Volume I, Issue 3 - Spring 2007

Thoughts From The Publisher

Hello, and welcome to the third issue of Targum Magazine, the magazine in support of Testament,
Publisher: Trojan War, Eternal Rome and all Ancient World campaign settings.
Highmoon Media Productions
www.highmoonmedia.com The ancient world is getting some love these days thanks to an eye-catching little movie
about a band of 300 Spartan warriors and the battle that immortalized them. Whether at the
Editors: theaters in early spring, or on DVD later in the year, this tale is sure to ignite the fires of
adventure in a few gamers, who'll want their characters to don helmet and sandals, and head over
Spike Y Jones to win some glory of their own. And guess what, we got you covered on that angle.
Daniel M. Perez
First-time Targum contributor, Eric Hansen, brings us an Era Spotlight article on the Battle
Developer: of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas and his Spartan hoplites held back the might of the
Daniel M. Perez Persian empire under Xerxes I. What's more, we made sure the article would be useful as a mini-
campaign supplement to GMs using Trojan War, as well as for those using the standard d20 rules
Contributing Writers: in their own campaigns.

Scott G. Carter, Eric Hansen, Spike Y Jones brings us this month an article that is almost an entire small supplement on
Spike Y Jones, Allon Mureinik, its own: 15 pages devoted to the Lost Tribes of Israel, including some history, setting information
Daniel M. Perez and tons of ideas to use this theme in your Testament games.

Art Direction & Layout: No Other Gods author, Scott G. Carter, returns this month with an article detailing the
Passover, one of the most important holidays in the life of the Israelites, past and present, and
Daniel M. Perez
explores how to use the themes of the feast as fodder for adventures or character development.

Mythic Vistas Line Manager: And speaking of Israel, we have a guest writer for this issue hailing from that country. Allon
Robert J. Schwalb Mureinik is the editor of The Orc Magazine <http://magazine.the-orc.com>, an Israeli online
gaming magazine, and he submitted to Targum one of his articles, previously available only in
Green Ronin Staff: Hebrew, on the subject of sins, and how to use this theme to great effect in your games in
general, not just in Testament.
Nicole Lindroos, Hal Mangold,
Chris Pramas, Steve Kenson, Marc Unfortunately, we could not bring you the second part to the Era Spotlight on the reign of
Schmalz, Robert J. Schwalb, and Akhenaten; shortly after the release of the previous issue, Scott Bennie had to take some time off
Evan Sass to rest his eyes after a minor corrective procedure. He is fine now, and with luck we'll have the
conclusion to that article very soon. We wish Scott a speedy recovery!

Produced under license from As with our previous issues, I am very excited to get this out into the world. Targum is the
Green Ronin Publishing, LLC magazine I would want to be reading as a customer, and based on the feedback we have gotten, I
www.greenronin.com am not alone in that regard. I want to invite you to send us your thoughts about the magazine,
as well as ideas for things you'd like to see. You can drop by the new Highmoon Media
Testament: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era is © 2003 Green Ronin
Publishing. Eternal Rome: Roleplaying in the Age of Gods and Productions forums at http://www.highmoonmedia.com/forum and talk to us there. I'll be
Emperors is © 2005 Green Ronin Publishing. Targum waiting.
Magazine is © 2006-2007 Highmoon Media Productions.
Reference to other copyrighted material in no way constitutes
Sincerely,
a challenge to the respective copyright holders of that mate-
rial. Terra Mythica, Highmoon Media Productions, and the
Highmoon Media Productions logo are trademarks of Daniel
M. Perez d/b/a Highmoon Media Productions. Mythic Vistas,
Green Ronin, and the Green Ronin logo are trademarks of
Green Ronin Publishing, LLC.

2
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Targum Magazine, Issue 3 Copyright 2007, Daniel M. Perez d/b/a Highmoon Media Productions, www.highmoonmedia.com; Authors Scott G. Carter, Eric
Hansen, Spike Y Jones, Allon Mureinik, Daniel M. Perez.

3
 By Spike Y Jones

Welcome to the third installment of Ostraca, a regular column

where I seem to spend my time taking things that are lost or broken
and finding uses for them in Testament campaigns. And this issue it's
back to the lost.
If you have any comments or questions about anything you read
in Ostraca, feel free to write me at spikeyj@crosslink.net.

Lost Tribes
"In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took
Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed
them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the
cities of the Medes...for the children of Israel walked in all the
sins of Jeroboam which he did; they departed not from them First, there weren't 12 tribes of Israel — sort of 13. When the
Promised Land was being divvied up between the Israelite tribes, the
until the Lord removed Israel out of his sight, as he had said by
tribe of Levi didn't get a specific regional allotment. Instead, the
all his servants the prophets. So was Israel carried away out of members of Levi were to be scattered throughout the land to serve
their own land to Assyrian unto this day. as priests for the other tribes.1 To bring the division of land grants
"And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon and back up to 12 (because 12 was a number with mystical import), the
from Cuthah and from Ava and from Hamath and from tribe of Joseph was subdivided between his two sons, Ephraim and
Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of Manasseh. Depending on what you were counting (sons of Jacob,
tribes of Israel, tribes and half-tribes of Israel, or territorial allot-
the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in
ments within Israel) you got either 12, 13, or 13 and some fraction.
the cities thereof. "
- II Kings 17:6, 22-24 Fading Away: Simeon
After settling (sort of) the question of how many tribes there were
The previous two issues of Targum feature articles by Daniel
when the Israelites arrived in the area, the next question is how
M. Perez on the 12 tribes of Israel, and both mentioned that the
many there were when it came time to leave.
whole concept of the "12 Tribes" changed when 10 of the tribes were
taken into captivity in Assyria in 721 BCE, never to return. But in
After a period of tribal independence (lasting less than 200
the tradition of this column (see Ostraca: Lost Books in Targum #1),
years in Testament's chronology), all the tribes of Israel were united
just because something's gone doesn't mean it can't be a source of
under a single monarch: first Saul, then David and finally his son
adventures.
Solomon. This 100-year period was followed by a division into a
southern kingdom of three tribes (Judah and Benjamin) and a
Counting To 12 northern kingdom of 10 tribes (Dan, Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar,
The first thing that has to be dealt with in any discussion of the 12 Zebulun, Naphtali, Asher, and Gad). Mathematically-inclined read-
tribes is the question of numbers. Jacob had 12 sons, each was the ers may notice that the "three" southern tribes only add up to two,
founder of an Israelite tribe, so there were 12 tribes of Israel. After and the "10" northern tribes only include eight names. The
the Assyrians deported the rebellious northern tribes, only two Biblically-inclined may be able to tick off names in their heads to
southern tribes (Judah and Benjamin) remained; therefore the find that Simeon and Reuben are missing from the list (as well as
Assyrians had taken 10 tribes away in bondage — but it's not that Levi, but we were expecting that).
simple.

