Instead of following the customs of the gentiles among whom they found
themselves, they decided to go into isolation, living according to the divine laws
given at Sinai. This called for another migration, this time voluntary, to a land
located farther away from the gentile nations among which the tribes lived
after their initial deportation. The gracious Lord led them to another land,
never before inhabited by humanity, where they could live free of the danger of
external influences. Millennia later, Joseph Armitage Robinson ( 1858 – 1933 ), a
rather eccentric biblical scholar and cleric, would call this place “The Terrestrial
Paradise.”^19 As the tribes moved ever farther from the land of Israel and from
the rest of humanity, the Lord “perform[ed] miracles,” opening the “narrow
passages of Euphrates,” halting the flow of the river, and leading the lost tribes
to their land of voluntary exile, Arzareth.
From a theological standpoint, Arzareth is of course a metaphor, an
imaginary and pristine place juxtaposed with our mundane and tainted
world. Yet, at the same time, it is presented as a real location, reached via
familiar and known geographical markers. The word itself is simply a mis-
translation of the Hebrew term for “another land.”^20 Esdras’s insistence on
turning “another land” into an actual place (as the reconstructed Hebrew
would have it, “it is a land which is called ‘another land’”) obscured the
possibility of mistranslation for a strikingly long time. “Arzareth” wasn’t
taken as a simple error, a mistranslation or mistranscription or simple garbling
ofErez Ahereth.Over the course of centuries, attempts to identify Arzareth, to
pinpoint it on a map, and to understand the meaning of the name only
underscored its presumed realness.
The possibility of mere mistranslation was raised only at the close of the
nineteenth century, by William Aldis Wright ( 1831 – 1914 ), a leading British
philologist and noted Bible and Shakespeare scholar. “Is not theArzarethof
our Apocrypha simply Eretz Ahereth (‘another land’) of that passage, corrupted
by an ignorant translator into a proper name?” He concluded: “Arzareth of
verse 47 is the ‘terram aliam’ [other land] of verse 40 .”^21
Meanwhile, the search for Arzareth had stretched over millennia. The
story told by Esdras is a potent narrative about migration, exile, and the
geographic imagination. In Arzareth, the real, historical circumstances of
loss and exile found meaning as part of a cosmic narrative that culminated
in repatriation and redemption. For many, Arzareth remained a real geograph-
ic entity, which appeared later in geographic narratives and maps. Arzareth is a
stunning example of place making at work. (Witsius speculated, for example,
that perhaps “Arzareth” really came from the Hebrew words‘Ir She’erit,“City of
Remnant,” orHar Sharet, “Mountain of Ministry.”)^22
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