and they eat human beings.”^3 The Romarnos proved to be voracious but
rational cannibals:
They took hold of us and, seeing that my companion was fat and
healthy and pleasing, slaughtered and ate him... but me they took, for
I was sick on board ship and they put me in chains until I should get
fat and well and they brought me all kinds of good but forbidden food
but I ate nothing and I hid the food, and when they asked me if I had
eaten I answered, yes I have eaten.Eldad was imprisoned for quite some time until “[t]he Lord performed a
miracle.” His captors were defeated by a “great army [that] came upon them
from another place.” The mysterious army then took him captive themselves.
Eldad told his Qayrawani hosts that his new captors were “wicked men and
fire-worshippers.” He lived with them for four years; they brought him to a
country called Assin. This second captivity ended when:
A Jew, a merchant of the tribe of Issachar, found me and bought me
for thirty-two gold pieces and brought me back with him to his
country. They live in the mountains of the sea-coast and belong to the
land of the Medes and Persian[s]. They fulfill the command “the book
of this law [the Torah] shall not depart from your mouth.” The yoke of
[ foreign] sovereignty is not upon them only the yoke of [Jewish] law.^4Eldad proceeded to tell the whereabouts of each of the ten lost tribes,
sketching a huge arc stretching from the borders of northwestern China
through Arabia to Ethiopia in Africa.^5 Eldad’s ten lost tribes are very much
alive, engaging in business, traveling huge distances, waging war against
various enemies. Most significantly, they are under the rule of no one. The
tribe of Reuben, he mentions, engages in robbery and shares the loot with the
neighboring Zebulonites. Eldad saves the best description for his own tribe:
“But the descendants of Samson, of the tribe of Dan, are superior to all.” While
he implies that somehow all the tribes share territorial contiguity, Eldad locates
four—Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher—in the Ethiopian region of the ten
tribes’ domain:
[T]hey see no man and no man sees them except these four tribes, who
dwell on the other side of the rivers of Ethiopia. There is a place where
these can see each other and speak if they cry out, but the River
Sambation [sic] is between them.... When they want anything
important, they have a kind of pigeon known among them and they
write their letters and fasten them to the wings or to the feet of the