5
 So what happened? Probably pretty much the same thing in
both cases, although no one has a certain answer.
The main southern tribe, Judah, was given a territorial allot-
ment of pretty much everything south of a line stretching from the Canaan. After some bargaining, in which they promises to partici-
northern end of the Dead Sea (where the Jordan River flows into it) pate fully in the conquest of the lands promised to the other tribes,
to the Mediterranean coast, and west of a line from the Dead Sea
southwest to the Wilderness of Paran in the central Sinai.
Simeon, on the other hand, got a subordinate land claim:
Simeon's land was all within the borders allotted to Judah, and con-
sisted of a collection of towns, villages, and the farmlands immedi-
ately surrounding then, scattered throughout the central and south- ed its own fade to nothing. What happened? Again the Bible has no
ern half of Judah. It had no definable borders, and if someone
referred to "the lands of Judah," the tribe of Simeon's holdings were ment of Reuben), the eastern portion of Manasseh had been aban-
assumed included.
But why such an odd arrangement? Because by the time the
allotments were being made, Simeon was in decline. The Book of
Numbers includes the results of a census of military-age men2 in
each tribe at the beginning of the tribes' wandering in the wilder-
ness following the exodus from Egypt, and another conducted 40
years later, just before the conquest of Canaan.3
At the time of the first census, Simeon had 59,300 military-age
men,4 making it the third most powerful tribe (militarily) after
Judah (74,600) and Dan (62,700). But after the second census, while
some tribes had had minor increases or decreases in those four
decades of warfare and wandering, none had suffered as greatly as
Simeon, which was now down to 22,200 military-age men, making
Simeon the weakest tribe militarily; the half-tribe of Manasseh had
been the smallest tribe (32,200) 40 years before, but now had more
than double Simeon's manpower (52,700).
What happened to Simeon in the wilderness to cause this
decline? The Bible doesn't say.5 All we know is that Simeon is men- that Joseph and Benjamin had both the same mother and father
tioned less and less as the biblical narrative continues, and by the may have been a way for the writer of Genesis to emphasize the
time Moses blesses the tribes before his death Simeon isn't men-
tioned at all.
Fading Away: Reuben
Unlike Simeon, Reuben's disappearing act took place after a success-
ful, Moses-approved settlement following the 40 years in the
wilderness. The census before the wandering put the tribe at a
fighting strength of 46,500 men. The one taken just before the con-
quest of Canaan recorded 43,730 fighting-age men; a drop in num-
bers, but only enough to juggle its place in the middle of the rank-
ings of the tribes. And Reuben took part in the war against the
Amorites who lived east of the Jordan River and Dead Sea, a war
that cleared an area for possible settlement and opened entrance
routes into Canaan across the Jordan.
But two and a quarter tribes (Reuben, Gad, and the children of
Machir, son of Manasseh, himself the son of Joseph, and therefore
half of a half-tribe) decided that they liked these newly conquered
lands east of the Jordan enough to settle there instead of in
Moses permitted these settlements in the east. Gad received all the
land to the east of the Jordan, Manasseh received that to the east
and north of the Sea of Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), and Reuben
got the lands to the east of the northern half of the Dead Sea.
And once the conquest of Canaan was completed, Reuben start-
answer.6 By the time of Saul's kingdom (200 years after the settle-
doned to Bashan and the Aramaeans, and Reuben had been taken by
Moab; while Moab would be a part of the kingdoms of David,
Solomon, and their northern successors, it was always considered a
foreign conquest, like Edom, which was controlled by David,
Solomon, and their southern successors.
Double-C
Counting: Benjamin
Those checking my math back in the second paragraph of Fading
Away: Simeon may have noticed that there were 12 tribe names there
but I said there were 13 tribes between the two kingdoms. And
unlike other places where it's the counting of Levi or the two Joseph
half-tribes that screws up the numbers, this time it's Benjamin caus-
ing problems. But unlike the disappearance of the tribes of Simeon
and Reuben, Benjamin never disappeared, and it's contribution to
the tribe-counting mess came about because of success, not failure.
Benjamin was the southernmost of the northern tribes of
Israel. The tribe's founder, Joseph's youngest son, had the same
mother (Rachel) as Joseph, whose two sons (Ephraim and Manasseh)
would pay the leading role among the northern tribes, and stating
strong tribal bonds between Benjamin and Ephraim (with which it
shared its longest border) to its north, and Manasseh to the north
of Ephraim. There would be internecine conflict (including the war
between Ephraim and Benjamin that almost wiped Benjamin off the
map, as described in the last three chapters of the Book of Judges),
but nevertheless Benjamin was stolidly northern — it was even the
tribe of Israel's first king, Saul.
One of the problems of Saul's kingdom was that it wasn't
exactly a united kingdom. Saul was the anointed king of all the
northern tribes, but Judah participated in Saul's war against the
Ammonites, the Philistines, and the Amalekites as an ally of Israel,
not as a part of his kingdom.7 When David of Judah took over
Saul's kingdom, he looked for a way of truly uniting the 12 tribes
into a single political entity, and one way to do this would be to
establish a new capital for the kingdom, some place other than
Saul's capital of Gibeah in central Benjamin or one of the northern
6
religious centres, and other than David's own capital of Hebron in
central Judah. And near Benjamin's southern border (and thus near
Judah's northern border) was a bit of unconquered territory that
was easily defended, centrally placed, and which didn't yet have reli-
gious traditions linking it to the cultic practices of the north or
the south: the Jebusite city of Jerusalem.8
David and his united army captured Jerusalem and began to
build a palace and other structures of government on the site. King
Solomon built a single large temple on the site (to replace the many
smaller religious centres scattered throughout the tribal lands), and
the eternal capital of the united Israel was established.
When Solomon died and the united kingdom split, the people living
in Benjamin's tribal area had a choice to make: They could rebel
with the rest of the northern tribes, their traditional allies, or they
could side with the successor of Solomon.
The Benjaminites had a number of considerations to weigh:
Rehoboam was the legitimate successor to Solomon who had been
the legitimate successor to David, but David had been only the
questionably legitimate successor to Israel's first king, the
Benjaminite King Saul; the tribe of Benjamin had been linked to
the other northern tribes by blood and tradition for seven centuries,
but for the lifetime of just about ever Benjaminite alive the king
had always been a Judahite and the other tribes had always been
united under that king; the breakaway kingdom of Israel gave every
appearance of being richer and more powerful than Judah, but the
capital and economic and religious centre of Judah, Jerusalem, was
right on the border of Benjamin, while Israel's potential capitals
and economic and religious centres were a distance away in another
tribe's territory; while there were sites with longstanding cultic
associations in the north, the Lord had decreed that worship of him
was to be centralized in his glorious Temple in Jerusalem and that
7
his mobile presence in the Ark of the Covenant was to be made sta-
tionary in that Temple; and while the rulers in Jerusalem had taxed
the rest of the nation harshly in order to build the lavish palace,
temple, and fortifications at Jerusalem (one of the primary causes
of the revolt), if the north was to establish its own capitals, tem-
ples, and fortifications it would require the same sort of taxation.
There's no way to know which factors were considered most
important by the Benjaminites: the Bible doesn't say, and even if it
did it the Bible's theological purpose would make its analysis sus-
pect. But whatever the reason, Benjamin sided with Judah, becoming
the third of the "two" southern tribes, and leaving only seven or
eight in the "ten" northern tribes.9
Exiles
With the Simeon, Reuben, and Benjamin historical digressions dealt
with we can get back to the meat of this Ostraca: the Lost Tribes of
Israel.
In 721 BCE, the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of
Israel, deporting the "10" tribes of that land to distant parts of the
Assyrian Empire, moving some deportees from yet other regions into
Israel to take their place; part of a policy of deliberately breaking
the political and cultural ties that had existed across the independ-
ent nations before their defeats, so as to forge new allegiance to the
empire.
More than a century later, in 586 BCE,10 Babylon (the successor
to the Assyrian Empire after 605 BCE) conquered the "two" tribes
of the southern kingdom of Judah, deporting them to distant parts
of the Babylonian Empire in order to break the pre-existing politi-
cal and cultural ties of the Judahites and make them good, inte-
grated members of the Babylonian Empire. In fact, when
the deported Judahites arrived in the cities of the
Babylonian Empire, they didn't find communities of
Israelites in exile waiting to greet them.11
Two generations later, the captive Jews (as they
were now called) were released from Babylonia by the
Persians (successors to the Babylonian Empire), return-
ing to Judah in waves beginning in 539 BCE. While in
exile, the Jews had not only maintained their cultural
identity, but they'd invigorated it, adding a few ele-
ments derived from Babylonian religion but more
importantly adding elements in reaction to Babylon, its
religion, and the experience of the captivity and their
eventual release. The Jews returned to Jerusalem,
rebuilt their Temple, re-edited the holy books that
had existed before the captivity (adding new books
written in Babylon or after the return to the biblical
canon) and re-established their lives and culture in
the Promised Land.
