What happened to the ten lost tribes of Israel?

Why ten tribes

After Solomon’s death, around 931 BC, his kingdom split in two, as told in why the kingdom of Israel split. A prophet had already torn a new cloak into twelve pieces and told Jeroboam, “Take ten pieces” (1 Kings 11:31). The ten northern tribes became the kingdom of Israel, later ruled from Samaria. Judah, with Benjamin, kept David’s line in Jerusalem.

What happened in 722 BC

Israel lay in the path of Assyria, the great empire of the age, which kept conquered peoples quiet by moving them across the map. The first blow came around 732 BC, when Tiglath-pileser III took Galilee and Gilead and carried their people off (2 Kings 15:29). Then King Hoshea stopped paying tribute and looked to Egypt for help. Assyria besieged Samaria for three years.

In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away to Assyria, and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

The Habor is the Khabur, a river in today’s northeast Syria, where Gozan was a provincial town, and the cities of the Medes lay in what is now northwestern Iran. Kings names Shalmaneser V as the king who began the siege (17:3–5; 18:9). His successor, Sargon II, claimed the victory in inscriptions at his palace at Khorsabad and gave a number: 27,290 people carried away. Assyria then settled other peoples in Samaria’s towns, the start of the feud in why Jews and Samaritans hated each other.

Lost, or scattered?

The tribes did not vanish in a day. Most historians think the deportees, like the other peoples Assyria moved, blended into the populations around them within a few generations; Assyrian documents of the following decades mention people with Israelite names, some of them soldiers. Many Israelites were never deported, and their descendants include the Samaritans. Others fled south: many archaeologists think northern refugees help explain why Jerusalem grew several times over in the late 700s BC. Chronicles says Hezekiah invited Ephraim and Manasseh to his Passover, and some came (2 Chronicles 30:1, 11). Centuries later, Luke still knows a prophetess, Anna, “of the tribe of Asher” (Luke 2:36).

The legends

The prophets promised a reunion. Isaiah, who lived through Samaria’s fall, speaks of a day when God “will assemble the outcasts of Israel” (Isaiah 11:12). The phrase “ten lost tribes” is not in the Bible, but the hope grew into legend.

• Beyond the Euphrates. Josephus, in the first century AD, says the ten tribes still live beyond the Euphrates, a multitude too large to count (Antiquities 11.133). The apocalypse of 2 Esdras sends them on a year-and-a-half journey to a land called Arzareth (2 Esdras 13:40–45).
• Will they return? In the Mishnah, Rabbi Akiva says no, reading “thrust them into another land, as it is today” (Deuteronomy 29:28) as a day that never comes back. Rabbi Eliezer answers that after the dark comes light (Sanhedrin 10:3).
• The Sambatyon. Rabbinic legend put them behind a river that hurls stones all week and rests on the Sabbath, so no observant traveler can cross.
• Travelers and theories. In the ninth century Eldad ha-Dani said he came from the tribe of Dan. In 1650 the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel argued in The Hope of Israel that tribesmen lived in South America. British Israelism later claimed the British, and the Latter-day Saints’ tenth Article of Faith looks for “the restoration of the Ten Tribes.”
• Communities today. In 1973 Israel’s Sephardi chief rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, recognized Ethiopia’s Beta Israel as descendants of Dan, and in 2005 a later chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, accepted the Bnei Menashe of northeast India as descendants of Israel.

No such claim can be proven, and few can be ruled out. What history can say is plainer: in 722 BC a small kingdom fell to an empire, and its people went where empires send people, into other nations’ stories.