outside Jerusalem in 701 BCEwhen Rabshakeh had beseeched the people of
the city to surrender, promising to take the surrendering Jerusalemites to a
place of exile “just like their own” ( 2 Kings 28 : 32 ). “Rav and Shmu’el: According
to one he [Rabshakeh] was a clever king, because if he had said that he would
take them in a better land than theirs they would consider him a liar. And
according to the other he was a fool, for what use could it be for them to go to a
land which is not better than their own?” As is common in gemaratic discus-
sions, a digression follows, here on the exile of the tribes:
To where did he exile the ten tribes of Israel? According to Mar Sutra to
Africa [Afriki] and according to R. Hanina to the mountains of S[a]lug.
However, the ten tribes of Israel slander the land of Israel, for when
they reached the city of Sus they said that it was like their own land.
And when they came to the city of Elmin they said that it is like our
Elmin [Jerusalem]. And when they reached the second Sus they said
that it was much better than their own land.^52
The thrust of the passage, obviously, is to insult the ten tribes by exposing
yet another of their sins: slandering the Holy Land by suggesting that other
places could be favorably compared to it. But it presents an itinerary of the
migration of exile: along the route are Elmin and Sus (both in southern Iran),
Africa, and the mountains of Salug (from the wordsheleg,snow), ostensibly the
final destinations of the tribes—and all real places.
“Afriki” and “Salug” require some thinking. In hisGeography of the Talmud,
Adolphe (Adolf) Neubauer identifies Afriki as either the Roman province
whose capital was Carthage, or a stretch of countries from Ethiopia to today’s
North Africa. In either case, it marks the southern borders of the Roman world.
It is not clear where the mountains of Salug are; many early modern and
modern travelers would suggest that they could be the Elburz (Alborz) Moun-
tains in northeastern Iran, southeast of the Caspian Sea, which marked the
northeastern boundary of the Persian Empire. This almost Alpine snowy
mountain range, 900 kilometers long and 300 kilometers wide, stretching
from the borders of Armenia in the west to the borders of Turkmenistan and
Afghanistan in the east, sounds like a good candidate for the Talmudic
“Mountains of Snow.” The Alborz range is not only a topographically ideal
candidate for an impassable barrier beyond which the ten tribes reside; it is
also the dwelling place of the Peshotan, a messiah-like figure in Zoroastrian
Persian mythology.^53 Furthermore, according to several medieval Christian
legends, Anderson’s gates of Gog/Magog are located somewhere along this
range.^54 In any case, we can assume that the name invoked a boundary of the
world, paired as it is with Afriki, the location and identity of which are beyond