Across the Sabbath River

by Hillel Halkin; nonfiction
Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2002

Reviewed by Andreas Wittenstein

Nearly three millenia ago, nine of Israel's twelve tribes were largely dispersed to Asia when Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel [II Kings 15:29,17:6,18:11; I Chronicles 5:26]. What happened to these "Lost Tribes"? Though the Bible says some were exiled to Halah, Habor, Gozan, and Media, destinations corroborated by Assyrian inscriptions concerning the Cimmerians, no reliable record of the tribes' subsequent plight exists.

When Babylonia conquered the southern kingdom of Judah and exiled the bulk of the remaining tribes to Babylon 140 years later, the northern tribes' fate had already turned to myth. Jeremiah has the lost tribes in vague "north country," "coasts of the world," and "distant isles." And the Jerusalem Talmud puts them "across the Sambatyon River," "enshrouded in cloud beyond the Mountains of Darkness," and "under Daphne of Antioch." Daphne, in Antakya, Turkey, was repeatedly buried by earthquakes. The Mountains of Darkness might be anywhere. And Sambatyon, whence this book's title, was a magical torrent of rocks ceasing every Sabbath -- thus unpassable to observant Hebrews.

The Hebrew prophets, including Amos [9:8-14], Jeremiah [3:12-18, 16:14-15], Ezekiel [37], and Isaiah [10:20-22, 11:11-12], repeatedly prophesied the eventual ingathering of exiled tribes, beginning with Menashe. To the prophets, the exiles are thoroughly mixed with other nations of the world, not lost -- nor hidden from God, who will signal them to reassamble in the Messiah's time.

Universal human longing for connectedness motivates both sides of the Lost Tribes search: romantic adventurers claiming to discover lost Israelites; and racial supremacists claiming to be the true Israelites. So the field is notorious for attracting crackpots. Add fanatics lured by Messiah prophesies. Plus grandiose imposters over the ages who used the lost tribes for political ends. A historical interlude in this book introduces some of these. But skeptical scientists discredited all such finds -- until now.

2700 years is a long time for a nation to preserve its culture, particularly in exile. Hunting Israelite tribes after this interval seems quixotic, particularly when Judah already dismissed the possibility 2600 years ago. Yet one nation has historically miraculously preserved its identity against all odds. Given Jews' religious tenaciousness, couldn't their Israelite sister tribes, though scattered around the Earth, have persisted and retained vestiges of their laws?

Across the Sabbath River begins with the comical adventures of an ethnographically naive orthodox rabbi and a reluctant tag-along journalist, Hillel Halkin, as they hunt for lost tribes among the Chiang in southwest China, the Pashtun in Afghanistan, and the Karen in southeast Asia. Intrigued but far from convinced by tales reminiscent of Babel, Noah, Joseph, and Moses, a god whose secret name is "Ya", and a lost vellum scroll of precious wisdom, Halkin gets a book contract and returns to southeast Asia on his own, with two Karen Israeli interpreters.

The Karen tribes Halkin interviews are convinced they descend from Menasheh, Joseph's oldest son. But their reasoning and reasons, including visions, politics, and elitism, are not altogether sound. Through skill, persistence, and luck, he earns the confidence of native ethnographers and pre-Christian priests, to uncover jewels never found by previous scholars: an ancient Song of the Red Sea; an Entering Zion line dance; a Day of Abstention From Yeast; a legend of the Assyrian king "Long-Tailed Wildcat"; and the meaning of Selah, which had eluded Hebrew scholars. Halkin's ultimate conclusion is not quite what the Judaizing Karen want to hear, but no less profound.

As entertainment, this true-life adventure is great fun, the themes deeply moving, the characters colorful, and the detective-story plot suspenseful to the end. As nonfiction, the scholarship is impeccable, the thesis compelling, the journalism first-rate, and the conclusion far-reaching.

This book is now in the Congregation's Library.

— from our September 2002 Newsletter

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