 What did the southern tribes do after their captivity? The
edict of Cyrus the Great that freed the captive Judahites also
apparently freed the captive Israelites,12 but if any Israelites at all
returned, the Bible doesn't mention it.13
Gone Without A Trace?
Because of the political and religious rivalries of the time, Judahites
accepted that northern Israel deserved to be ravaged, its leading cit-
izens deported, its temple destroyed, and its royal line ended as a
(possibly) permanent punishment for the sins of the northerners.
But when the exact same fate befell Judah a century later, that view
had to be changed: While the punishment was certainly still
deserved (by both Israel and Judah), it also certainly couldn't be
permanent — the Lord still loved his chosen people and would save
and protect them from other nations and gods in order to fulfill
his many promises to them.
As a result of that change in thinking, while the northerners
hadn't returned to Israel in 182 years,14 many Jews began to believe
not just that they might return, but that they had to return — the
Lord promised it.
Writing sometime after the northern tribes had been deported
to Assyria but before the southern tribes were to suffer a similar
fate, Isaiah prophesied that there would come a king of Judah who
would "assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of
Judah... And there will be a highway from Assyria for the remnant which is
left of his people" (Isaiah 11:12, 16). At the time this was written, this
was taken to refer to the Israelites in exile and those Judahites who
would voluntarily set up communities in Egypt, Phoenicia, Elam,
and even Assyria, but by the time the book of Isaiah was edited into
its final form around 350 BCE (i.e., over 150 years after the Jews'
return from the Babylon exile) "the dispersed of Judah" was taken
to refer to the Babylonian exile and to those who fled to other
countries to escape the Babylonians. Read that way, the Lord had
fulfilled his promise to return the Jews to the Promised Land, and
thus the rest of the prophesy indicates that the Lost Tribes will
also eventually return at the time of some great Jewish king yet to
come.
Ezekiel (one of a small number deported to Babylon in 597
BCE—11 years before the larger Judahite exile—as punishment for a
failed revolt) wrote from exile, "Thus saith the Lord God: 'Behold, I will
take the children of Israel from among the heathen whither they be gone, and
will gather them on every side and bring them into their own land... I will
save them out of all their dwelling-places, wherein they have sinned, and will
cleanse them; so shall they be my people and I will be their God'" (Ezekiel
37:21, 23).
Writing about 200 years after Ezekiel, the anonymous
Chronicler discusses the history of the northern kingdom, ending
with the deportation of the northern tribes to Assyria, where they they had to try to maintain the worship of the god of Israel when
remain "to this day" (I Chronicles 5:26), instead of saying that they
had died out, disappeared, assimilated with the Assyrians, been
destroyed; they still existed so that the god of Israel could eventu-
ally fulfil his promises to them (just as the Chronicler records the
descendants of the last kings of Judah through to the year 400
BCE, just in case someone of that line would be restored to the
throne of David).
The last-written book of the Hebrew Bible, Esther, was written
around 150 BCE, and while more books were written in the decades
following (many of which are included in the Apocrypha found in
some Christian Bibles), the Lost Tribes no longer received much
mention.15 The next references to the Lost Tribes would be in secu-
lar and Christian sources.16
But promises and prophecies aside, what really did happen to
the northern tribes? Here we have a choice between the boring his-
torical answer and the more interesting and mythic one. And since
Testament is in Green Ronin's Mythic Vistas product line, let's see if
we can dispose of the historical answer in a paragraph or six.
The Reality
First, while II Kings 17:6 and 23 (quoted at the top of this Ostraca)
says that the entire population of northern Israel was deported, in
reality only the rich and powerful were taken from the conquered
land; the Assyrians had no fear of any number of poor farmers if
the leading priests, nobles, and landowners (who were most likely to
successfully foment revolt) of the nation were removed. Therefore,
maybe as many as 100,000 Israelites might have been in Israel
throughout the time of the exile.17
Second, some Israelites (both common folk and the rich or tal-
ented) had fled the invading Assyrian armies, taking up residence in
Jerusalem (whose population more than doubled in the decades
immediately following the Assyrian conquest) or establishing towns
and villages in southern Judah: as far away as they one could get
from Assyria and still remain within the Promised Land. Scattered
as they were within the territories of Judah and Benjamin (and
Simeon, but let's not go back there), it's not unexpected that they'd
have a hard time maintaining separate tribal identities, and after a
few generations, while individual families would maintain traditions
of their separate tribal origins, as a whole the majority culture
would eventually be taken to be the entire culture — especially if
members of that majority culture were the ones writing the histo-
ries, and especially if some of those histories were written or edited
centuries later, under very different circumstances.
And third, the situation for those Israelites taken away to the
distant corners of the Assyrian Empire would have been similar to
that of the immigrants to Jerusalem or southern Judah, only worse.
Not only were they scattered, but they were scattered among com-
pletely alien peoples. Instead of having to adapt the form of their
worship of the Lord to that of their surrounding co-religionists,
they weren't actually in Israel.18
8
 There's evidence that Israelites maintained some measure of cul-
tural identity for decades into the Assyrian exile. In Assyria the Mythic Beliefs
deported Israelites weren't slaves.19 They ran businesses, entered the Okay, enough of that historical rubbish; what untrue things could
Assyrian army (either individually scattered in regular military units player characters believe about the Lost Tribes without destroying
or together in an elite Israelite-manned chariot unit), and even the legitimate historical feel of a Testament campaign?
moved about the northern and eastern reaches of the empire, leav-
ing the cities they were originally deported to — but never return-
ing to Israel.
Beyond The Holy River
For almost a century Israelite identity is easy to detect in the Maybe the lost Israelites didn't return to Israel because something
records of the Assyrian bureaucracy, but then a disturbing trend prevented them. It can't be that the Persians stood in the way of
began: wills, contracts, and other legal papers began appearing that their repatriation: Cyrus would never have stood for such interfer-
illustrated a cultural transition in progress; for instance, a contract ence with one of his proclamations.24 So if it wasn't someone pre-
signed "Halmasu (an Assyrian name) son of Ahzi-Yahu (an Israelite venting the return, maybe it was something.
name)." After a century amongst foreigners, the latest generation of
Israelites were giving their children names that no longer set them Flavius Josephus, writing between 76 and 96 CE, reports that
apart from the surrounding people. While there's no way of know- the Roman general (later emperor) Titus, while travelling through
ing for sure that the displaced Israelites abandoned the religion of Syria came across a miraculous river which ran strong and full of
their ancestors when they adopted the naming conventions of the water for one day each week, but dried up for six days until the
Assyrians, in most cultures of the Testament lands, names had mean- springs at its source recharged and started the cycle again,25 earning
ings linked to religion, and many of the new names it the name Sabbatic (Sabbath/Sabbaton/
of assimilated Israelites included the names of Sabbatyon/Sambayton) River.
Assyrian gods in place of the God of
Israel. The apocryphal Second Book
of Esdras (written around 95 CE)
The last known Israelite said that the Israelite multitude
reference found in Assyria is a resettled by Nebuchadrezzar at
contract dated 602 BCE — a the eastern edge of the
mere 16 years before members Babylonian Empire had decid-
of the southern tribes were ed to "go forth into a further
themselves transported to country, where never mankind
Babylonia. While it is possible dwelt, that they might their
that there were still self-identi- keep the statutes that they never
fied Israelites to be found some- kept in their own land" (II Edras
where in the empire, the absence of 13:39-49).
positive evidence of such contact20 argues
against any meeting between the Judahites and It took a while, but by the 3rd Century CE these
their long-lost cousins. And the absence of such meetings two snippets had been combined into one story: The lost
argues against the numbers of self-identified Israelites being large: Israelites were in an eastern land permanently separated from the
If you really had been kept forcibly apart from your co-religionists rest of the world by the Sabbatyon River, a holy river east of the
for over a century, what could've prevented you from making even Tigris and Euphrates, that flowed for six days but rested on the
tentative contact with them once they entered the land of your seventh.
exile?21
But the question then arose: how could a mere river (no matter
The historical view is that most Israelites were relabelled how miraculous) have prevented the exiled Israelites from returning
Samaritans, continuing to survive in their homeland for over two to Israel after Cyrus' decree freed them? By the 9th Century CE this
more millennia, while the elite who were taken from Israel eventu- question was answered by the traveller Eldad ha-Dani, who claimed
22
to be from the Israelite tribe of Dan that had supposedly settled
ally assimilated themselves out of distinct existence.23
south of Babylonia, and who spoke of the tribes who had settled
beyond the Sabbatyon: "This river of stones26 and sand rolls during
the six working days and rests on the Sabbath day. As soon as the
Sabbath begins, fire surrounds the river and the flame remains until
the next evening" — no water.27

