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So what really happened to the 10 lost tribes? |
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Written by Arnold Ages
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Wednesday, 28 October 2009 |
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One of the most intriguing questions in the Hebrew Bible is what happened to the 10 tribes after the northern kingdom of Israel was sundered and plundered by a succession of Assyrian kings whose names – Sennacherib, Shalmaneser, Sargon and Tiglat-pileser – are attached to the sacking of the territory in the eight century BCE?
Not only did these Assyrian monarchs destroy the infrastructure of the political entity that housed all but the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, they also deported, in successive waves, its entire population base to vaguely identified portions of the Assyrian Empire, some beyond a distant river. According to Zvi Benite, who has studied the question with an almost intimidating thoroughness, the “lostness” of the 10 tribes has become the stuff of mystery, folklore and Messianic speculation.
In proposing an answer to the first conundrum – why deport people in the first place? – Benite suggests that the vastness of the Assyrian realm permitted its rulers to gather conquered peoples into its different spaces and use them to consolidate their hold on the empire while granting the deportees a modicum of independence and identity. This thesis, however, stands on some pretty thin gruel. Conquered and deported nations do not generally blend in and become supporters of the regime or empire that carted them off from their native lands.
Be that as it may, Benite’s study does not rest on the questionable idea that the lost tribes somehow serviced the imperial aims of the Assyrians. The quality of his essay resides in the way in which the idea of the ten lost tribes became part of the religious folklore of the Jewish people. In illustrating this, the author ferrets out every last verse of the Hebrew Bible in alluding to the anticipation with which Biblical authors awaited the return of the tribes. The books of Kings, Isaiah and Ezra are especially targeted to place in relief the contemporary view of the fate of the 10 tribes.
According to Benite, the return of the inhabitants of Judea from Babylon and their reconstruction of the Great Temple of Jerusalem sharpened interest in the following question. If Cyrus, the Persian monarch and successor to the Assyrian Empire, decided to return the captives of Judea to their ancestral homeland, how is it that the 10 tribes did not somehow return at the same time as the Judeans? No definitive answer to that question was found.
In the absence of a satisfactory historical solution, theology entered the arena and the fate of the 10 tribes became wrapped up in messianic resonance. In the end of days, that is to say, in the times of the Messiah all the forlorn of Israel would return to the homeland – including the 10 lost tribes. This is one of the themes addressed in Isaiah’s poetic renderings of the Messianic epoch.
The really interesting part of Benite’s inquiry, however, lies not in the mixture of religion and folklore, which surrounded the lost tribes, but rather in the way the latter became the fodder for myth making, speculative geography and ethnic explorations among not only Jews but a wide variety of Christians as well. Benite has excavated every significant thing ever written about the 10 tribes and shared with the reader his conclusions about the myriad theories advanced to explain their “disappearance.”
One of the most fascinating is his portrait of Benjamin of Tudela, a medieval Jewish traveller cum historian who recounted having met a member of the tribe of Dan in North Africa who provided luxuriant detail about the lives of three of the other 10 tribes about which he claimed to have intimate knowledge. Reports such as those of Tudela unleashed phalanxes of interested parties who traversed the globe trying to find those “unfindable” tribes. For centuries thereafter the tribes were said to have settled in Asia Minor, South America and North Africa.
One small part of the British people themselves suggested that their very name “Brit-Ish” – covenant of man – was proof that they were the descendants of the much sought after tribes. One of the author’s most startling ideas is that the fate of the tribes actually spurred the modern age of exploration as the tribes began to represent the ultimate beyond the known borders that beckoned explorers – which raises the interesting question of whether Christopher Columbus was familiar with the stories of the lost tribes? Benite mentions Columbus but does not tie him directly to those stories.
The most beautiful part of searchers’ syndrome, however, pivots on the way Jews manufactured fantastical stories about the marvelous fate of the 10 tribes, immured as they were, beyond the waters of the magical Sambatyon River, where they became symbols of the very mystery of life itself. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 04 November 2009 )
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