The Sign and the Seal
Page 50
You will then disembark and travel along the bank for forty days, for there are sharp rocks in the Nile and many reefs through which you will be unable to sail. Having marched through this country in forty days, you will embark again in another boat and sail for twelve days, and then you will come to a great city, the name of which is Meroe. This city is said to be the mother of all Ethiopia … From this city, making a voyage of the same length of sailing as you did from Elephantine to the mother city of the Ethiopians, you will come to the land of the Deserters … These were two hundred and forty thousand Egyptians, fighter Egyptians, who revolted from the Egyptians and joined the Ethiopians … in the time of King Psammetichus. When these people had settled among the Ethiopians, the Ethiopians became more civilised, through learning the manner of the Egyptians. For four months of travel space, then, sailing and road, beyond its course in Egypt, the Nile is a known country. If you add all together, you will find that it takes four months of journeying from Elephantine to these Deserters of whom I spoke.43
I said earlier that the mass exodus of ‘the Deserters’ from Elephantine had not necessarily involved Jews, and I could find no proof that it had. Herodotus had stated very clearly, however, that this exodus had occurred in the time of the Pharaoh Psammetichus (595–589 BC44). I was therefore excited to learn from an impeccable source that ‘Jews had been sent out as auxiliaries to fight in the army of Psammetichus against the King of the Ethiopians.’45 On the basis of this well documented historical fact it did not seem unreasonable to conclude that there might indeed have been some Jews amongst the Deserters.
Another aspect of the Herodotus report which I found intriguing was that it made specific mention of Meroe – through which, according to Raphael Hadane, the forefathers of the Falashas had passed on their way to Abyssinia. Moreover, Herodotus had gone to considerable lengths to explain that his ‘Deserters’ had lived a full fifty-six days’ sail beyond Meroe. If this journey had been made on the Atbara river, which flows into the Nile just to the north of Meroe (and into which, in turn, the Takazze also flows) then it would have brought the traveller as far as the borders of modern Ethiopia, and perhaps across those borders.46
Herodotus had written his report in the fifth century BC. It followed that if a group of Jews bearing the Ark of the Covenant had chosen to flee southwards from Elephantine in that same century then they would have passed through ‘known country’ almost all the way to Lake Tana. Moreover, simple logic suggested that the Abyssinian highlands could have been an attractive destination for them – cool and well watered, these green mountains would surely have looked like a Garden of Eden by comparison with the deserts of the Sudan.
Beyond the rivers of Cush
Could the fugitives from Elephantine have had foreknowledge of this ‘garden beyond the wilderness’? Was it possible that in making their journey to the south they might not only have been travelling through ‘known country’ but also going towards a land in which they already had kin and co-religionists? As my research progressed I did find evidence to suggest that this was indeed possible and that Jews could well have ventured into Abyssinia at dates even earlier than the fifth century BC.
Part of this evidence was biblical. Though I knew that the use of the word ‘Ethiopia’ in the Scriptures could not automatically be assumed to refer to the country now going by that name, I also knew that there were circumstances in which it might have done. As noted above, ‘Ethiopia’ is a Greek word meaning ‘burnt faces’. In the earliest Greek editions of the Bible, the Hebrew term ‘Cush’ was translated as ‘Ethiopia’ and was used to refer, as one leading authority put it, to ‘the entire Nile Valley south of Egypt, including Nubia and Abyssinia’.47 What this meant was that biblical references to ‘Ethiopia’ might or might not refer to Abyssinia proper. Likewise, in English translations that had reverted to the use of the word ‘Cush’, Abyssinia might or might not have been implied.
In this context it seemed to me at least worthy of note that Moses himself had married an ‘Ethiopian woman’48 – according to an undeniably ancient verse in the book of Numbers. Added to this was the curious testimony of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus – supported by several Jewish legends – which asserted that between his fortieth and eightieth years the prophet had lived for some time in ‘Ethiopia’.49
Other passages in the Scriptures also referred to ‘Ethiopia’/‘Cush’. Many were plainly irrelevant to my interests. Some, however, were intriguing and raised the possibility that the scribes responsible for them had not had Nubia or any part of the Sudan in mind but rather the mountainous land in the Horn of Africa that we call ‘Ethiopia’ today.
