>>25108356 lb
The interesting link is narrative, not linguistic. Asenath is the mother of Ephraim and Manasseh, two of the tribes swept into the Assyrian exile that 2 Esdras then sends on to Arsareth.
One name belongs to the woman at the start of that lineage in Egypt; the other is the apocalyptic label for the hidden country at the far end of the exile.
That is a coincidence of theme, not necessarily of word origin.
Some colonists of USA in 18th c. use that name.
Asenath
In Genesis she appears only three times (41:45, 41:50, 46:20). Pharaoh gives Joseph an Egyptian name, Zaphenath-paneah, and as a wife Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, priest of On (Heliopolis).
She is the mother of Manasseh and Ephraim, so she is the ancestress of two tribes later counted among the northern kingdom.
The Hebrew form is אָסְנַת (ʾĀsnat). The standard etymology is Egyptian: something like ns-n(j)t or js.t-n-nt, “she who belongs to Neith.”
Neith was the creator-and-war goddess especially associated with Sais;
the Greek form of the name is Aseneth or Asenneth.
Hebrew folk associations (with אָסוֹן, “harm,” or an Aramaic word for thornbush) are secondary and not the origin.
Later tradition expands her a great deal. The Hellenistic romance Joseph and Aseneth turns her into an Egyptian noblewoman who renounces idolatry, is miraculously fed honeycomb by an angel, and marries Joseph.
Some rabbinic lines make her the daughter of Dinah and Shechem, adopted by Potiphera, so that Joseph’s wife is Israelite by blood.
Modern Hebrew still uses the name as Osnat.
Nowhere in the biblical text, the apocrypha, or the standard onomastica is Asenath a land.
Meaning of the word is the same as U-topia? "No Place"
(I think I saw a bar by that name.
An euphamism for a place no one has seen?)
Arsareth
The name occurs in 2 Esdras (4 Ezra) 13:40–45, a Jewish apocalypse preserved mainly in Latin from a lost Greek version of a Semitic original.
In the vision, an interpreting angel identifies a peaceful multitude as the ten tribes carried off by Shalmaneser in the time of Hoshea.
They resolve to leave the nations and go to a further country “where never mankind dwelt,” so they can keep the statutes they had not kept at home.
They cross the Euphrates at its narrows; God holds the flood until they pass. The journey takes a year and a half.
“The same region is called Arsareth” (KJV; many modern versions print Arzareth).
The usual explanation, going back to Schiller-Szinessy and accepted in the Jewish Encyclopedia and the standard Bible dictionaries, is that Arsareth / Arzareth is not an independent geographic name.
It compresses the Hebrew phrase אֶרֶץ אַחֶרֶת (ʾereṣ ʾaḥeret), “another land,” from Deuteronomy 29:28: God will uproot Israel “and cast them into another land, as it is this day.”
(so could be euphemism for the diaspora?)
The tsade in אֶרֶץ accounts for the z/s fluctuation (Arzareth vs. Arsareth).
The RSV margin simply prints “Another Land.”
Josephus still reports a belief that the tribes were beyond the Euphrates in vast numbers (Antiquities 11.5.2), and later legend attached the story to the Sambation river and, from Columbus onward, sometimes to the Americas.
The text itself gives no coordinates beyond “a year and a half beyond the Euphrates” and “where never mankind dwelt.”
It's not Asenath who leaves but her progeny by Pharaoh Joseph. I go for shortened timelines, so there you go.
What the legend is doing is easy to see. It explains a real absence — the northern deportees do not come home — without saying they are gone.
They are pious, numerous, and one Sabbath away, held by a law of nature that copies the law they keep.
Return is postponed to the messianic age, when the river will no longer bind them. (The supposedly can not cross that river, since they are keeping the laws? And there's only one passage day which comes on the Sabbath?
All to explain why they are not coming back, apparently.
That is the same hope as Arsareth in 2 Esdras 13, but a different mechanism: there, distance and an empty country; here, a Sabbath-locked river. The two were braided later. They were not the same story at the start.
The ten tribes were probably genocided in Syria, that's why they are not coming back?
Its possible American colonist/ settlers used that name believing they were the descendants of some lost tribes mentioned in the Bible?