9
 But a river of rocks and fire isn't the only thing standing
between the Lost Tribes and the rest of the world. There were
griffins, the phoenix, and other monsters aplenty in the eastern
reaches of the Persian Empire — and hostile people afraid of what
an army of militant holy warriors could do if released from their
prison.
And the method of worship of the god of Israel practised by
the Lost Tribes beyond the Sabbatyon was likely to be different
from that of both the Jews and the Samaritans currently living in
Israel. Maybe the Israelites of the Lost Tribes had no desire to mix
with their religiously confused brethren.
Farther Afield
A hidden kingdom surrounded by a miraculous river somewhere east
of the Persian Empire isn't the only possible location of the Lost
Tribes.
In the late 8th Century/early 7th Century BCE a new nation
appeared to the north of Assyria, the Scythians. Traditional history
says that the Scythians arrived on horseback from the western Asian
steppes, defeating and absorbing the Cimmerians and then harassing
the Greeks to the west and the Assyrians to the south (by way of
Medea to the southeast). After a couple hundred years of this, the
Scythians were gradually pushed back to the north and away from
civilization, until they disappeared from historical view at least a
century before the common era.
Is it entirely coincidental, though, that the Scythians appeared
north and northeast of Assyrian just decades after the Assyrians
deported the Israelites to the northern and northeastern ends of
the empire? Or that Scythians are known to have absorbed the rem-
nants of one culture (the Cimmerians), causing it to disappear, at
the same time that the Israelites disappeared, supposedly by being
absorbed into another culture?28
And maybe the historians were wrong about the ultimate fate
of the Scythians. Maybe, instead of drifting back toward the
steppes and being absorbed into another horse tribe, the Israelite-
Scythians went in a different direction, migrating westward, becom-
ing known as Saxons ("Isaac's Sons"), founding countries like
Denmark (the land of the Danes; i.e., the Tribe of Dan) and Ireland
(founded by the Tuatha de Danaan — more Dannites), and carrying
with them treasures like King David's harp (hence the harp as a
national symbol of Ireland) and a miraculous stone that had formed
the seat of David's throne (becoming the coronation stone of
Ireland, then Scotland, and now England). Descendants of Ephraim
founded England, those of Reuben settled in France, etc.29
Travel to northwestern Europe was never a simple proposition
during the Testament era, but if the Lost Tribes are definitely to be
found there, then the journey could be worthwhile.
10
Or maybe instead of trekking to the north, west, or east of the
Scythian lands above Assyria the Lost Tribes are still there on the
shores of the Caspian Sea, prevented from returning by a physical
barrier — but unlike the Sabbatyon River, this one is manmade
(although still spectacular).
A story that first appeared some decades after the fall of the
Western Roman Empire says that when Alexander the Great con-
quered the eastern Persian Empire he protected the northern extent
of his lands by sealing the passes to the lands of the western
Caspian shores with a gigantic steel wall stretching from the shores
of the sea to the mountains, and then from mountain to mountain,
replacing an earlier and more modest stone wall built by the
Persians.
In different versions of the story, the people trapped by the
Persians on the other side of the wall are generic northern barbar-
ians,30 Gog and Magog,31 "22 kings with their people," or, inevitably,
"the Jews of 10 lineages;" i.e., the Lost Tribes.
The nature of the wall varies too. Sometimes the steel is
sheathed in molten bronze or tar, or is really adamantine. And in
one story Alexander prayed to God for help in building the wall,
and the Lord moved the mountains together, forming them into a
near-impregnable barrier from the Caspian to the Black Sea: the
Caucasus Mountains.
Occasionally a solitary Israelite mountaineer or tunneller man-
ages to escape the prison with tales of life on the other side, but
the stories all agree, though, that eventually the people trapped on
the far side of the gates will break through en masse, looking for
someone to take out centuries of frustrations on.32
South In Two Waves
But instead of striking out into uncharted territory to escape the
Assyrians, maybe the 10 Tribes fled to a land where they would be
beyond the reach of Sargon and his empire, but could expect a
ready welcome.
Some 250 years before the Assyrian conquest of a divided
northern Israel, King Solomon ruled over a unified kingdom of
Israel, receiving deputations from neighbouring kingdoms and mar-
rying the daughters of foreign kings to cement peace treaties.
The most famous of his royal visitors, who Solomon didn't
marry but did cement a dynastic relationship with, was Balkis, queen
of Sheba, a kingdom in southern Arabia (modern Yemen). After a
time in Jerusalem, the queen returned to Sheba and soon gave birth
to Solomon's son, Menelik, who would be the founder of a dynasty
that would endure until the last quarter of the 20th Century CE.
Impressed by Solomon's court, Balkis converted her nation to
the worship of the god of Israel, and as Menelik and his descen-
dants expanded their empire across the narrows of the Red Sea, the
African portion of the empire became known by a variety of names,
including eventually Abyssinia and Ethiopia. The fortunes of
Menelik's empire would wax and wane, but it was protected from
northern aggression by distance, deserts, and the armies that gold,
precious stones, and aromatic spices could fund, and even the arrival
of Christianity and Islam into the empire couldn't extinguish its
Israelite minority and their traditions.
invisibility, a fountain of youth, a huge mirror in his palace that
would display nascent conspiracies anywhere in the kingdom (see the
Speculum of Serenity sidebar), and a miraculous river of stone and
fire—would be entirely appropriate for a Testament-era African
Israelite kingdom. If Prester John's medieval legend could appropri-
ate the Sabbath River from Jewish folklore, then surely it's fair for
a Testament GM to borrow a few legends in the other direction.