One such, with which I was already familiar, occurred in the second chapter of the book of Genesis and referred to the rivers that flowed out of the Garden of Eden: ‘And the name of the second river is Gihon; the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.’50 A glance at a map showed me that there was a very real sense in which the Blue Nile, sweeping out from Lake Tana in a wide loop, did indeed compass ‘the whole land of Ethiopia’. Moreover, as I had been aware for some time,51 the twin springs regarded as the source of that great river are known to this day as Giyon by the Ethiopians themselves.52
Another interesting passage occurred in Psalm 68, described by Jon D. Levenson, Associate Professor of the Hebrew Bible in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, as ‘one of the oldest pieces of Israelite poetry’.53 This psalm included a cryptic reference to the Ark of the Covenant54 and also made the following strange prediction: ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.’55 I could not help but wonder why Ethiopia had been given prominence in this way as a likely candidate for conversion to the religion of Israel. Unfortunately, there was nothing in the psalm itself which helped to answer this question. However, in a passage written somewhat later by the prophet Amos (whose ministry lasted from 783 to 743 BC56), there were indications that something so momentous had happened in Ethiopia/Cush that the inhabitants of that distant land were now to be regarded as being on a par with the ‘Chosen People’ of Israel. Three different translations of the same verse (Amos 9:7) help to illustrate what I mean:
Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord. (King James Authorized Version) Are not you and the Cushites all the same to me, sons of Israel? – it is Yahweh who speaks. (Jerusalem Bible) Are not you Israelites like Cushites to me? says the Lord. (New English Bible)
While I realized that it would be possible to interpret this verse in another way – i.e. to understand from it that the children of Israel were no longer to be accorded any special privileges by Yahweh – it seemed to me that the more obvious reading also had to be considered. By the eighth century BC, when Amos was prophesying, was it not conceivable that there could already have been a flow of Hebrew migrants southwards through Egypt and into the highlands of Abyssinia? There was no proof for this admittedly wild speculation. It was an undeniable fact, however, that out of all the vast swathe of territory that Amos could have been referring to when he spoke of Ethiopia/Cush, only one specific area was known to have adopted the Judaic faith in antiquity (and, moreover, to have adhered to that faith right up until the twentieth century AD). That area, of course, lay in the vicinity of Lake Tana, the Falasha homeland since time immemorial.
The next biblical passage that caught my attention was in the book of Zephaniah, and had been written at some time between 640 and 622 BC57 – i.e. during the reign of King Josiah. Again I found it helpful to view side by side three separate translations of the same verse (Zephaniah 3:10), which supposedly quoted the words of the Lord:
From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia my suppliants, even the daughter of my dispersed, shall bring mine offering. (King James Authorized Version) From beyond the banks of the rivers of Ethiopia my suppliants will bring me offerings. (Jerusalem Bible) From beyond the rivers of Cush my suppliants of the Dispersion shall bring me tribute. (New English Bible)
Since there was absolutely no doubt that this verse had been written before 622 BC – and thus well before the exile and captivity of the Israelites in Babylon – it was pertinent to ask the following questions:
1 When Zephaniah had referred to a ‘dispersion’ what event exactly had he been talking about?
2 Which part of biblical ‘Cush’ had he had in mind when he had envisaged the suppliants of the Lord bringing offerings ‘from beyond the rivers of Ethiopia’?
In answer to the first question, I had to conclude that the prophet had been talking about some kind of voluntary popular migration, because there had been no enforced ‘dispersion’ of the Hebrews from the Holy Land prior to Zephaniah’s time. As regards the second question, the reader will recall that the biblical term ‘Cush’ connoted ‘the entire Nile Valley, south of Egypt, including Nubia and Abyssinia’. The verse quoted above, however, contained internal evidence which helped to narrow down the precise geographical area that Zephaniah had been speaking of. That evidence lay in the phrase variously translated as ‘beyond the rivers of Ethiopia’. Since more than one river was involved, the Nile Valley as far south as Meroe could be ruled out. East of Meroe, however, flowed the Atbara, and beyond that the Takazze, while to the south (roughly parallel to the Atbara) the Blue Nile rushed down from Abyssinia. These, surely, were the rivers of Ethiopia, and beyond all of them lay Lake Tana. The possibility that the prophet had had the traditional area of Falasha settlement in mind when he had written this intriguing verse could not, therefore, be entirely dismissed.
