Of course, not all of the features and facets of the Roman Saturn were
duplicated in rabbinic literature. But some were woven into the basic frame-
work of the ten tribes’ story from early on. In Greco-Roman mythology, the
insatiable Saturn/Cronus swallows his children one by one. Terrible for sure,
but he does after all keep them alive inside him. This malevolent feature in the
Greco-Roman myth is transformed in the Jewish version into the image of God
placing the ten tribes—the children of Moses, the children of Levi, and the sons
of Rechab—in Sambatyon. Again, we recall that Hosea’s quip—“Israel was
swallowed among the nations,” which implies assimilation—was transformed
into a story of being swallowed but remaining intact, as the Midrash suggest.
As for the nature of these children, while we may still debate whether the ten
tribes were a good nation or not, the Midrash is explicit about the superiority of
those groups admitted later to Sambatyon. Consider Virgil’s ( 70 BCE– 19 CE)
verse: “Justice now returns / And Saturn’s realm, and from high heaven
descends / worthier race of men.”^74
IntheRomanversion,inwhichSaturnplaysamorepositiverole
than in the Greek, Saturn represents a “golden age,” a “glowing picture of
blessed times where Saturn-Cronus ruled.” Saturn, says Diodorus of Sicily
(d. after 21 BCE), causes “all men who were his subjects to change from a
rude way of living to civilized life.”^75 While the Midrash does not speak
explicitly about a change that the ten tribes undergo, Esdras’s vision
(which, again, provides the basic frame for the Midrash) explicitly speaks
of the tribes’ decision to change.
Finally, returning to the spatial from the temporal, the concrete physical
position and behavior of Saturn as the planet in the sky show further links. In the
ancient view of the solar system—that is, the five planets seen by the naked eye—
Saturn appears as the most distant from the sun. In the ancient period, well
before the heliocentric revolution, the planet’s “vast distance from the earth” was
key.^76 As Ptolemy ( 90 – 168 CE) observed: “Saturn is the farthest planet from the
Earth and moves on the largest spheres around the centre of the zodiac.”^77 To the
ancient observer, then, Saturn’s supposed orbit around the earth marked the
outermost boundary and limit of our planet. In spatial terms, then, if one wanted
to convey the message that the ten tribes were located outside the earth’s outer-
most boundary, they would be placed beyond Saturn—beyond the Sambatyon.
Perhaps the best definition of Sambatyon is that of the German Orientalist
and scholar of Ethiopia Hiob Ludolf ( 1624 – 1704 ). Discussing the rivers of
Ethiopia in his history of the country, Hiob digresses suddenly and mentions
“Sabbation of the Sabbath River,” which as we shall see in the next chapter was
held to be in Ethiopia. Having presented the “frivolous fiction” of the familiar
description of the river’s qualities, Ludolf mocks those who believe in it while
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