Th e 10 lost tribes constitute a collective reference to the Israelites who did not sur- vive the First Temple’s destruction in 587 BCE, as opposed to the tribes of Judah, Levi, and Benjamin, who then forged what became the Jewish people, as evidenced in the book of Esther’s reference to Mordechai as “the Jew” (Esther 2:5), the fi rst such reference in any known literature. Th is post-Israelite identity became known universally as “Jewish” after the disappearance of the tribes that inhabited the Israel- ite kingdom.
For its part, the Israelite kingdom—which was dominated by Ephraim and joined by all tribes except Judah and Benjamin as well as Levi, which did not
p ossess a specifi c region, and Simon, which passively merged into Judah—seceded in 928 BCE from the kingdom Solomon bequeathed to his son Rehoboam. Th at kingdom, in its turn, was fi rst established in 1025 BCE by Saul, who hailed from Benjamin, and in 1006 BCE was restored by David, who belonged to Judah.
Th e tribes that descended from Jacob the Patriarch—Reuben, Simon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Ephraim, Manasseh, and Ben- jamin—were never tightly united. Even under David’s and Solomon’s united king- doms there were intra-Israelite tensions, particularly between the two largest tribes, Judah and Ephraim, but also between the smallest tribe, Benjamin, and its large neighbor to the south, Judah. Th e tension with Benjamin resulted in repeated civil wars, most notably the one described at length in Judges 20, when “all the Isra- elites came out, from Dan to Beersheba, including the land of the Gilead,” to wage war on Benjamin because of the rape and murder of a woman in the town of Gi- beah. Similarly, the rivalry between David and Saul concealed the historic friction between Judah and Benjamin. After Saul’s death this tension also produced a vio- lent clash between the soldiers of Joab and Abner, who were, respectively, David’s and Saul’s military commanders.
Still, the main tension was between Ephraim and Judah, and it surfaced soon after the death of Moses, when the former protested to Joshua (who was himself a member of their tribe) that the region carved out for them in the Promised Land was too forested and hilly. Similar tensions emerged subsequently during the pre- royal period, when the people of Ephraim challenged Gideon the judge for alleg- edly not deploying them in his successful attack on the kingdom of Ammon.
Th e tribes’ disjointedness owed not only to genealogy but also to geography. Even before they entered the Promised Land, the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh asked Moses to stay put in Transjordan, whose grasslands they found suitable for their sheep and cattle. Moses reluctantly agreed, but only after receiv- ing a promise that the soldiers of the two and a half tribes would not only join the conquest of the Promised Land but would also in fact lead it. Still, the consequent spread of the 12 tribes on both sides of the arid and inhospitable Jordan Valley could only intensify the seclusion in which the Transjordanian tribes dwelled, and further weaken pan-Israelite solidarity and cohesion. Th us, when Deborah the prophetess summed up the battle in which Sisera the Canaanite was defeated, she scolded Reuben: “Why did you tarry among the sheepfolds, to hear the piping of the fl ocks? Among the clans of Reuben there were great searchings of heart” (Judges 5:16).
Th e northern tribes’ battle with the Canaanites was shunned not only by Reu- ben and Gad of the east but also by Asher and Dan of the north. Even more curi- ously, the southern tribes of Judah and Simon are not mentioned for better or for worse by Deborah, apparently indicating her own realization that their location was too far even in her demanding eyes for them to travel through the Samaritan Mountains to join the battle that took place east of Mount Carmel.
Other Israelite fi gures, most notably Samson, who belonged to the tribe of Dan, did not quarrel with other tribes, but their careers did not break through the confi nes of their immediate tribal settings. In fact, the Bible generally leaves
the impression that the Israelite leaders before King Saul were hardly concerned about the other tribes’ travails. In Gideon’s case the refusal to weld the Israelites into a functioning polity was even ideological. When, after his impressive military victories, the “men of Israel” implored him to become their king, he replied, “I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you; the Lord shall rule over you” (Judges 8:23). Th is attitude led philosopher Martin Buber to portray the tribes’ exis- tence before the rise of the Israelite kingdom as an idyll. Th e way he saw it, theirs was a society of farmers who combined political anarchy with religious piety and industrious husbandry. Either way, behind the passage that appears repeatedly in the book of Judges—“In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes”—lurked a failure to confront invasions from with- out and crime from within. Th is pervasive lack of security ultimately produced the popular demand for political power and national unity, which eventually gave rise to the Israelite monarchies.
