Today's Scripture Reading (March 8, 2020): 2 Chronicles 30
One of my
favorite Edgar Allan Poe stories is "The Purloined Letter." The short
story is a departure from his more haunting, horror-filled creations and is about
a stolen letter the authorities want to find. They make elaborate attempts to
find the letter, searching for a hidden compartment and hidden rooms where the letter
might be kept, but in the end, the letter was hidden in plain sight. When the
hiding place is finally revealed, the stolen letter is pinned to a bulletin
board with a lot of other similar looking documents. The moral of the story
might be that if you are trying to hide something, sometimes the best place to
hide it is where everyone can see it.
As a kid, I remember
hearing a lot about the lost ten tribes of Israel. It was these tribes that were
carried away by the Assyrian exile, and unlike those taken away from Judah in
the Babylonian exile, those removed during the Assyrian exile never returned.
The idea argued by some was that there was a population somewhere that consisted
of these lost tribes. And there has been no end to the speculation about which
people groups it might be that makes up these lost tribes of Israel. Even the
North American native populations have found themselves on this list, identifying
them as the lost tribes of Israel.
Eventually, I
grew older and started to take a look at the mystery myself and made a radical
discovery. I had been lied to; the lost ten tribes of Israel were never
missing. Much like Poe's "Purloined Letter," they had been hidden in
plain sight. It seems the most likely answer to the mystery of the lost tribes
is that the Assyrian exile was a partial exile. Some people were taken and
distributed throughout the Assyrian Kingdom. But a portion or a remnant of the ten
tribes were left on the land, and other people groups were brought into the area
to live with them, marry them, and have children with them. The Ten Tribes were
never really missing; they were hidden in place.
Hezekiah seems
to confirm this version of facts. Some scholars have been confused by Hezekiah's
invitation to Israel, and especially to Ephraim and Manasseh, two of the ten lost
tribes of Israel. The problem is that the last King of Israel, Hoshea, was
defeated and deposed around 723 B.C.E. The Assyrian exile was completed by 720
B.C.E., but Hezekiah did not come to power until 715 B.C.E. The repairs on the
temple would have taken some time, so the invitation would have gone out
sometime after that date, and if the renovations the Temple needed were severe,
it might have been years after 715 B.C.E.
The easiest
solution to the mystery is that not all of the people had been taken from their
land. And specifically, while the invitation went out to all of Israel to come
to the Temple, Hezekiah knew of specific places that housed concentrations of
the people from the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. (It should be noted that
while "Ephraim" was often used to describe all of the people of the
lost ten tribes of Israel, here, the context seems to indicate that it was just
the specific tribe that was being targeted by Hezekiah's letter). This was to
be a special Passover when all of Jacob's children would gather together to worship
the God of Jacob, who had brought them out of Egypt and into the land in which
they lived so many generations ago.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: 2 Chronicles
31
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