When the great King Solomon died some 930 years before the Common Era, the golden age of Israel united under a single monarchy died with him. Among the Twelve Tribes of Israel—the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, Simeon, Dan, Ephraim, Reuben, Gad, Menasseh, Issachar, Zebulun, Asher, and Naphtali—Solomon had always favored the southern tribes of Benjamin and Judah, in whose territory lay the city of Jerusalem. His successor, Rehoboam, could not manage to keep the kingdom united, and the northern tribes rebelled under Jeroboam. Once divided, many in the southern Kingdom of Judah, who kept their Mosaic traditions, viewed the newly established Kingdom of Israel in the north as apostates. Thus, when Assyrian Shalmaneser V conquered the northern kingdom some two centuries later, around 722 BCE, it was suggested that the subsequent deportation of the ten northern tribes was an act of God, a punishment for their idolatry. These ten tribes of the northern kingdom would come to be known as the Lost Tribes of Israel. Together, prophecy and folklore have transformed their story into simultaneously a legitimate historical mystery and a wide-reaching historical myth that has been baselessly used to both defame and glorify different groups of people. The tale of the Lost Tribes of Israel really only begins with their deportation and forced resettlement in, according to 2 Kings, the “cities of the Medes,” which would appear to be Media in north-western Iran. After that, they disappear from history, but the legend tells us that they did not integrate, that much as the Jews of the Diaspora later would, they maintained their cultural identity and fled eastward, away from the lands where they had been resettled. It would later be claimed that they eventually came, after more than a year of travel, to a land untouched by mankind, called Arsareth. It is here that the Lost Tribes remain to this day, protected and kept in place by a magical river, the River Sambation, or the Sabbatical River, so-called because it is impassable 6 days a week but miraculously dries up on the Sabbath, a day on which travel is forbidden. But at the dawn of the Messianic Age, it is said that the Sabbatical River will be parted for them, and they will return to their homeland and once more reunite all the tribes of Israel.

A relief from an Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III’s palace, picturing deportees from a city sacked by Assyrian forces; courtesy the British Museum.

In my recent post on Prester John, I mentioned that the famous Prester John letter claims the Lost Tribes of Israel survived in that legendary Christian king’s fantastical kingdom. Much like the Prester John legend, the legend of the Lost Tribes has inspired many an intrepid explorer to search for them in distant Asia and Africa, and also like the Prester John legend, which was inspired in part by the Acts of Thomas, the Lost Tribes legend first took definite shape in the apocryphal work, 2 Esdras. Scholars believe this work was written sometime after the destruction of the Second Temple, when Romans captured Jerusalem in 70 CE. For a long time, this work survived only incompletely, as it contained a lacuna, or literal historical blind spot of missing verses in the middle of it. It seems all Latin versions of this work had been copied from an original from which someone had torn out pages. These verses were not restored until the 19th century. Although attributed to Ezra the Scribe of the canonical Book of Ezra, some scholars believe it to be the pseudepigraphal work of as many as five different authors. And indeed it is picked and pulled from as if it were a collection of works rather than a coherent work. For example, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church accepts only twelve chapters from the work, calling it Izra Sutuel, and these same twelve chapters are valued by others as a text called The Apocalypse of Ezra. Originally, I was thinking of this episode as an edition of my Apocryphal Catechism series, but the legend of the Lost Tribes reaches so much further than its apocryphal beginnings, and has become so much more than it appeared in 2 Esdras, Chapter 13, verses 40-47. These 8 verses established only that the ten exiled northern tribes left the land of their resettlement for a “further country,” deciding once again to obey God’s commandments. So God helped them escape by holding back the waters of the Euphrates that they might cross. This appears to be the beginning of the legendary Sabbatical River, for it’s said that in “the latter time,” God will “stay the springs of the stream again, that they may go through” and return to Israel. Here, in this apocryphon, we are given the name of the untouched land the Lost Tribes traveled a year and a half to find, Arsareth. Some have tracked down in fragments and other works from antiquity mention of an Arsaratha, suggesting that this was an Israelite colony in Assyria whose name meant City of the Remainder, but if that were the case, then it certainly was not in an untouched land 18 months’ journey away from the place of their resettlement. Other scholars suggest that, rather than a proper city name, this was a corruption through the apocryphon’s many translations of the Hebrew phrase erez aheret, or “another land.” So at the beginning of the legend, all that we have is the Ten Tribes making their way over a river to a distant region, where they will abide until the end times.

