tribes’ exile. In some passages, we read that the tribes were exiled “beyond”
Sambatyon. In others, we find them exiled “to” Sambatyon. A third instance
posits that one exile went “beyond” Sambatyon while another went “to” it.
A locative Sambatyon appears in many passages in the rabbinic literature, with
Sambatyon not only the river separating the ten tribes from the rest of the
world, but also the site to which they were exiled. The rabbinic literature, the
later Midrash in particular, speaks explicitly of Sambatyon as a place of con-
cealment and separation, concealment and protection. This is true not only for
the ten lost tribes, the first group to be “admitted” to Sambatyon, but also for all
sorts of people who are concealed and remain in a protected state.
The seventh-centuryCEAramaicTargum(translation) of Pseudo-Jonathan
for the Pentateuch refers to the Sambatyon as the river to which God dis-
patches another exclusive group of people, the sons of Moses (Benei Moshe). It
refers to an episode in Exodus, when during a moment of extreme wrath
against the Israelites, God promises to turn Moses’s own offspring into a
“great nation.” Since Exodus fails to tell us if the Lord ever followed up on
this promise, theTarguminterferes in the text and tells us, in the voice of God,
that after the initial Judahite exile to Babylon, the Benei Moshe were indeed
whisked away and transferred elsewhere: “I will take them from the rivers of
Babylon and place them beyond the Sambatyon and they will be different, no
one as wonderful as them among the residents of the earth.”^65 Crossing the
Sambatyon means being in concealment, but crucially it also means becoming
different from all the residents of the earth.
Similarly, a short Midrash entitled “Ten Exiles” (‘Eser Galuyot) breaks down
the exile of all Israel into ten different specific exiles and picks up on the same
theme. It tells the story of some Levites who cut off their fingers since they did
not want to play music in Babylon. The Levites express extreme sorrow for the
loss of the temple and fear that they will be forced to sing in the new place of
exile. The Levites are a special group within the children of Israel since they did
not partake in the sin of the Golden Calf. Certainly Sambatyon material, these
people are transferred to Sambatyon explicitly to be concealed: “and the Bless-
ed be He saw that they did not want to sing and concealed them [genazan]
beyond Sambatya [Sambatyon].”^66
Sambatyon is also the place where another exclusive Jewish group, the
Rachabites, sons of Yehonadav ben-Rechav, end up. Relatives of Moses, they
are praised by Jeremiah for the extreme piety they exhibited in refusing to get
drunk in the (first) temple. For this, they receive a promise from God that the
horrors of the Babylonian exile will not affect them and that they will never be
wiped from the face of the earth (Jeremiah 35 ). The Talmud and Midrash even
claim that God’s covenant with the Rechabites was superior to that of the house
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