The Not So Lost 10 Tribes

Isaiah 41:10 states “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” And “Say, ˹O Prophet,˺ “This ˹Quran˺ has been revealed by the One Who knows the secrets of the heavens and the earth. Surely He is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful.”, (Quran 25:6)

On August 13, 2025, the Times of Israel published an article by Prof. Mary-Joan Leith, a Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College stating that stories of the ten lost tribes told by Jews or Christians, only appear only after the Second Temple period.

Since it began, however, the myths have developed in all sorts of directions, and over the centuries the “lost tribes” have been “found” on every continent except Antarctica. My favorite example is the “Jewish Indian Theory,” first suggested in the 16th century by Spanish explorers who thought that descendants of the ten lost tribes had survived among indigenous Americans; a variant of this theory made its way into Mormon traditions in nineteenth-century United States.

The strangest part of the “ten lost tribes” tradition is that the “ten tribes” of Israel were never lost. True, as we know from Assyrian documents, many Israelites were exiled to Assyria in 720 B.C.E. under Shalmaneser V and Sargon II (as were Judeans under Sennacherib in 701, but many other Israelites continued to inhabit their native homeland in what become the Assyrian province of Samaria soon after the conquest. The direct descendants, the Samarians, were still there in the Second Temple period.

According to the biblical account, after King Solomon dies, the “United Monarchy” splits, with ten tribes becoming the Northern Kingdom of Israel while the tribe of Judah becomes the core of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. The Prophet Ahijah promises Jeroboam that he will rule over ten tribes “torn” from the Solomon’s: “He then said to Jeroboam, “Take for yourself ten pieces, for thus says YHWH, the God of Israel: See, I am about to tear the kingdom from the hand of Solomon and will give you ten tribes. 11:32 The one tribe will remain his, for the sake of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel.

The ten tribes were “lost” when the Assyrians conquer the Northern Kingdom and deport its people: Kings 17:23 “In the end, YHWH removed Israel out of his sight, as he had foretold through all his servants the prophets. So Israel was exiled from their own land to Assyria until this day.”

The passage goes on to say that the Assyrians settled foreign peoples in what was now the Assyrian province of Samaria: Kings 17:24 “The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria in place of the people of Israel; they took possession of Samaria, and settled in its cities”

When they first settle there, YHWH brings lions upon them, since they don’t understand how to worship him properly, so the Assyrian king has an Israelite priest return from exile to teach them the proper way to worship the local deity. Nevertheless, these new people never really adopt Israelite religion fully: Kings 17:33 So they worshiped YHWH but also served their own gods, after the manner of the nations from among whom they had been carried away. Kings 17:34 To this day they continue to practice their former customs. They do not worship YHWH, and they do not follow the statutes or the ordinances or the law or the commandment that YHWH commanded the children of Jacob, whom he named Israel.”

The next time we hear the allegation that Samaria is inhabited by non-Israelites with only a dubious claim to authentic YHWH-worship is in Ezra-Nehemiah.

Ezra-Nehemiah promotes a much narrow definition of true Israel, limited exclusively to the Golah “exiles,” referring to the returned Judean exiles. The protagonists of the book even reject what seem to be local Judeans who were never exiled, merely called “the people of the land” (עַמֵּי הָאָ֑רֶץ, Ezra 10:2, 11; Nehemiah 10:30–31), and certainly wrote off the inhabitants of Samaria, the former Northern Kingdom, as transplanted foreigners with no claim to authentic Israelite identity.

When Zerubbabel—a scion of the Davidic line—is rebuilding the Temple, people labeled by the narrator as “adversaries of Judah and Benjamin” ask to participate: Ezra 4:1 “When the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the returned exiles were building a temple to YHWH, the God of Israel 4:2 they approached Zerubbabel and the heads of families and said to them, “Let us build with you, for we worship your God as you do, and we have been sacrificing to him ever since the days of King Esarhaddon of Assyria, who brought us here.”

Note how the narrator undercuts their request to participate with their self-admission of their relatively recent adoption of YHWH worship as well as their non-native Israelite ethnicity. Zerubbabel and Yeshua the high priest reject this request outright, stating that these people are not the same as their people, i.e., they are not Israelites, and YHWH has no interest in their participation:. Ezra 4:3 But Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and the rest of the heads of families in Israel said to them, “You shall have no part with us in building a house to our God; but we alone will build to YHWH, the God of Israel, as King Cyrus of Persia has commanded us.”

Ezra-Nehemiah’s “adversaries” are never explicitly identified as Samarians, but readers have connected them with Nehemiah’s nemesis, Governor Sanballat of Samaria, who with his allies, obstructed efforts to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem: Nehemiah 3:33 “Now when Sanballat heard that we were building the wall, he was angry and greatly enraged, and he mocked the Jews. 3:34 He said in the presence of his associates and of the army of Samaria, “What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore it by themselves? Will they offer sacrifice? Will they finish it in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish—burned ones at that?”

