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The Tribe of Dan Refused to Fight Judah and Left Canaan for Good

A storm drove Elchanan's spice ship onto a sandbank at the far end of the world. The men who came down to the beach were speaking Hebrew.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Ship on the Sandbank
  2. The Order They Would Not Obey
  3. Every Road Was Closed
  4. Twenty-Five Kings in One Day
  5. The River That Rests on Saturday
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The Ship on the Sandbank

Elchanan son of Joseph had built a ship with sixty rooms in it, one for every servant and his goods, and a tower at the center so that from where he stood he could see every door.

He loaded it with ten thousand talents of pepper, ten thousand of frankincense, ten thousand of cinnamon and sweet cane, a thousand measures of saffron, and every other spice until there was no room left between the floor and the deck. Then he put ten thousand talents of silver aboard to buy fine clothing with, and took the helm himself.

The storm caught him a long way out. When it let go, the hull was sitting on sand in the Sea of Havila and the ship was not going anywhere.

Men came down to look at it. They were speaking Hebrew.

"Who are you?" Elchanan asked them.

"We are the sons of Dan," they said, and took him home with them, and honored him, and he asked how in the world they had got there. So they told him.

The Order They Would Not Obey

It began with Jeroboam, who had made two calves of gold and split the kingdom away from the house of David. He wanted the ten tribes to march on Jerusalem, and he put the question to the elders: who fights best?

The elders answered honestly. In all Israel there is no tribe with men like Dan.

So Jeroboam turned to them. "Rise, sons of Dan, and fight the men of Judah."

"By the life of our father Dan," they said, "we will never go up against our brothers, against the house of David and the king of Judah. Why should we shed innocent blood?"

Jeroboam heard that and gave them their choice. "Then get out of the land of Canaan."

They took up their swords and their spears and their bows and made ready to die fighting Jeroboam instead, and God stepped between them, so that even then they did not spill their brothers' blood. They walked out.

Every Road Was Closed

The first plan was Egypt. Go down and take the whole country and kill everyone in it, which after four hundred years of brickwork had a certain arithmetic to it.

Their princes stopped them with the Torah in their hands. You shall never see that place again. So Egypt was out as a home, and they settled for walking through it.

The Egyptians heard they were coming and put their hardest warriors on every road the Danites would use, and stood there, and watched them pass south.

Edom next. Then Ammon, then Moab. Each time the same thing happened: someone found the verse, and the verse said no, and the tribe put its weapons down and kept walking. Seven years from Canaan they reached the brook of Pishon, and there they got on camels and rode into Kush, which is Havila, and found fields and vineyards and gardens and palaces, and Ethiopians beyond counting, and a sea to live beside.

Twenty-Five Kings in One Day

Word reached the king of that country, and the kings of Kush gathered as one man. "Better that we all die on a single day than a little at a time at the hands of this strange nation."

Sixty-five of them camped on the far side of the brook of Pishon with a town lying between the two armies. Each king had a thousand horsemen and eighty thousand foot.

Two hundred thousand Danites took their bows in their hands and waded the brook, and the fighting happened in the water. Twenty-five kings died there.

That night, still in camp, they heard shouting and trumpets and got up shouting themselves, because three hundred thousand men of Naphtali and Gad and Asher had come in on horses. "Brothers, you must be tired. Rest until morning, and we will finish it with you."

In the morning they killed every remaining king of Kush and divided the spoil by lot, and silver and gold lay about as common as stones. They killed part of the population and put the rest under tribute. The land of Havila is a square, and a man walking one side of it walks four months, and each of the four tribes took one side. They made Abiel son of Shaphat their king, and his brother Abihail captain of the host, both of them Danites. When the trumpet goes, the captain rides out under a hundred and seventy-three banners with fifteen hundred men to each, and comes back the same way. Every tribe serves three months of the year and keeps what it takes.

The River That Rests on Saturday

There was one more thing to tell him, and it was about the Levites.

When the exiles reached the Euphrates their captors wanted entertainment. Stand up in front of our gods, they said, and sing what you sang in the temple. The Levites answered them. "Fools. If we had sung a song of thanks for every miracle God did for us, we would never have been carried out of our own country at all. And now we are to sing to your idols?"

They were killed in heaps for it, and the killing spoiled the party, because the Jews still would not bow. The Levites who lived through it cut the fingers off their own hands. When the order came again to take up the harps, they held up what was left.

That night a cloud came down over them and their wives and their sons and their daughters, and a pillar of fire showed them the road until daybreak and brought them out at the sea. Then the river Sabbatyon was drawn around them, on three sides with the sea on the fourth. It runs two hundred cubits deep and it is full of sand and stones, and six days a week it rolls them with a noise like an earthquake that carries half a day's walk. On the Sabbath it stops. And the moment it stops, fire comes up out of the western bank and burns along the whole length of it, so that nothing living gets within thirty-four miles.

