Never wax pale ( Captives of the Southern Kingdom of Judah) Part 2

to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad]

 Literally, that are in the dispersion. The superscription is interesting as shewing that the ten tribes of the Kingdom of Israel, though they had been carried into a more distant exile than Judah and Benjamin, were thought of, not as lost and out of sight, but as still sharing the faith and hope of their fathers. So St Paul speaks of “the twelve-tribed nation” as “serving God day and night” (Act_26:7), and our Lord’s promise that His twelve disciples should sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Mat_19:28), and the Apocalyptic vision of the sealing of the tribes (Rev_7:5-8) imply the same belief. The legend as to the disappearance of the Ten Tribes, which has given rise to so many insane dreams as to their identification with the Red Indians of America or our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, appears for the first time in the Apocryphal 2 Esdras (13:39–47), a book probably of about the same date as the Revelation of St John.
The term, “the dispersion,” the abstract noun being used for the concrete, had come to be a technical term for the Hellenistic and other Jews who were to be found within, or beyond, the limits of the Roman Empire. So the Jews ask whether our Lord will go “to the dispersion of (i. e. among) the Greeks” (Joh_7:35). So St Peter writes to “the sojourners of the dispersion” in the provinces of Asia Minor (1Pe_1:1). The term had probably come into use from the LXX. of Deu_28:25 (“There shall be a dispersion in all the kingdoms of the world”). So in Jdt_5:19, Judah and Benjamin are said “to have come back from the dispersion,” and the prayer of Nehemiah in 2Ma_1:27 is that “God would gather together his dispersion,”