Yet even when the Israelite kingdom was established, its limbs were never been connected by an effi cient highway system. It seems that well before its destruction the Israelite kingdom was mainly what immediately surrounded Samaria, while its links to Transjordan and the Galilee remained weak.
Culturally, the Israelites appear to have been less committed to the Torah and more open to foreign infl uences, apparently owing to their proximity to the Medi- terranean and the coastal plain, which was part of the international highway con- necting Egypt with Phoenicia, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Th e Israelite tolerance of foreign culture even included the acceptance of a Gentile, Isabel, as its queen.
Th e Kingdom of Judah, by contrast, identifi ed with the Temple at Jerusalem and remained less alien to the Mosaic tradition and more mentally distant from the outer world. It was also more marginal from the viewpoint of foreign invaders, whose main strategic focus was traditionally the coastal plain and those more im- mediately connected to it, like the Israelite kingdom.
Th e rivalry between Judah and Ephraim was foretold in Genesis, where the two tribes’ founders square off , fi rst when Joseph shares with his older brothers his dreams of dominating them, and in turn is sold by them to slavery, and then, after Joseph’s rise to prominence as pharaoh’s deputy and his dramatic encounter with his brothers, when Judah confronts Joseph on behalf of all their brothers.
Th e strife between Judah and Israel not only resulted in the failure to remain politically united, but it also made them more vulnerable to external pressure and occasionally even led to wars between them. Soon after Israel’s secession, the Trans- jordanian kingdoms of Ammon, Moab, and Edom, which had previously been sub- jugated by the Israelites, restored their independence. Th en Egypt and the Philistines attacked Israel. Eventually, Judah, too, attacked Israel and took lands in southern Ephraim, capitalizing on Israel’s evident weakness after its debilitation by Egypt. During the reign of King Asa (908–867 BCE), Judah even called on a foreign power, Aram, to take sides in its confl ict with Israel.
Although there were also periods of harmony between the two kingdoms, most notably in the times of kings Jehoshaphat of Judah and Ahab and Omri of Israel, when the kingdoms fought mutual enemies jointly and Judah did not interfere
while Israel built Samaria as its new capital city, the separation of the two in their lives and deaths emerged as a defi ning trauma in Jewish history.
Th e Israelite kingdom was ultimately defeated in 722–720 BCE by Assyria, led successively by kings Shalmaneser V and Sargon II, whose policy was to exile the nations they conquered to distant lands. Judah, at the same time, was spared As- syria’s assault thanks to King Hezekiah’s shrewd maneuvering among regional pow- ers. At the same time, Hezekiah consolidated his kingdom’s bonds to the Temple and the Torah and “sent to all Israel and Judah, and wrote letters also to Ephraim and Manasseh, that they should come to the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, to keep the Passover unto the Lord, the God of Israel” (2 Chronicles 30:1). At that point, eff ectively, Israelite history ended and Jewish history began. After the Assyr- ian conquest, there no longer were Israelites, only Judeans, who eventually became known as Jews.
Th e Bible points to the exiled Israelites’ initial locations: “In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away unto Assyria, and placed them in Halah, and in Habor, on the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes” (2 Kings 17:5). Th ese places are between today’s northeastern Syria and northwestern Iran. In those areas archaeology has found evidence of Israelite names like Hilkiyahu, Paltiyahu, and Neriyahu, but research has no answer for the Israel- ites’ whereabouts since their initial relocation. Apparently, the historic disappear- ance of the Israelite tribes had more to do with culture than with geography, as they proved to lack the Judeans’ determination to cling to their nationality and heritage.