While the legends of Prester John's Christian kingdom of
Ethiopia are technically centuries out of date for a Testament cam-
paign, some of the country's wonders and magical defences—includ-
ing fireproof robes worn by the king (and one assumes his
favourites, his generals, and his court and battlefield wizards), natu-
rally occurring magic pebbles with powers ranging from curatives to
And along with the native Israelite descendants of Solomon
and Sheba, there evidently were some refugees of the Exile who
made it to Arabian Sheba and then to Ethiopia. As late as the 16th
Century CE reports of Ethiopians who traced their descent from
the tribes of Dan and Gad (Solomon was a Judahite) were reaching
Western Europe.33

The Speculum of Serenity

This 5-ft.-diameter mirror rests in an ornate frame in an audience chamber in the palace of the king of Ethiopia. Once per
day its owner can command the mirror to display for him the most discontented person in the owner's realm. The image has
both audible and visible components and shows a live image as events are occurring wherever that discontented person is. The
king can watch the image continuously without limit, but if he looks away from it for even a moment the image disappears.
The king cannot control who the speculum focuses on or where in the kingdom the image comes from: It always displays
the most disgruntled person in the lands the king controls, whomever and wherever that may be. When he commands the mir-
ror to action on following days, if that same subject is still the most discontented in the kingdom, then his image will again
be displayed.
To ensure that a single angry man doesn't monopolize the mirror's warnings, preventing the king from being alerted to
the multitude of ever-so-slightly lesser threats to the kingdom, the king employs an army of agents whose job it is to quickly
solve the problems leading to each person's complaints. The agents include scouts to identify locations shown in the images
(and the captain of his scouts is usually present when the king consults the mirror each day) and warriors to deal with violent
discontents, but also clerics and bureaucrats whose job it is to deal with complaints of other sorts; the king of Ethiopia's rep-
utation is enhanced both by the speed with which his agents deal with unrest and by the measured response they display:
compassionate and confrontational only as required.
And while these efficient procedures mean that one person's image rarely remains on the mirror's surface for more than a
few days, the king also employs the army of spies and informants common to rulers in the Testament lands, hoping to deal
with secondary threats before they grow to become primary ones. As a result of the two sets of discontent-detection methods,
most people (both within and without the kingdom) know of the speculum of serenity but are unaware of its limitations,
attributing all of the king's intelligence of internal unrest to the mirror.
And as the mirror's range is strictly limited to the lands over which he rules, the king's spies must also range into neigh-
bouring kingdoms in order to warn of external threats to his rule. If the speculum were ever to be stolen, this restriction to
the lands controlled by the user could considerably lessen the utility of the device. If used by a town's mayor, it would show
images set within the town's walls. If used by a commoner, it would reveal only the most discontented person in his own house
— possibly himself!
While the spell detect thoughts is cast as part of the speculum's creation, unlike a crystal ball, the king is unable to use that or
any other divination spell through the mirror.
(Although the speculum of serenity is a unique magic item, there's no reason why another one couldn't be created, and thus
it doesn't qualify as even a minor artifact. But that technicality doesn't prevent the king's propagandists from attributing
other powers and artifact status on the mirror, in order to cow the king's potential enemies and to magnify his import.)

Moderate divination; CL 10th; Craft Wondrous Item, scrying, detect thoughts; Price 20,800 gp; Weight 200 lbs.

