And the strayed who are in the land of Assyria

 After finishing Divrei Hayamim for the first time (and going through certain chapters several more times after that), I sat back and realized that of all of the tens and hundreds of thousands of people from the two and a half tribes from ever haYarden, we only have a handful of names. We have tribal leaders from the time of the desert, we have some later shoftim and assistants of David and Shlomo, we have a speculated king from Gad (Menachem) and we have some tribal leaders from other generations. That's about it. It comes down to maybe 100 names. Two and a half tribes cut down to about ten minyans. That's sad. After comparing the list to that of Judea - Yehudah, Levi and Binyamin - I thought, man, why don't we have a Chronicles version for the 10 Lost Tribes?

But that's actually not true. We had one, or at least commonly believed to have had one. But like the Lost Tribes, it got lost. It's only ever mentioned in the Tanach, not actually inserted into it. It was called: Divrei Hayamim L'Malchei Yisrael - The Chronicles of the Kings of Israel.

Rabbi Ahron Marcus has speculated in one of his books - Kadmoniyot, I believe - that our Chronicles is what is called in Melachim "Divrei Hayamim L'Malchei Yehudah" - The Chronicles of the Kings of Judea while Melachim itself is either based off of or is The Chronicles of the Kings of Israel (perhaps with some parts edited out). His hypothesis is based on the fact that Chronicles goes into great detail on the people, and in particular, the kings of Judea while Kings seemingly ignores some key factors about the Kings of Judea and focuses more on the happenings of the Kings of Israel. One of his main examples is the story of King Uzziah. But that's a subject for another post.

In any case, upon realizing that we barely knew anything about the two and a half tribes, I realized this brought new meaning to the verse in Yeshayahu: "...ובאו האובדים בארץ אשור והנדחים בארץ מצרים..." - "...and the strayed who are in the land of Assyria and the expelled who are in the land of Egypt shall come..." - these people are so lost that we don't even know who they were/are. Hard to believe! And I think that this intensifies the tragedy of the whole story.

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