Behind that water they sow one seed and reap a hundred. Six springs run together into one pool and water everything. No unclean bird lands there and no unclean beast walks there. They build their own houses and plough their own ground, since there is no servant among them, and they live to a hundred and twenty, and no man there has ever buried a child. They leave their doors open all night. A small child walks out with the cattle for days at a time and comes back.

Nobody has ever seen the flames on that river except the sons of Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher, who are the only ones close enough to look.

Elchanan stayed with them twelve months.

TribesEgyptConquestTorahExile
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From the tradition

Sources

2 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Legends of the Jews 6:11Legends of the Jews

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg (1909) · Public Domain

Legends of the Jews turns to The Tribe of Dan Nearly Invaded Judah.

Well, according to the Legends of the Jews, as retold by Ginzberg, they were far from idle. Their story takes a turn toward adventure and… well, perhaps a little bit of mischief.

Apparently, the tribe of Dan had a plan. A BIG plan. Their initial thought? Head straight to Egypt and simply… take over. After all those years of slavery, they were going to turn the tables. But cooler heads prevailed. The princes of the tribe, wiser and perhaps a little more mindful of the Torah, reminded them of a rather significant detail: the Bible explicitly forbids the Israelites from settling in Egypt. Oops. (Deuteronomy 17:16)

So, plan A was scrapped. What next?

Perhaps fueled by a little bit of that conquering spirit, they considered attacking the Edomites, Ammonites, and Moabites. But again, the Torah stepped in. These nations, descendants of Lot and Esau, were to be treated with consideration. The Israelites were commanded to leave them alone. (Deuteronomy 2:4-9, 19) It seems even in ancient times, there were rules of engagement, even if divinely mandated!

Finally, they landed on a compromise. A plan that was… well, let's just say it was ambitious. They would go to Egypt, but not to stay. They would simply… pass through. Their ultimate destination? Ethiopia. Now, why Ethiopia? Ginzberg doesn't say, leaving us to wonder what riches or opportunities they sought there. Perhaps a new land to call their own?

But here's where the story gets interesting. The Egyptians, it turns out, were terrified of the Danites. Seriously. These weren't just rumors whispered in the marketplace. The Egyptians took it seriously enough to station their toughest warriors along the roads, anticipating the arrival of the tribe of Dan. Talk about reputation preceding you! What had the Danites done to earn such fear? Were they known for their ferocity? Their battle prowess? We aren't told, but clearly, something about them struck fear into the hearts of the Egyptians.

And what happened when the Danites finally arrived in Ethiopia? They weren't exactly welcomed with open arms. According to the legend, they "slew a part of the population, and exacted tribute from the rest." Ouch. This isn't the triumphant return of heroes we might expect. It’s a story of conquest, power, and perhaps a little bit of ruthlessness.

So, what are we to make of this tale of the wandering, warring tribe of Dan? It certainly paints a different picture than the more familiar narratives of the other tribes. And that even within the sacred texts, there are echoes of ambition, conflict, and the ever-present struggle to find a place in the world.

What happened to those Danites in Ethiopia? Did they build a kingdom? Did they assimilate? Their story, as told in the Legends, is a potent reminder that history is rarely simple, and the paths we take are often far more winding than we imagine.

Full source
Chronicles of Jerahmeel LXIIChronicles of Jerahmeel (Gaster, 1899)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Chronicles of Jerahmeel, trans. Moses Gaster (1899) · Public Domain

The most detailed account of the lost tribes of Israel comes from Eldad the Danite, a traveler whose report is preserved in the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899. Eldad claimed to have visited the scattered tribes and brought back an astonishing report of their survival, their wars, and their faithfulness to the Torah.

The sons of Moses lived behind the river Sabbatyon, a body of water unlike any other. It rolled sand and stones with the noise of an earthquake all six days of the week, making it impossible to cross. On the Sabbath the river rested, but a wall of fire erupted in its place. Behind this barrier, the Levites lived in complete purity. No unclean animal existed in their territory. No child died before their parents. Everyone lived to 120. They sowed one seed and reaped a hundredfold.

The tribe of Dan had settled far to the south, in the land of Havilah near the brook of Pishon, after refusing to participate in Jeroboam's civil war against the house of David. They had migrated rather than shed Israelite blood. In their new homeland, they fought the Kushite kings and won. When 200,000 Danite warriors crossed the brook of Pishon to meet sixty-five Ethiopian kings in battle, twenty-five of those kings fell in the first engagement. Then 300,000 men from the tribes of Naphtali, Gad, and Asher arrived to reinforce them.

The tribe of Issachar dwelt on the mountains behind Media and Persia, devoted entirely to Torah study. They accepted no earthly yoke, only the yoke of heaven. The combined tribes received tribute from twenty-five vassal kings, waged war against surrounding nations, and spoke Hebrew and Greek among themselves. Eldad lived among the sons of Judah and Simeon for three years before traveling home by ship. His account was received, examined, and preserved as testimony that the ten lost tribes had never truly vanished. They were simply waiting, faithful and powerful, behind rivers of sand and walls of fire.

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