For the evolution of this legend into an anti-Semitic motif, we must look to the 12th century, when the Lost Tribes were first conflated with the biblical Gog and Magog. I mentioned this in my last episode about the Prester John letter, that a brief mention of the Lost Tribes in the letter would later be twisted into the claim that these Lost Tribes were actually the evil and barbaric Gog and Magog supposedly trapped by Alexander the Great within the Caspian Mountains. The history of Gog and Magog is one of biblical contradiction and confusion. A Gog is mentioned in 1 Chronicles as a descendant of the prophet Joel, but any who might consider the legend of Gog and Magog literally would have to view this Gog as unrelated, for the prophet Joel, if it was he who actually wrote the Book of Joel, is believed to have lived and written during the Second Temple period and thus he and his sons were not among Lost Tribes in a faraway Arsareth. In Ezekiel, it is prophesied that Gog and Magog will one day lay siege to the land of Israel, and here Gog is identified as a person, the chief prince of “Meshek and Tubal” in a land called Magog. These tribal names, Meshek and Tubal, have long caused their own debate, with many believing they referred to descendants of Noah’s son Japheth, to whom various dubious theories of racial origin have traced a variety of peoples, including Scots, Poles, and Russians. Nowhere is it argued, though, that Japhetites were among the northern tribes of Israel deported by Assyrians, for it is traditionally held that, after the flood, Noah’s son Shem became the progenitor of the Hebrew and Arab peoples, as Abraham is counted among his descendants. Lastly, in Revelation, Gog and Magog appear again as the innumerable armies allied with the devil who march over the earth and attack Jerusalem. These sources actually don’t depict them as evil; Revelation specifically says that the devil deceives them in order to draw them to his side. But by the time they are included in the legend of Alexander trapping them in the Caspian Mountains, which some identify with the Caucasus, they have become heathen barbarians and unclean cannibals. In fact, later Islamic texts depict the inhabitants of Gog and Magog as inhuman monsters, with tails and huge ears that they use as bedding and claws with which they endlessly scratch at the wall that traps them. Considering depictions like this, it is clear that the equation of the Lost Tribes of Israel with Gog and Magog reflected and thereafter propagated anti-Semitic views.

A depiction of Alexander trapping the people of Gog and Magog. Public Domain.

The first person to suggest the Lost Tribes were one and the same as Gog and Magog appears to have been French theologian Petrus Comestor around 1173 in his paraphrasing of the Bible, Historia Scholastica. By Comestor’s retelling, Alexander had enclosed the ten Lost Tribes of Israel within the Caspian Mountains, and had been able to do so only with the help of the God of Israel. Comestor’s work saw widespread use in universities, and with translations in every Western European vernacular language, it became widely read as a “popular bible” for centuries. It is no surprise then, that after it became so popular, later editions of the Alexander Romance and the Prester John letter were altered to conflate these two legends, with the Alexander Romance’s mention of Gog and Magog thereafter transformed into a reference to the Lost Tribes, and the Prester John letter’s mention of the Lost tribes conversely changed into a reference to Gog and Magog. The conflation of the two reached their anti-Semitic height in The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a 14th century work purportedly written by an English knight, describing his fantastical journeys through the legendary realm of Prester John and the faraway territories of the Lost Tribes of Israel. The work is an amalgamation of previous stories from romances and extant encyclopedias. Who wrote it remains a mystery, and it seems likely that the narrating character himself, Sir Mandeville, was entirely an invention. The work claims that in the Caspian Mountains, the “Jews of 10 lineages” that men call Gog and Magog, have been enclosed. It claims that the Lost Tribes might actually escape their enclosure on one side, but still dare not because they understand no languages but their own. Further, Mandeville foretells how these Lost Tribes will go out into the world during the time of the Antichrist and will subjugate and destroy all Christian people. Even worse than this is the further implication that the Jews of the Diaspora have taken great pains to preserve their Hebrew language only so they will be able to communicate with the Lost Tribes and aid them in their conquest of Christians everywhere. Thus we see that these are really claims of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy of global domination, perhaps unsurprising when placed into historical context. A few decades before Comestor’s work, William of Norwich’s murder gave birth to that other Anti-Christian Jewish World Conspiracy theory, the Blood Libel, which I have spoken about in great detail in a previous episode. And The Book of John Mandeville is believed to have been written just a few years after the peak of the Black Death’s devastation of Europe, when, as I have also discussed in an even more recent episode, Jews were again scapegoated, falsely accused of starting the pandemic as part of a secret and deadly war against Christendom.

