The Lost Tribes and Isaiah's Promise of Return

In 722 BCE, the Assyrian empire carried away the ten northern tribes of Israel. They went east and did not return. No other ancient people lost in this way has ever been definitively found. The Assyrians were thorough. The scattering was complete. And yet the rabbis who assembled the Midrash Tehillim, working in the land of Israel between roughly the fifth and ninth centuries CE, refused to treat this as the end of the story. They found in Psalm 147 a word that changed everything: "nidchei Yisrael yichanes," the rejected of Israel will enter.

What Does It Mean to Be Among the Rejected?

The Hebrew word nidchei, from the root meaning to push away or banish, carries a specific weight in the prophetic tradition. It is the word used in Deuteronomy 29:27 when the text describes Israel being cast into another land. It is the word that describes something not merely lost but actively expelled, pushed beyond the boundaries of the recognizable world. When Psalm 147:2 says that God "gathers the rejected of Israel," the rabbis hear this as a promise directed specifically at the ten tribes who had been most completely expelled.

The text from Midrash Tehillim 147:4 sets this reading in conversation with the prophet Isaiah, whose words from Isaiah 43:18-21 promise a new thing emerging from the wilderness, a path in the desert, rivers in the wasteland. The Midrash Aggadah tradition, with over 3,205 texts, consistently reads Isaiah's wilderness imagery as referring to the exile of the northern tribes and their eventual return through regions that are currently impossible to traverse.

Isaiah's True and False Prophets

The title assigned to the source text, Isaiah and the True and False Prophets, points to a dimension of this teaching that goes beyond simply the lost tribes. The larger context in Midrash Tehillim is a sustained reflection on who gets to speak authoritatively about the future. False prophets in the tradition are those who speak of return without acknowledging the depth of the exile, who offer comfort that has not passed through the full weight of the loss. True prophets, Isaiah among them, speak of exile with full seriousness and of return with equal seriousness, not papering over one with the other.

Isaiah 43 begins with the command "do not remember the former things," which sounds like an instruction to forget the Exodus and all the miracles that preceded and followed it. But the rabbis read it differently. They read it as a command to stop comparing the coming redemption to the past one, because the coming redemption will be so much larger that the comparison would diminish it. The lost tribes' return will make the Exodus look, not insignificant, but preliminary.

Where Did the Ten Tribes Go?

The question of where the lost tribes went generated centuries of speculation in the rabbinic tradition. The Legends of the Jews, assembled by Louis Ginzberg between 1909 and 1938 in Philadelphia, collects multiple traditions: some say the ten tribes were taken beyond a mythical river called the Sambatyon, which flows with stones and sand six days a week and rests only on Shabbat, making crossing impossible. Some say they are in a land of perpetual light where it is always Shabbat. Some say they are hidden in a place that will only become accessible when the time of redemption arrives.

What all these traditions share is the insistence that the ten tribes are not simply dispersed and assimilated. They exist somewhere, preserved, waiting. The exile is not dissolution. It is concealment. The Psalm's word, "rejected," does not mean destroyed. It means pushed to the margins where ordinary human vision cannot reach. But divine vision reaches everywhere, and the gathering that Psalm 147 promises is a gathering from every margin simultaneously.

Psalm 147 and the Stars That Are Called by Name

Psalm 147 moves from the gathering of the rejected to a startling image: "He counts the number of the stars; He gives names to all of them" (Psalm 147:4). The Midrash Tehillim connects these two verses directly. The same God who knows the name of every star knows the name of every exile. The lost tribes are not unknown. They are known, counted, named, even in their lostness. The Psalm's astronomical imagery is not a digression. It is the theological guarantee behind the promise of return.

The Kabbalistic tradition of the Zohar, first circulated in 13th-century Castile, developed this connection between stars and souls into a complete metaphysical system, each soul corresponding to a star, each exile corresponding to a dimming. But the seed of the idea is here in the Midrash Tehillim's reading of Psalm 147, centuries before the Zohar. The God who tracks stars across billions of miles of darkness is not going to lose track of ten tribes across a few thousand miles of terrestrial wilderness.

What the Return of the Rejected Looks Like

The Midrash Tehillim's vision of the ingathering is not triumphal. The word nidchei means rejected, and the people who return will return as people who were rejected. They will carry their exile with them. The return does not erase what happened. It incorporates it. Jerusalem, in the rabbinic imagination of the final redemption, becomes a city large enough to contain every exile, every experience of rejection, every generation that waited.

Isaiah's phrase, "this people I have formed for Myself" (Isaiah 43:21), is read by the Midrash as a declaration of ownership that survives all exile. God formed the ten tribes. God formed the two tribes. God formed every scattered individual. Formation is not revoked by exile. The ownership does not lapse during the period of concealment. When Psalm 147 says God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds (Psalm 147:3), the rabbis hear this as a description of what happens when the lost tribes return, the healing of a wound so old it has become part of the body's structure. That healing, they insist, is coming.