11
So What? Unfortunately, in the end, the alliance of two small nations was
no more effective than a single small nation in holding off deter-
mined and powerful aggressors.
But even if we know where the Lost Tribes are and why they haven't
returned, why bother looking for them? There are any number of
But what if Israel wasn't a small nation? What if the Lost
reasons, some appealing to GMs, others to players, and still others
Tribes had grown in numbers and power in exile?
to the PCs and NPCs of a Testament campaign themselves.
Josephus said that the Lost Tribes had grown into "an immense
Treasure multitude, not to be estimated by numbers" (Antiquities 11:5:133) in their
When the leading Israelites were deported by Sargon II, he also hiding place beyond the Persian Empire. And what better location
took treasure, including the fittings of the temples in the cities of for an allied immense multitude than on the other side of a poten-
Dan and Bethel: "I surrounded and deported as prisoners 27, 290 of its tial enemy of Judea: the Persian Empire, the Selucid Empire, or the
inhabitants, together with their chariots and the gods in whom they trusted" Roman Empire (when the Romans held their off-and-on control of
(Nimrud Prism IV). When the leading Judahites were deported by territories in the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys?38
Nebuchadrezzar, he also took treasure, including the fittings of the
temple in Jerusalem: "And the pillars of bronze that were in the house of Heck, even if the Lost Tribes came back and turned out to be
the Lord, and the bases and the bronze sea that was in the house of the Lord, only a small multitude, at least they could help the Judeans with a
did the Chaldees break in pieces, and carried the bronze of them to Babylon. local enemy: the Samaritans; after 200 years on the land, the
And the pots, and the shovels, and the snuffers, and the spoons, and all the Samaritan population would've been even less pleased with the idea
vessels of bronze wherewith they ministered, took they away. And the of sharing their land with these "newcomers" than the stay-behind
firepans, and the bowls, and such things as were of gold, in gold, and of Judeans were with the returning Jews after less than 50 years of their
silver, in silver, the captain of the guard took away" (II Kings 25:13-15).34 exile (see the Book of Ezra).39
(Although in both Israel and Judah the temples had already been
stripped to their religious essentials in order to provide tribute to Religion
the Assyrians and Babylonians in hopes of staving off attacks.)
Throughout Jewish history there have always been ambiguous points
When the Jews were allowed by Cyrus to return to Judah, he of religions text, doctrine, and interpretation that priests, scholars,
specifically stated that they must be allowed to carry their temple kings, and even common folk debated. The canonical books of the
treasures with them: "Cyrus the king brought forth the vessels of the Hebrew Bible display little of this uncertainty (having been edited
house of the Lord, which Nebuchadrezzar had brought forth out of and re-edited over the centuries to maintain consistent support for
Jerusalem and had put them in the house of his gods" (Ezra 1:7). So if the orthodox religious position), but noncanonical books (including
Cyrus's decree covered the captive Israelites as well as the Judahites, some of the Apocrypha and, in a sense, Christian Scriptures) can
then logically it would also require the return of the treasures of contain alternative viewpoints (e.g., the majority of the Dead Sea
Dan and Bethel to Israel. Scrolls are multiple copies of canonical Biblical texts, but even these
have different translations of certain words, and may add or sub-
"A little temple treasure? Big deal," you might say. "There was tract or rearrange the occasional verse), and extra-Biblical writings
temple treasure all over the Testament lands, and if you've pillaged like the Talmud record debates and the solutions to them that
one temple (as most of the characters in my campaigns have), you've eventually became the orthodox Jewish positions on disputed points.
pillaged them all." True, every city, every town in the ancient The points could be pedestrian ("Is this new food that's not men-
Middle East had at least one temple, and in most cases many: tem- tioned in the Bible kosher?") or metaphysical ("Will there be a bodi-
ples to the god of the city, to the gods of the nation, to gods of ly resurrection of the dead when the messiah comes?"), and the
individual professions or concerns. But Israel had only two temples answers could have import beyond the religious life of the Jews (e.g.,
that question about resurrection was one of those that divided the
in its entire territory, and Judah only one.35 As a result, assuming
Pharisees and Sadducees for more than a century before the
that every nation spent about the same on temple finery, then the
destruction of the Second Temple).
temple treasures of Israel and Judah could be as great as that of
entire comparable nations' worth of temples.36 Unfortunately, while the debates came to consensus on any
number of points, they weren't always definitive — someone could
Allies come late to the argument and open it up again and again and
Israel and Judah were small countries, always at the mercy of some again.
of their more populous neighbours. Despite their religious and
political enmity, occasionally the kings of the two countries realized But what if there was an outside group with special knowledge
that could come in and settle the arguments, providing an incontro-
that their only security lay in alliances for mutual defence.37
vertibly correct answer?

12
 The original Israelites from before their exile certainly weren't Magic
that group; their religious differences from the Judahites were the
Some of the spells available to Israelite priests and psalmists are
ultimate cause (according to the Bible) of their exile. But in exile,
based on the experiences of the Israelite and Judahite people, as
the religious practices of the Lost Tribes apparently changed. They
described in the Bible, and the miracles granted to the faithful by
became among the most pious people on Earth (according to the
the god of Israel. If a new population of worshippers appears, hav-
post-Biblical writers) and were even granted a continuous miracle (in
ing had a novel set of experiences in a different environment, they
the form of the Sabbath River) that carried a weekly religious mes-
might bring with them a collection of new spells, magic items, and
sage with it.40 A group with such close contact with the Lord
maybe even relics and artifacts (see, for example, the river of rocks
would be the perfect doctrinal tie-breaker, and each religious fac-
and fire sidebar).
tion would be confident that the theologians of the Lost Tribes (or
even the average folk, as they were universally pious) would back
their particular viewpoint. Characterization
As mentioned at the top of this Ostraca, the first two issues of
Imminentizing the Eschaton Targum included articles by Daniel Perez on individualizing charac-
ter from the 12 Tribes of Israel, but all these differences disap-
Some prophetic references (Jewish and Christian, canonical and oth-
peared with the Exile and the Return. If the Lost Tribes return and
erwise) to the Lost Tribes take the form of messianic promises:
their individual tribal natures are maintained, all of a sudden post-
that when the messiah (whatever his nature) comes, the 12 Tribes
Exilic PCs gain access to new feats and other features (or at least
will be reunited. But with a bit of exegetical effort it's possible to
the Israelite ones do; as the tribes of the south lost their individual
read some of the prophecies as messianic requirements: that the messi-
identities, members of those tribes would lose access to tribal feats),
ah won't appear until there is unity among the children of Moses.
while GMs have a source of tribal personalities and conflicts that
And for that to happen, someone has to find the Lost Tribes (or at
can be played out at the level of national politics, with tribes
least a representative number of each tribe).
squabbling over boundaries, water rights, and what to do with the
interloping Samaritans, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, or even nego-
As an example, the Book of Zechariah, which talks about the
tiating separate military and trade alliances with neighbouring pow-
construction of the Second Temple to be followed by the reign of
ers.
Zerubbabel, the governor of Judea under the Persians and a descen-
dant of line of David and thus a potential king (Zechariah 3:8, 6:10-
And having spent generations as part of the Assyrian/
15), the prediction that the Lord will "save the house of Joseph, and...
Babylonian Empire, and having integrated with Assyrian society to
will bring them again also out of the land of Egypt, and gather them out of
some extent, members of the returned or rediscovered Lost Tribes
Assyria" (10:6-10), and an apocalyptic battle against the surrounding
can choose feats restricted to Babylonians, such as Astronomer and
nations (chapter 9 to the end of the book), can be contrasted with
Tamkarum (although feats such as Fertility Dancer and Craft
the actual history of the time of Zechariah (circa 520 BCE): the
Teraphim would be questionable choices for pious worshippers of
Second Temple was built, but the house of Joseph (i.e., Ephraim and
the god if Israel).
Manasseh, the leading tribes of the lost Israelites) didn't return,
there was no decisive battle with Persia, Zerubbabel didn't become
king, and the messianic age was never instituted. Exploration
One feature of the Testament world is that it's mostly familiar to
As the failure of the Lost Tribes to return can be seen as the players; while there are miracles, magical beast, and the like, the set-
failure point in the prophetic sequence, then maybe some enterpris- ting is still our real world and our real history with modifications.
ing Judeans can take action to fulfil that prophecy themselves, As a result, a search for the Lost Tribes can lead a party out of
becoming instruments of the Lord's will instead of merely sitting Canaan, Egypt, and Mesopotamia to Europe north of Greece and
around and waiting for him to fulfil the prophecy for them. Rome, to the Arabian Desert east of Israel and south of Babylonia,
to Persia east of Babylonia, all lands on the fringes of the known
And the prophecy doesn't necessarily have to be tied to the world that would soon play important roles in history, assuming
lifetime of Zerubbabel, for he could be seen as merely an exemplar changes don't occur in individual campaigns.
of the line of David. The text was apparently edited to replace
Zerubbabel's name with the prophetic term "The Branch," meaning But for those who see Testament's familiar world setting as a
some non-specific descendant of David, and as that line continued limit instead of a feature, the search for the Lost Tribes of Israel
for generations after Zerubbabel's death, the prophecy could be can open up a completely unknown world, where the geography no
seen to hanging, waiting for the right moment to be fulfilled.41 longer matches the known and familiar: beyond a miraculous river
not found on modern maps, the mysterious east, where tribes of
cannibals and dog-men threaten the trade routes, where giant ants
mine gold, where sheep are born as part of tree branches, and where
the Fountain of Youth is to be found; beyond a wall mistaken for a