The writer of the Mandeville book seems to have taken some of his notions that the Lost Tribes represented a Jewish threat to Christianity from an earlier writer, Matthew Paris. In Paris’s Chronica Majora, and later in the Book of Mandeville, it’s suggested that the place where the Lost Tribes settled and/or were trapped was Scythia, a somewhat undefined Central Eurasian region where resided a race of nomadic horsemen described by Herodotus. These Scythians came to be erroneously identified with numerous warlike nomads, such as the Goths and the Hun. Essentially, Scythian came to mean barbarian hordes from somewhere out thataway. Considering the development of the Lost Tribes legend, it’s not surprising that they came to be thought of as Scythians eventually, and this led to their further identification with the Golden Horde. Matthew Paris was the first to identify the Lost Tribes with the Mongol invaders who at the time he was writing his massive chronicle were conquering numerous regions of Eastern and Central Europe under the command of Genghis Khan’s grandsons. But Matthew, along with most other Europeans, did not call them Mongols or even Scythians but rather Tartars, who had arrived from their homeland, Tartary, a vast and indistinct Asian territory. The name Tartar appears to be a corruption of an actual Turkic ethnic group, the Tatars, who were not so much the Mongols themselves but rather a people conquered by Genghis Khan and absorbed by his Mongol Empire. The name Tatar is believed by scholars to have been corrupted to Tartar as a pun on Tartarus, a hellish abyss from Greek mythology, for it was said that these invaders had ridden out of hell, that their homeland was an infernal region, a terrible and uninhabitable abyss. And Matthew Paris goes so far as to include a clearly fictional episode that is akin to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its imputation of Jewish conspiracy to betray Christendom. He claims that, in a secret meeting like that described in the Protocols forgery, Jews, who believed the Tartars, or Mongol invaders, to be the Lost Tribes returned, conspired to aid their campaign against the Christian West by smuggling provisions and weapons to them. If one doubts Matthew Paris’s prejudice against Jews or that he might have invented a Jewish conspiracy like this, one should look further into how his work spread the Blood Libel conspiracy theory by repeating accounts of Jewish ritual crucifixion, and further examine his depiction of the Lost Tribes, or Tartars, as irrational beasts with claws and fangs and disproportional bodies.

Depiction of Mongols as cannibals in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora. Public Domain. — Depiction of Mongols as cannibals in Matthew Paris’s *Chronica Majora*. Public Domain.

In the 17th century, an English parliamentarian and millenarian writer named Giles Fletcher the Elder would further Matthew Paris’s presumption that the Tartars were the Lost Tribes. By the time that he wrote his work The Tartars Or, Ten Tribes, the Golden Horde no longer ruled its conquered territories in Russia, though some remnants of their Mongol-Turkish confederation remained. Fletcher, who had lived in Moscow as an ambassador for Queen Elizabeth most of a year in 1588 and ’89, believed he was uniquely positioned to finally provide evidence for what others before him had claimed, that the Mongols were the Lost Tribes of Israel. He recognized that his views were somewhat unorthodox, for at the time, most reputable Protestant thinkers believed the “millennium,” or the thousand year reign of Christ on Earth mentioned in Revelation, was only a symbolic reference to the time period between the Incarnation and the Second Coming—a view called amillennialism. The apocalyptic view that Fletcher espoused was manifestly heterodox, to put it mildly. He put stock in the idea that the Millennium would only begin after the prophesied battle of Armageddon, when Protestants would vanquish Roman Catholics and Jews, reunited with their Lost Tribes and all of them converted to Christianity, would simultaneously rout the Ottoman Empire. But he did not dwell on the eschatology so much as his evidence for identifying the Tartars as the Lost Tribes who would be converted before ushering in Christ’s earthly reign. His evidence was that the “Scythian or Tartar tongue,” which he narrows down further to the “Turkish language,” even though this was only one of the languages spoken among the confederation of peoples that was the Golden Horde, was strikingly similar to Hebrew, though he was no linguist and at King’s College studied Greek rather these languages he was comparing. Unsurprisingly, modern linguists do not find his claims convincing. More than this, though, he further claimed that there were among the Tartars ten hordes, corresponding to the ten tribes, and that Timur, or as Fletcher called him Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror of the 14th century, had expressly claimed to be descended from the Lost Danite Tribe. Unfortunately, no other sources appear to corroborate these claims, making them seem wholly invented. Lastly, he pointed to the practice of circumcision among the Tartars as evidence of Israelite cultural remnants, even though this practice had likely been introduced into Turkish and Mongol cultures with the spread of Islam. So after all, this first attempt to identify the Lost Tribes with a known people falls apart under scrutiny. And one finds that the entire legend of the Lost Tribes likewise becomes hard to credit under close inspection.

