(Sa‘id al-Fayyumi, c. 882 – 942 ) commented that “there is not the slightest
doubt that Halah, Habor, the river of Gozan, and the cities of the Medes ( 2
Kings 17 : 6 ), are to be found in Khorasan [in northeastern Iran]; Habor is most
probably the river Khaboor. All this is well known here.”^13
“Here” for Sa’adya Gaon—the leading rabbinic authority of world
Jewry at the time—was Iraq under the Abbasids. Khorasan—Persian for
“where the sun arrives from”—was a much larger area than the con-
temporary Iranian province and included large parts of Central Asia and
Afghanistan. Neubauer comments that the identification of Habor with the
River Khaboor is indicative of Sa‘adya’s familiarity with Ptolemy’s geography.
Ptolemy, like many Greek authors, was translated into Arabic and was
widely read by scholars under the Abbasids. Other contemporary readers
of Arabic geography followed Sa‘adya Gaon’s initial identifications of
eastern locations with increasing detail. A twelfth-century Arabic translation
of Sa‘adya’s commentary on 2 Kings elaborates on his Khorasan identifica-
tions: “He placed them in Halwkn (a province of Nisabur), Herat, the rival
of Azerbaijan (a Persian province, with the capital Tabriz), and the towns of
Mahat (Nehawand).”^14
Tricksters and Authentic Lies
Unlike these exegetes and the authors of the Midrash, however, Eldad was
generating new knowledge about the ten tribes not by speculation, but by
pretendingto be one of them and to have traveled among them. His fantastic
story—robed with cannibals and mysterious people coming from “another
place,” in addition to his pretension to be a member of the ten tribes—reminds
us that Eldad, while no doubt a traveler of some sort, was also a trickster of the
type so brilliantly profiled by Natalie Zemon Davis in herTrickster Travels.
Not many of his coreligionists, though, saw him as such. Abraham Ibn-
Ezra ( 1092 or 1093 – 1167 ), a noted scholar of the sciences and an authoritative
commentator on the Torah, mentions Eldad’s as an example of a book “contra-
dicting the truth,” but he was almost alone in his suspicions.^15 Nineteenth-
century depictions of Eldad alternated between two views. One of the first
scholars of his story simply called him a “voyageur.”^16 Another scholar called
him “a rogue and a swindler,” “devoid of any higher purpose,” but at the same
time also called him a “compatriot and counterpart of Ulysses.” Heinrich Zvi
Greatz ( 1817 – 1891 ), the great Jewish historian, called him “an adventurer and
charlatan.”^17 Neubauer dubbed him “a daring impostor, crowned with an
unexpected success.”^18