13
 natural mountain range, the lands
New Spell of the Amazons and the centaurs,
River of Rocks and Fire and beyond them the lands where
the most powerful gods wield cold
Transmutation
and ice instead of lighting and
Level: Clr 8 (Israelite)
fire; or on the other side of the
Components: V, S, DF
forests of Europe, the land where
Casting Time: 1 action
the greatest threats to man are
Range: Long (400 ft. + 40 ft./level)
giants of rock, fire, and ice, fight-
Area: Running water with a surface area of up to 1,000 sq. ft./level, up to 30 ft. deep
ing gods and mortals in a war that
Duration: 10 minutes/level
will bring the end of the world; or
Saving Throw: See text
across the dry riverbed where the
Spell Resistance: No
Pishon River once flowed, watering
When this spell is cast, the designated volume of running water is changed into tumbling
what became the Arabian Desert,
rocks and boulders, accompanied by sprays of fine sand. As water from upstream enters the
to the fantastically rich lands of
area, it turns into stone that moves at the speed the water did, and as the bouncing boul-
Sheba, Havilah, and Ophir, where
ders exit the area downstream, they turn instantly back into water. If the wet river ran fast
magicians command (most of the
enough to produce mist and spray above its surface, sand and stones occasionally bounce
time) powerful and treacherous
upwards in the same way, striking birds flying close above the river with stunning or killing
djinns, and where merchants from
force. Stones diverted from the river or sand that splashes onto its banks turn into water
the South Asian and East African
unless the spell's area was configured to include the extra area.
coasts bring every manner of bird,
Anyone attempting to cross the river or who is trapped in the water as it turns into
beast, food, spice, aromatic, gem,
rock can find himself pinned between slow-moving boulders (requiring a DC 12 Strength
and magic item to the same bazaar
check to move 10 ft.) or battered by rushing rocks (suffering 2d6 damage per 10-ft. section
to trade.
crossed) unless he succeeds on a Reflex save each round, which halves the damage.
If river of rocks and fire is cast before the Sabbath with a duration that extends into
the Sabbath, at the moment just before the Sabbath begins the rocks and sand are turned Enemies
into flowing fire and sprays of sparks. While the Jewish people would
Those trapped within or attempting to cross through the flames suffer 2d6 points of have assumed that the returning
fire damage per 10-ft. section crossed (double damage to undead). Those within the fire members of the Lost Tribes would
when it first appears can escape the flames unharmed if they succeed on a Reflex save, but ally with them against common
those entering the river afterwards get no save. enemies (see Allies above), it's
If the flowing flames are diverted from the spell's area or if sparks jump onto the banks, entirely likely that the returning
they revert to water that's the same temperature as that upstream of the spell area. Israelites would maintain their ani-
Secondary fires cannot be lit from the magical one. mosity toward the Judahites, who
If any 10-cubic-ft. section of flaming river takes 20 points of cold damage or more in 1 had, after all, warred against them
round, the flames in that section revert to water and then freeze. (Do not divide cold dam- off and on for two centuries before
age by 4, as normal for objects.) If the ice cube is anchored to the shore or the bottom of the Assyrian invasion, and who had
the river, the ice melts in 1d6 rounds as flames from the rest of the river bathe its sides. If only avoided the same fate at that
the ice cube is formed unsupported in the middle of the river, it floats downstream, melt- earlier date by joining the
ing all the way; if any ice remains when the cube leaves the area of the river of rocks and fire Assyrians against Israel.
spell, it remains frozen for the duration of the spell that created the ice.
If river of rocks and fire is cast during the Sabbath with a duration that extends after Hostile Israelites might achieve
the Sabbath ends, the flames turn into rock at the moment the Sabbath ends. Casting river a temporary peace with Judea for
of rocks and fire during the Sabbath (as opposed to casting it before the Sabbath with a as long as it takes to settle the
duration that continues into the Sabbath) causes a -2 Piety loss for the caster unless the Samaritan problem. But if the
spell was cast to save a person's life, in self-defence after an attack has begun, or to protect Israelite religious practices aren't as
a person's life from a clear and imminent threat (not just a vague possibility of danger). pure and proper as those of the
This penalty also applies to using the magical flame to light a mundane secondary fire for Jews (i.e., if they aren't identical to
purposes other than lifesaving, self-defence, or protection from imminent threat. those of any of the Jewish fac-
River of rocks and fire is a difficult spell, requiring a Levite priest to make a DC 16 Piety tions), then the old hostility would
check before casting. Failure means that the spell is not successfully cast and the spell slot quickly reassert itself. And if the
is expended. returned Lost Tribes were indeed a
great multitude armed with novel
magics and holy artifacts, the Jews

14
might find themselves longing for the days when they faced only (6) A likely possibility is that Reuben was either wiped out by
the pagan Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. or absorbed into its neighbours Moab and/or Ammon.
Many Israelite tribal allotments were vulnerable to attack by
Liars neighbouring foreign nations (running counterclockwise in a ring
from Israel's southern Mediterranean coast: Moabites, Ammonites,
All of this discussion of returning members of the Lost Tribes has
Bashanites, and Phoenicians (the Philistines didn't arrive until after
assumed that the Lost Tribes are real, but in reality the Israelites
the conquest), with the Egyptians, Midianites, Amorites, and
disappeared from history in 610 BCE and a lot of the later stories
Aramaeans forming an outer ring, and the remnants of the
were the result of frauds perpetrated many centuries later, to scam
Canaanites found in pockets throughout the land), but Reuben had
money from European Jewish or Christian communities in order to
the misfortune of receiving the smallest territorial allotment in the
support the distant Israelite communities, to pay for members to
east, having only a short common border with fellow Israelite tribes
travel to Europe, to finance embassies to the Lost Tribes to enlist
(which might affect the willingness of the rest of Israel to come to
their aid against the Muslims, or even just pious frauds bringing
its aid, and the size and timeliness of that aid), being distant from
hope to persecuted Christians and Jews even if no material aid was
Samaria (the capital of the northern kingdom after the fall of
ever promised and no reward was ever sought.
Solomon's united kingdom) reducing the cultural and political ties
to the north (other tribes equally distant from Samaria suffered
But the Jews of the period from their return from the
similar problems: Dan in the southwest was forced to migrate to the
Babylonian Exile to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem certainly
north, Benjamin in the south was annexed by Judah, part of
faced hardship, foreign oppression, and religious persecution: fertile
Naphtali in the north was sold to Phoenicia, and Asher never man-
ground for inspirational frauds, scheming con-men, foreign spies,
aged to take over the northwestern lands that were its official
and dangerous visionaries of almost any sort imaginable, whether
allotment), and it was surrounded on two sides by strong enemies
they are plots the GM concocts to confound the players, or scams
from culturally related tribes (Moab and Ammon were both Semitic
the PCs come up with for their own purposes — or even that one
tribes), unlike most Israelite tribes, which had only one neighbour-
PC employs against the others.
ing enemy, and a culturally foreign one that was easy to demonize.
As a result, Reuben would have been both militarily vulnerable
and subject to cultural creep through intermarriage with its neigh-
Notes :
bours, and adoption of language, handicrafts, and other features of
the dominant Moabite culture. In the 150 years between the settle-
(1) As well as administering the six cities of refuge that were ment of Gad and the judgeship of Jephthah, Gad and Ephraim,
also scattered throughout Israel. despite a shared border, had developed regional dialects distinct
(2) In the Bible, taking a census was always a contentious issue, enough that the Gaddites could identify Ephraimites by the pro-
because there were two reasons for a census: taxation (see, for exam- nunciation of the Hebrew word for "stream" (shibboleth) and then
ple, Luke 2:1 in the New Testament) or preparation for war (see kill them (during a civil war); the same kind of cultural shift
David's actions in II Samuel 24:1 and I Chronicles 21:1). would've been taking place to the southern Reuben, but possibly to
(3) And these two censuses are what gave the Book of Numbers a greater extent.
its name in English Bible translations. Asimov also mentions the possibility that the 13th child of
(4) As with many other such figures in the Bible, these num- Jacob, Dinah, his only daughter, might have been the foundress of
bers are likely inflated by a factor of at least 10. But while the yet another Israelite tribe, one that was virtually wiped out in a war
absolute numbers aren't trustworthy, their relation to those of the with the non-Semitic tribe of Shechem, a war that also depleted the
other tribes are probably at least semi-reliable. fighting strength of Dinah's brother tribes Levi and Simeon
(5) My own theory is that some members of the tribe tried to (Genesis 34). If you accept that hypothesis, then add 1 to the num-
settle in the area of Simeon and Judah's joint allotment immediately bers of tribes mentioned at various places in the article where
on the Israelites' arrival in the area early in the exodus. Moses for- appropriate.
bade this (as he wanted (for entirely sensible reasons) to keep all (7) Some look at this, the fact that Judah wasn't listed along-
the Israelites together until all the tribes could enter into their side the other 11 tribes in the Song of Deborah (a pieces of early
allotments as one), but as much as half of Simeon defied Moses and Israelite poetry that included mention of Simeon, the other south-
made their way north. If they'd immediately been annihilated by ern tribe), and other interesting items as evidence that Judah wasn't
the locals, the Bible writer would have gleefully recorded the fact, originally an Israelite tribe at all; maybe some of the histories were
but as it wasn't recorded, maybe that indicates that they had politi- rewritten to add (Edomite?) Judah retroactively as a sign of its
cally inconvenient success and the second census records only the acceptance into the gang.
remnant of the tribe that obeyed Moses's orders. That would make the disappearance of Simeon (see note 5) even
When Judah and Simeon officially entered the area two genera- more interesting, as Judah's absorption of Simeon would have repre-
tions later, part of the tribe of Simeon was already there, but sented Simeon's merger with a then-foreign people, and the shared
couldn't be acknowledged by the Bible writers, hence the odd allot- territorial allotment would have been another way to back-date
ment of territory to Simeon. Judah's membership in the family.