The tale in Kings and the attitude of Ezra-Nehemiah paint a portrait of a sharp break between the Judahites in the south and the northern tribes who were exiled in Assyria and replaced with foreigners whose worship of YHWH was syncretistic at best. Add to this the influence of New Testament narratives such as the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37) and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:7–42), along with Josephus’ disparaging portrayal of the Samaritans, and it is unsurprising that Jewish and Christian readers assumed that Judah and Jerusalem alone preserved the authentic YHVH tradition during the post-exilic Second Temple period.

However, the 1970’s saw the beginning of a break from two thousand years of a (mostly) unquestioned narrative about the so-called “Samaritan schism,” beginning with a careful look at other Second Temple period texts—both biblical and extra-biblical—which contradict the narrow definition of acceptable Israelites and the cultural erasure of the northern tribes in the books of Kings and Ezra-Nehemiah.

Chronicles, written by a Judean in the late Persian or early Hellenistic period, displays a pan-Israelite perspective, taking for granted that the members of the northern tribes are genuine YHWH worshipers. Notably, the account of Hezekiah’s Passover, well after fall of the North to Assyria, repeatedly indicates that Hezekiah (and the narrator) considers the people of the North to be legitimate Yahwists and not newcomers:

Chronicles 30:1 “Hezekiah sent word to all Israel and Judah, and wrote letters also to Ephraim and Manasseh, that they should come to the house of YHWH at Jerusalem, to keep the passover to YHWH the God of Israel.”

Hezekiah explicitly addresses the people of the North as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—not as newcomers! Moreover, he describes them as the remnant who escaped the Assyrian deportation: Chronicles 30:6 states “So couriers went throughout all Israel and Judah with letters from the king and his officials, as the king had commanded, saying, “O people of Israel, return to YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, so that he may turn again to the remnant of you who have escaped from the hand of the kings of Assyria. 30:7 Do not be like your ancestors and your kindred, who were faithless to YHWH God of their ancestors, so that he made them a desolation, as you see.”

Where Ezra and Nehemiah famously celebrate the divorces imposed on “mixed” marriages between Golah and non-Golah spouses, the Chronicler’s genealogies of the tribe of Judah[16] contain a plethora of mixed marriages involving not just foreigners like Egyptians and Edomites but also members of northern Israelite tribes. Esther and Mordechai are from the tribe of Benjamin, the tribe of King Saul, the first king of Israel whose family David overthrew.

The Letter of Aristeas is a narrative depiction of the creation of the third-century B.C.E. translation of the Hebrew Torah/Pentateuch into Greek, known as the Septuagint (LXX).

As Pamela Barmash of Washington University notes, the narrative takes as given that all twelve tribes exist and are involved in producing the translation: Six elders from each tribe were sent by the High Priest [in Jerusalem] at Ptolemy’s request, and the name of the resulting translation was derived from their total number of seventy-two.

Tobit and his son Tobias, the heroes of the book of Tobit, trace their ancestry to the northern tribe of Naphtali. Set in the period after the Assyrian conquest, the text envisions Israelites maintaining their ancestral traditions despite living in the Persian Diaspora.

2 Maccabees expresses the perception that Judeans and Samarians have a common religious heritage in its outrage (6:2) at the desecration of both the Jerusalem and Gerizim Temples: 2 Maccabees 6:1 Not long after this, the king sent an Athenian senator to compel the Jews to forsake the laws of their ancestors and no longer to live by the laws of God, 6:2 also to pollute the temple in Jerusalem and to call it the temple of Olympian Zeus and to call the one in Gerizim Zeus-the-Friend-of-Strangers, as the people who live in that place are known.

All of these sources work with the premise that Samarians and Jews are part of the greater Israelite people. The archaeological record shows us that this was not mere imagination, but reflects on the ground realities of the times.

The Assyrians practiced selective deportation, and while some areas of the Northern Kingdom suffered serious demographic decline, archaeological surveys of Northern Kingdom territory also show unbroken continuity of settlement and material culture through the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic periods.

On one hand, it is possible that refugees from the Assyrian onslaught would have fled south to Judah where they could have contributed to the a population increase that some scholars identify in the archaeological record of Judah and Jerusalem in the (late) eighth and seventh centuries. On the other hand, as Gary Knoppers (1956–2018) of the University of Notre Dame writes, there is no “evidence that the traditional culture in the Hill Country of Ephraim and Manasseh was suddenly displaced by a single foreign culture or by a variety of foreign cultures.”

In other words, many Israelites, especially non-elites, remained in Samaria and continued to live as such. Indeed, from the Babylonian through the Hellenistic eras, the province of Samaria/Shomron was far richer and more populous than Judea/Yehud, profiting especially from international trade.