My feeling that there might be something to this speculation strengthened when I ran a computer check and discovered that the phrase ‘beyond the rivers of Ethiopia/Cush’ had only been used on one other occasion in the entire Bible. The King James Authorized Version translated the relevant passage (from Chapter 18 of the book of Isaiah) as follows:
Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia: That sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes upon the waters, saying, Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled!58
The other translations of the same passage, which I reproduce below side by side, added further shades of meaning to an already rich and haunting message:
Country of whirring wings beyond the rivers of Cush, who send ambassadors by sea, in papyrus skiffs over the waters. Go, swift messengers to a people tall and bronzed, to a nation always feared, a people mighty and masterful, in the country criss-crossed with rivers. (Jerusalem Bible) There is a land of sailing ships, a land beyond the rivers of Cush which sends its envoys by the Nile, journeying on the waters in vessels of reed. Go, swift messengers, go to a people tall and smooth-skinned, to a people dreaded near and far, a nation strong and proud, whose land is scoured by rivers. (New English Bible)
Falling as it did in Chapter 18 of the book of Isaiah, it was certain that this passage had been written by Isaiah himself.59 This meant, of course, that it could be accurately dated to his lifetime which, as I already knew,60 had been a long one, spanning the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah (respectively 740–736 BC, 736–716 BC and 716–687 BC61). In fact, the prophet had almost certainly survived into the reign of Manasseh, the monarch whose idolatry, I was now quite certain, had led to the removal of the Ark of the Covenant from the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple. I was therefore interested to learn of a strong and ancient Jewish tradition which held that Isaiah had died a martyr at the hands of Manasseh himself.62
What I found even more interesting was the way in which the prophet had spoken of the mysterious land that lay ‘beyond the rivers of Cush’. The King James Authorized Version of the Bible suggested that he had cursed this land but the more recent translations conveyed no such impression. All three renderings, however, did agree on its geographical character: not only was it located ‘beyond’ rivers, but also it was itself ‘spoiled’, or ‘scoured’, or ‘criss-crossed’ by rivers.
In my view, this information made it virtually certain that Isaiah had been referring to Abyssinia and to the area of traditional Falasha settlement there. The high country around Lake Tana is indeed ‘criss-crossed’ by rivers (which also spoil and scour it by carrying away huge quantities of its precious top-soil). There were other clues as well:
1 The inhabitants of the land were said to be tall and ‘peeled’, or ‘smooth-skinned’, or – in the authoritative Jerusalem Bible translation – ‘bronzed’. This, I thought, was a description that could easily be applied to modern Ethiopians, whose glowing, chestnut-brown complexions are quite distinct from the ‘black’, negroid skin tones found in other African countries.
2 The land was curiously described as ‘shadowing with wings’ (or more directly as a ‘country of whirring wings’). This, I felt, might very well be a reference to the giant locust swarms that, every decade or so, lay waste Ethiopia, overshadowing the fields of the peasants and filling the air with a dry whirring sound that sends shivers down the spine.
3 Finally Isaiah had made specific mention of the fact that the messengers of the land travelled in ‘vessels of bulrushes’ or in ‘papyrus skiffs’, or in ‘vessels of reed’. To this day, as I was very well aware, those who dwell around the vast inland sea of Lake Tana make extensive use of papyrus-reed boats known as tankwas.63
All in all, therefore, I felt that the biblical data did lend a considerable degree of credibility to the view that some kind of relationship might have been established between Israel and the Abyssinian highlands at a very early date. Moses’s Ethiopian wife, Isaiah’s ‘people tall and bronzed’, and Zephaniah’s ‘dispersed’ suppliants – who would return to Jerusalem ‘from beyond the rivers of Cush’ – all made it very difficult to resist the suspicion that Hebrews had been travelling to Ethiopia, and probably settling there, long before the fifth century BC. If, as I suspected, the Jewish priests of Elephantine had brought the Ark of the Covenant to the island of Tana Kirkos in that same century then it followed that they would have been coming to a land in which their co-religionists had already established a secure foothold.
