The Lost Tribes and Isaiah's Promise That Banishment Is Not Final

The Disappearance That History Could Not Explain Away

In 722 BCE the Assyrian empire carried away the ten northern tribes of Israel. The Assyrians were thorough. They replaced the deported population with peoples from other parts of their empire and mixed the remnant with foreigners until the tribal identity dissolved. The ten tribes went east and did not return. No other people scattered in this way has ever been definitively accounted for. The rabbis who assembled Midrash Tehillim, working in the land of Israel between the fifth and ninth centuries CE, refused to treat this as a closed case. They found in Psalm 147 a Hebrew word that reopened it.

The Weight of One Word

Psalm 147:2 says that God gathers the nidchei Yisrael, the rejected of Israel. The root of nidchei carries a specific force: not merely lost or wandered away, but actively pushed, expelled, driven beyond the recognizable boundaries of the world. Deuteronomy 29:27 uses the same root when it describes Israel being cast into another land as the consequence of breaking the covenant. It is the word for something that has been forcibly removed from its place.

When the Midrash reads that God gathers the nidchei Yisrael, it hears this as a promise directed specifically at the ten tribes, because they are the ones who were most completely nidchah, most thoroughly expelled. The verse is not speaking abstractly about the spiritually distant or the culturally assimilated. It is speaking about the ones who were physically driven beyond any map that Israel could read.

What Isaiah Promised Would Come Out of the Desert

Midrash Tehillim 147:4 sets this reading in conversation with Isaiah 43:18-21. Isaiah says: do not remember the former things, do not consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing. It springs up, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me because I give water in the wilderness and rivers in the desert to give drink to my chosen people.

The wilderness in Isaiah is not a general image of difficulty. It is the specific terrain between Assyria and the land of Israel, the geography of the exile. The way in the wilderness is the road home for the nidchei Yisrael, the expelled ones who are gathered from the east. Isaiah says this new thing is something you will not recognize immediately because you are still looking for the pattern of the old thing, the Exodus from Egypt that has defined what redemption looks like. The new thing will come differently, through different terrain, by a different route. But the destination is the same.

Passover Night and the Promise's Timing

Legends of the Jews transmits a tradition from Midrash Rabbah about the timing of the final redemption. Moses declared that just as God protected Israel against the angels of destruction on the night of the fifteenth of Nisan, so too would the final redemption come on that same night. The cosmic anniversary of freedom. The night on which the pattern was first established becomes the night toward which all subsequent redemptions are oriented.

The ten tribes went east. The promise of Psalm 147 runs west. The night of Passover is the hinge on which both the first redemption from Egypt and the final ingathering turn. God gathers the nidchei Yisrael: the word is a present tense, the psalm tells us, which the rabbis heard as ongoing. Not gathered once and done. Gathering continuously, across centuries, through deserts that have not yet produced their rivers.

The First and Last Who Hold the Boundaries

Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah, a kabbalistic text in the tradition of the Zohar, takes the verse from Isaiah 44:6, I am first and I am last, as a description of the Eyn Sof, the boundless divine essence that encompasses everything. The first and the last means there is no outside. There is no exile that falls beyond God's reach because there is no beyond. The ten tribes went to the uttermost east. The promise of Psalm 147 says God is already there, already gathering, because the gathering was written at the same time as the expulsion, and the word first and the word last are both God's.