Contradictions in the scriptures from which the legend derives should be enough to cast doubt on its historicity. First is the matter of the river the northern tribes are said to have needed God’s help in crossing as they left the lands of their resettlement and struck out eastward toward lands untouched by men. The foundation of this legend in the apocryphal text 2 Esdras states that this was the River Euphrates, but from a geographical standpoint, that doesn’t make sense. If the northern tribes had been settled in the “cities of the Medes” as canonical texts clarify, then they had already crossed the Euphrates on their way from Israel to north-western Iran. So then if they were crossing the Euphrates again, they would have been on their way back homeward rather than striking out into the Far East. And maybe they did return in some numbers, for there is scriptural evidence that the ten northern tribes were never lost at all, at least not in their entirety. Prophetic texts in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea all promise the repatriation and redemption of the northern tribes, which would seem to indicate that there was definite knowledge of the northern tribes’ survival, and knowledge that they had retained their cultural identity even in exile. In fact, throughout Ezekiel, the prophet makes references to tribes other than the only two that supposedly remained 200 years after the Assyrian conquest of the north, and in three different chapters addresses “the entire House of Israel” as though tacitly admitting that members of all tribes remained. Likewise, in the canonical Book of Ezra 6:17, at the dedication of the Second Temple, a sin offering is made for all twelve tribes as though the Ten Lost Tribes remained, at least in part. One explanation for these indications is that all the talk in canonical texts of the Northern Tribes one day returning and being redeemed was not really about the tribes having been deported and physically lost but rather about the northern tribes’ perceived apostasy. In this sense, the northern tribes were only “lost” in the sense that all sinners and apostates are lost. After all, less than two decades after the fall of the north, in 701 BCE, Jerusalem and the remaining two tribes also fell to Assyrian conquest, resulting in another deportation, this time from among the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, but this deportation isn’t even mentioned in the scriptures.

Map of the territories of the tribes of Israel, from Tim Callahan’s “The ‘Lost’ Tribes of Israel,” Skeptic, vol. 24, no. 3, July 2019, p. 9. — Map of the territories of the tribes of Israel, from Tim Callahan’s “The ‘Lost’ Tribes of Israel,” *Skeptic*, vol. 24, no. 3, July 2019, p. 9.

The fact that the Assyrian deportation of southern tribes never resulted in a legend of more Lost Tribes seems evidence enough that Assyrian conquest did not result in absolute obliteration or even complete deportation. But there is further evidence from Assyrian sources, such as inscriptions that summarized the exploits of their kings. These texts give actual numbers for those deported from occupied territories, and while some of the numbers recorded are suspected by scholars to be exaggerations, the number claimed to have been deported from the north is only 27 thousand or so, which would not appear to have been a complete evacuation of all their population, suggesting many from the northern tribes were permitted to remain in their homelands. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that northern tribes had ample opportunity to escape Assyrian deportation and seek refuge in the south. After all, the process of their conquest was not sudden. The dismantling of the northern Kingdom of Israel had begun all the way back in 738 BCE under the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III. More than one deportation took place as the Assyrians took the region piece by piece, and we know that Israelites were aware of the deportation policy because the prophets Amos and Hosea are recorded as warning them that they will be exiled. Then there’s the fact that their conquest was interrupted, as Tiglath-Pileser’s successor Shalmaneser V died just after capturing the major northern cities. Assyrian forces marched home to see the next king, Sargon, establish himself, and did not return to continue their subjugation of the Kingdom of Israel for two years, during which time, again, many might have escaped the conquered cities. Population records even show a surge of new citizens in Jerusalem, supporting the theory that many northerners fled to the more secure southern city. After Assyrian control was reasserted and deportation from northern cities resumed, archaeological evidence still appears to support the idea that this deportation was only partial. A consistency of style in later ceramics and architecture stand as evidence that the northern culture was not wiped out. All of this stands as convincing evidence that the ten northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel were never truly “lost” at all, a view that conforms well with the fact that this legend did not actually appear until the end of the Second Temple period.

The more one looks at the story of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the more clearly it can be seen as myth. For example, the idea that there is still some undiscovered Eastern land where an innumerable people remain cut off from the rest of the world is simply not credible. In fact, with modern knowledge of geography and the known dispersion of peoples, it is even hard to believe that back then the Lost Tribes might have found a land untouched by man in which to remain separate from other peoples, rather than just settling among an existing people and integrating. Thus, for a modern person to believe in the literal existence of the Lost Tribes of Israel, he or she must search for historical peoples or isolated races and make the argument that the Lost Tribes culture evolved into one we know existed or even still exists. While in a bygone era, explorers might strike out to exotic regions in hopes of finding the realm of Prester John or the abode of the Lost Tribes, today it has become more of an academic quest, with those who seek the Lost Tribes searching history books and ethnologies. Thus, much as Giles Fletcher the Elder made his argument that the Mongol Empire was descended from the Lost Tribes, many a theorist has suggested that the Lost Tribes ended up in some other region, in Africa, Japan, Western Europe, or even across the Bering Strait in the New World. And in this way, the legend of the Lost Tribe would experience its own diaspora, and as we will see in part two, would come to be used in a variety of dubious new religions and racist ideologies.

The Abode of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Part One: Conquest

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