves have been forcing and compelling
their kings to commit sin” ( 2 Baruch 1 : 1 – 3 ).
A number of recent tragedies lurked behind the author’s words: the
destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, the loss of the second Jewish
polity, and a new sense of exile that was bringing back memories of the
Babylonian exile. The book of 2 Baruch is an early instance of the tendency,
identified by Israel Yuval, to link the events of 70 CEwith the Babylonian exile.
The book of 2 Baruch also links the destruction of the temple with the exile of
the ten tribes. Written close to the beginning of the second centuryCE, 2 Baruch
pretends to have been composed during the early sixth centurybce, by Baruch,
“son of Neriah the Scribe”—a biblical figure and a close associate of the
prophet Jeremiah and his secretary.^9
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