Waves of migration?
Outside the Bible was there any evidence at all which might support this hypothesis? I felt that there was. The research that I myself had conducted in Ethiopia during 1989–90, for example, had already raised the possibility that there might have been successive waves of Hebrew migration over an immense span of time extending back into the remotest antiquity. Most strongly suggestive of this had been the long interview that I had conducted with Wambar Muluna Marsha, High Priest of the ‘Hebraeo-Pagan’ Qemant (see Chapter 11). He had told me that Anayer, the founder of his religion, had come to the Lake Tana area from ‘the land of Canaan’. When I had made a closer examination of Qemant religion I had established that it contained a peculiar mixture of pagan and Jewish practices – the latter reflected particularly in the distinctions between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ foods – coupled with a reverence for ‘sacred groves’ which bore a close resemblance to the very earliest forms of Judaism (the patriarch Abraham had ‘planted a grove in Beersheba,’ and had ‘called there on the name of the Lord’.64 Such tendencies had probably been quite widespread during the early period of Israelite settlement in Canaan, and had enjoyed a brief resurgence during Manasseh’s reign, but had been thoroughly and finally stamped out by King Josiah in the seventh century BC.
The implication was that the forefathers of the Qemant must have migrated to Ethiopia from Canaan at a very early date. By contrast the Falashas looked like the descendants of slightly more recent migrants. Their religion included certain practices also banned by King Josiah – notably animal sacrifice at local shrines – but otherwise looked like a rather pure form of Old Testament Judaism (and was certainly not adulterated with any obviously pagan beliefs).
Neighbours in the mountains and valleys around Lake Tana, the Qemant a
nd the Falashas maintained that they were related to each other (Wambar Muluna Marsha had told me that the founding family of his religion and the founding family of the Falasha religion had travelled ‘on the same journey’ and had discussed a possible marriage alliance – which they had ultimately failed to make).
Such folklore, as I subsequently established, did reflect an ethnographic truth. The Falashas and the Qemant were indeed relatives: both were sub-sections of the great Agaw tribe of western central Ethiopia65 – an ethnic group considered to represent the oldest stratum of population in the Horn of Africa.66 Because of this, the mother-tongue of both peoples was a dialect of Agaw, classified, interestingly enough, as belonging to the ‘Cushitic’ group of languages.67 Semitic tongues related to Hebrew and Arabic (for example, Amharic and Tigrigna) were also present in Ethiopia but were not spoken (except as second languages) either by the Falashas or by the Qemant.
The explanation for this anomaly, and the deductions that flowed logically from it, seemed to me to be obvious. I wrote in my notebook:
The first small bands of Hebrews must have begun to migrate from Israel to Ethiopia a very long time ago. I suspect that this process started as early as the tenth century BC (perhaps even earlier) and that it continued at least until the end of the fifth century BC. On their arrival in the Lake Tana area the migrants would have found themselves amongst the oldest-established inhabitants of Ethiopia – such as the Agaw – and would have intermarried with them, thus gradually losing their own distinct ethnic identity. At the same time, however, they would have passed on the Judaic faith and culture that they had brought with them. In this fashion, by say the second or first century BC, there would have been no more ‘Hebrews’ as such living in Ethiopia, only ‘Hebraized’ or ‘Judaized’ peoples who to all other intents and purposes would have looked like native Ethiopians and who would, of course, have spoken a native Ethiopian language (Hebrew having long since been forgotten). The modern descendants of these ‘Hebraized’ or ‘Judaized’ peoples are the Qemant and the Falashas – the black Jews of Ethiopia – and their mother-tongue, a dialect of Agaw, is indeed a native Cushitic language.