15
 (8) The same sort of decision-making resulted in the perma-
nent capital of the USA being constructed on uninhabited swamp-
land at the border of the largest southern state and one of the
smaller border states to the north, and of the capital of Canada
being built at a remote site on the border between French-speaking
Quebec and the most populous English-speaking province, Ontario.
(9) If you swap "north" and "south," this situation is similar to
that faced by the state of Maryland during the U.S. Civil War.
Maryland was traditionally a Southern state, being a slave-owning
state located below the Mason-Dixon Line (i.e., it was in "Dixie"). In
the election of 1860 there were four (out of 23) counties in which
Abraham Lincoln not only lost, but didn't receive even a single vote.
On the other hand, the capital of the North, Washington, D.C., was
located right on the Maryland border (as mentioned in note 8), and
even if Maryland had tried to secede it would likely just have been
setting itself up to be the first state conquered and occupied by the
Union armies (as demonstrated at a small scale by the way
Baltimore was occupied by Union troops, who trained artillery pieces
on the centre of the city in of an uprising).
In the end, "Southern" Maryland ended up siding with the
North, and if you ask modern Marylanders, while some proudly dis-
play their Confederate flag bumper stickers, others deny that
Maryland was ever considered a Southern state, some aren't aware of
the state's slaveholding past, and patriotism is as likely to be used
as a reason for the state's decision as the force of Union arms (real
and implied) pointed at its citizens.
(10) There had been a partial deportation in 597 BCE, but the
follow-up operation 11 years later was more thorough.
(11) The Judahites were deported to different cities than the
Israelites had been, but once each group was removed from their
forbidden homeland it could be expected that there would be some
movement of individuals or small groups of the exiles within the
rest of the empire, or at least contact via letters.
(12) In the Bible, the decree reads: "Who is there among you of all
his people, his god be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in
Judah, and build the house of the Lord, god of Israel" (Ezra 1:3). Persian
records say that in all the cities of the empire where the sanctuaries
of the foreign gods "had been in ruins over a long period, the gods who
above is in the midst of them, I [Cyrus] returned to their places and housed
them in lasting abodes. I gathered together all their in habitants and restored
to them their dwellings," which is more universal than Ezra's account,
but either account would appear to give the northern Israelites per-
mission to return to Canaan to rebuild, either in conjunction with
their neighbours in the south or in competition to them.
(13) Which could be intentional: It would have made polemic
sense to downplay any return in order to maintain the "northern
tribes were punished for their idolatry" line.
(14) And, in fact, the Judahites hadn't even heard from the
Israelites in some 167 years, since 706 BCE, when King Sennacherib
of Assyria (son of Sargon, who'd deported the Israelites 15 years
before) sent a Hebrew-speaking official, recruited from among the
captive Israelites, along with his armies to conduct a form of psy-
chological operations against the population of Jerusalem during an
unsuccessful siege of that city; II Kings 18:17-36.
(15) I spent a good part of my vacation last summer rereading
16
the Dead Sea Scrolls (yes, rereading) hoping to get some insight into
the thoughts of at least one Jewish group during the inter-
Testamental period on the subject of the Lost Tribes.
Unfortunately, the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls didn't have an
opinion on the Lost Tribes — or at least not one that was put into
writing and which survived to our time.
The scrolls were written by a group of messianic Jews who
splintered away from one of the major religio-political parties of
Judea (cases can be made for both a Pharisee and a Sadducee origin
for them, and for and against identifying them with the Essenes
after the split), and it was apparently their firm belief that only
the members of their own splinter group, plus the righteous mem-
bers of the party they'd splintered from, would enjoy the benefits
of the messiahs' (plural) forthcoming appearance in Jerusalem.
When the scrolls mention "Israel," they often mean by that "the
sons of Levi, the sons of Judah, and the sons of Benjamin," and more
specifically not even all of those tribes, but only "the exiles of the
Sons of the Light" who will "return from the Wilderness of the Peoples to
camp in the Wilderness of Jerusalem" (The War Scroll, column 1); i.e.,
just the persecuted members of the scroll-writing sect.
So, while scrolls like The Words Of The Heavenly Light appear
to contain statements about the fate of the Lost Tribes ("Please, oh
Lord... rescue your people Israel from all the lands, near and far, to which
you have banished them..."), knowing that the scroll writers considered
themselves the true Israel, exiled from Jerusalem by their political
adversaries, there's no way of knowing which meaning of Israel is
being referred to in some of these apparently plain statements.
There are some fragmentary scrolls that might have contained
interesting statements about the Lost Tribes, but exactly the wrong
fragments survived the last two millennia. For example, Portion 3 of
Stories About The Tribes Of Israel ends just as the Joseph tribes are
calling out to the god of Israel for forgiveness from the sins that
led to their exile — but the Lord's response, whatever it was, is miss-
ing.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have nothing conclusive to say about the
Lost Tribes, which suggests that their fate wasn't weighing heavily
on the minds of Jews of the 1st Century BCE — but then again, the
scroll writers were probably not typical Jews of the time.
(16) Paul spoke (Acts 26:6-7) of the 12 tribes still hoping to
come into the promises that the god of Israel had made to them,
the Epistle of James opens "James, a servant of God and of the Lord
Jesus Christ, to the 12 tribes which are scattered abroad: Greeting."
The Apocalypse of St. John says (Revelation 7:1-8) that 12,000 from
each of the 12 tribes (sort of: the full tribe of Joseph and the half-
tribe of his son Manasseh are included, but not the full-tribe of
Dan or Ephraim, the half-tribe of the other son of Joseph; whether
this is a deliberate slight against Dan or the result of a copyist's
error is a matter of interpretation) would be protected from the
devastation to be wrought on the Earth in the last days. The apoc-
ryphal II Esdras (see notes 27 and 38) was originally a Jewish apoca-
lypse, but it was edited and expanded by Christians and no copies
of the Jewish original are extant.
(17) These left-behind Israelites were to cause major political,
social, and theological problems for the Jews after the return from
the Babylonian exile. The people moved into Israel from other parts
of the Assyrian Empire soon assimilated into the dominant Yahvist
culture of Israel (because when gods were considered to be tied to a
particular locale, it made good sense to worship the god of the
place where you were destined to spend the rest of your life), pro-
ducing a people of mixed ancestry and heritage but a single religion.
Unfortunately, the single religion was distinct from that practised
in Judah.
The new mixed northern people considered their form of the
Israelite religion the true version, untainted by the idolatry of
Babylon. Their Bible didn't include any books written during or
after the exile, and where the texts of the two Bibles differed, they
believed they had the original version. And they could boast a com-
paratively unbroken line of religious tradition, as the Assyrians had
returned one of the abducted priests to Israel when a plague of
lions afflicted the north and the mixed population beseeched
Assyria for help as there was no one to lead them in the religious
rites appropriate to the situation (II Kings 17:26-28). Thus occurred
in the first years after the deportation, so the priest sent back to
Israel was almost certainly of the first generation of exiles
(although just as certainly not a high-ranking priest who might
have formed the nucleus of a rebellion); when the Jews returned
from their own exile, there were likely few (if any) returning priests
who'd actually been born and trained in Judah, and who could thus
be expected to be free of Babylonian influence.
The Jews, on the other hand, believed their version of the Bible
and the worship of the Lord to be authentic. The southerners had
already been complaining for centuries about the doctrinal errors of
the northern kingdom before the Assyrians made things worse. The
cultic practices of the mixture of left-behind Israelites and import-
ed foreigners was incomplete, error-ridden, and tainted with foreign
concepts.
As the capital city of the northern kingdom (from 887 BCE)
was Samaria, that name was applied to the land and to the hated
Samaritans who lived there.
(18) When it was Judah's turn to worship the Lord in exile,
they managed it by transforming their view of the Lord from the
god of a particular place (the god of the land of Israel), and more
specifically the god found in a specific temple who could be linked
to a particular physical artifact (the Ark of the Covenant), to a god
of a particular people, giving a different meaning to "the nation of
Israel."
A further step in the evolution of Jewish thinking about the
Lord (and one embraced by one branch of the early Christian
church) would transform him into a universal deity, one who had
sovereignty over everyone on Earth and who could and should be
worshipped by all.
(19) Well, most of them weren't slaves. Some Israelites would
eventually become slaves, but that was a condition more like the
temporary indentured servitude some whites entered into in the
18th century as opposed to the permanent chattel slavery involun-
tarily visited on blacks (and their children) for generations.
Israelites (and other free Assyrian subjects) could be forced into
slavery as a result of debts, losing trials, or even voluntarily.
(20) The lack of references in the Scriptures comes as no sur-
prise (see note 13), but there also aren't any references in the
17
Babylonian Talmud, a collection of (among other things) priestly
rulings on how to interpret Biblical regulations in the novel situa-
tions presented to the worshippers of the Lord in a foreign land.
For instance, the Talmud includes instructions on sharing drinks
and meals with Babylonians, but there's no mention of the problem
of sharing meals with Babylonian Israelites, marrying them, taking
them as slaves, lending money to them, buying livestock from them,
etc.; questions that surely would have come up if there had been
Israelites present for the Judahites to meet.
(21) The Assyrians and Babylonians weren't the only people to
practice this sort of deportation and resettlement in history, and
the fate of the Lost Tribes of Israel and the survival of Judah
aren't unique either. Just last year I discovered through happen-
stance that my mother's family was descended from French farmers
who'd been forcibly deported from Acadia (which was resettled with
Scottish immigrants who renamed it Nova Scotia) in 1755 CE. Some
Acadians fled to France and were assimilated into the parent cul-
ture. Others fled to distant French colonies and struggled to main-
tain their cultural identity, founding New Orleans and transform-
ing over generations from Acadians into Cajuns. And others were
forcibly settled in foreign lands by the British invaders and ordered
to assimilate. Instead of the 47 years of foreign bondage the Jews
suffered in Babylon, my own ancestors only spent 12 (or in some
cases more) years captive in Massachusetts, forced to practice their
Catholic religion underground, having their children taken forcibly
from them to be raised as English-speaking Protestants, before
escaping to New France (Quebec), but many of the similarities
between the experiences are interesting (at least to me).
(22) Although now, after some 27 centuries on the land as
Samaritans (not counting their 5 as northern Israelites), the
Samaritans may be headed for extinction. The centre of Samaritan
culture is Shechem in the territory of Manasseh, near the border
with the territory of Manasseh's brother Ephraim. During the
Roman period, it was renamed Neapolis, a name that eventually
shifted to Nabulus or Nablus (just as the Neapolis in Italy became
Napoli or Naples). Nablus is also the capital of the modern
Palestinian semi-state, and is the cite of repeated violent clashes
with the Israeli armed forces. The Samaritans in Nablus were forced
to abandon that town during the First Intifada (1987-1990), and
now live in Kiryat Luza on Mt. Gerizim itself, under the protection
of the Israelis. The worldwide population of Samaritans (divided
between the settlement on Mt. Gerizim and the city of Holon,
about 40 miles southwest of it in Israel) is estimated at 700. Still,
while their situation is dire, the population has grown from a low of
146 in 1917.
(23) And if anyone doubts that a cultural group could assimi-
late itself out of distinct existence in a mere 182 years, recent events
in New Orleans may be illustrative.
Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans during the 250 anniver-
sary of the Acadian deportation (the round-ups of Acadians began
August 10th, 1755, and continued until the last deportation ships
were loaded and send south in the middle of December). Residents
of devastated Louisiana fled in every direction, tens of thousands
settling temporarily not just in adjacent states, but anyplace where
they could find refuge, from coast to coast in the USA, with many
eventually deciding to put down roots and stay in these other places
instead of returning to Louisiana when the all-clear was sounded.
But one location I don't recall hearing any stories about
Katrina refugees ending up is Quebec, a place where New Orleans'
Acadian-descended Cajun population would certainly have relatives,
where some of the same French-derived culture could still be found,
where the language of New Orleans' founding fathers was still spo-
ken, and where a homecoming party 250 years in the making could
certainly have been a spectacle.
Why didn't the Cajun Katrina victims look to Quebec as a
place for refuge and resettlement once New Orleans was destroyed?
Well, because, after 250 years, the Cajuns had assimilated. The lan-
guage of New Orleans isn't French anymore, it's English (albeit with
a large number of loan words from French and spoken with a
strange accent). They identify themselves as Americans, not dis-
placed Canadians or Acadians or Frenchmen. Their ties of home,
family, and living memory are all to Louisiana and the adjacent
states, not a thousand miles to the north and east. In all likelihood,
the thought of "returning" to Quebec didn't even momentarily cross
the mind of a single Katrina-fleeing Cajun, either in the rush to
get out of inundated New Orleans or in the months afterwards
when the question of permanent relocation came up, just as it prob-
ably didn't register with the Assyrian-speaking, Marduk-worship-
ping, Euphrates-dwelling descendants of deported Israelites when
they were given an opportunity to "return" to Israel.
Interestingly, and different from the Israelite experience in
Assyria, while the language and self-identification of the Cajuns
changed over the generations, one thing that stayed stable and kept
them somewhat distinct from the surrounding population that they
otherwise assimilated into was their religion. Louisiana (along with
some northeastern urban centres and a stretch of territory in south-
ern Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California) is a pocket of
strong Catholicism within a mostly Protestant USA.
(24) Just as Darius, some 22 years after the release of the exiled
Judeans, upheld the rights of the Jews against the complaints of the
surrounding Samaritans, Philistines, Nabateans, and Ammonites,
based on the exact wording of the decades-old decree that written
by one of his predecessors.
(25) Josephus, The Jewish War 7:5:96-99. Pliny (Natural History
31) reverses the river's sequence, having the river run wet for six days
and dry for one.
(26) In the continuing evolution of the story of the Sabbatyon
River, by the 12 Century CE, in a letter supposedly from Prester
John, at least some of the stones had become precious stones.
(27) If there's no way to cross the river any day of the week,
how did the migrating Israelites get trapped on the far side?
According to the apocryphal II Esdras 13:41, the god of Israel "held
still the flood till they were passed over" and he will "stay the
springs of the stream again" at "the latter time;" i.e., the coming of
the Jewish Messiah, or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, depend-
ing on the reader's viewpoint. The text seems to say that the river
in question is the Euphrates, but it can also be read to imply the
Sabbath River, and it was often read that way in later centuries.
(28) And while the thought of hordes of Israelite horse-war-
riors may seem somehow incongruous, don't forget that Israelite
18
chariot unit fighting for the Assyrians against the empire's other
enemies.
(29) The belief that England is a lineal descendant of Israel,
and thus heir to any promises the Lord made to Israel or specifical-
ly to one of the individual northern tribes (which one varies accord-
ing to the teller) dates at least as far back as 15th Century CE. The
belief is currently espoused by the Worldwide Church of God (pub-
lishers of The Plain Truth magazine that used to be available for free
in racks at bus stops in major cities) and the Philadelphia Church
of God (publishers of The Philadelphia Trumpet magazine), both
descendants of a church founded by Herbert W. Armstrong in the
1930s. Armstrong also identified Germany as the Assyrians (driven
out of their country by the Babylonians), Italy as Babylon (driven
out of their country by the Persians), and the USA as the tribe of
Manasseh (miraculously sifted out of the mixed stocks of England,
France, Denmark, etc., where they'd dwelled among their cousins
never knowing that they were actually a separate tribe). Other ver-
sions of the Anglo-Israel myth are also extant, and there may be
millions of believers in one form or another of it worldwide.
Now, most versions of this pseudo-history don't have the scat-
tered Israelites landing in their eventual destinations for centuries
after the beginning of their captivity, possibly not arriving there
until long after the Testament era, but with the number of liberties
the story already takes with the historical record, moving events a
few centuries one way or the other is again fair game.
(30) For various reasons, some believe this to be a garbled
account of the Great Wall of China protecting that country from
its own northern barbarians.
(31) This version of the story appears in a number of places,
including in the Koran, Surat al-Kahf ("The Cave"), 83-98.
(32) Unlike the Israelites on the other side of the Sabbatyon
River, who were said to be learned and pious, those Alexander sealed
up between the Black and Caspian Seas were unrepentant idolators,
worshipping golden calves and forsaking the law of Moses.
(33) Some readers may remember the publicity surrounding the
admission to Israel of a number of Falashas, Ethiopian Jews official-
ly declared (by the Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel in 1973) to be
Israelites. Since that time Israel has recognized the even more tenu-
ous claim of a group in India, some clans within the Kuki-Chin-
Mizo people calling themselves the "Children of Manmasi," claim-
ing to be descended from the Tribe of Manasseh. And some time
ago Israel officially recognised the Samaritans as descendants of the
northern tribes, granting them permission (like the Falashas and the
Manmasi) the right to emigrate to Israel and automatically receive
Israeli citizenship.
Groups in China, Japan, and Burma, among others, as well as
the Kurds in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran, have also been identified
by some as descendants of the Lost Tribes. At least the Kurds are in
a plausible location.
(34) II Kings 25:15 can be read as saying that the gold and silver
items were melted down and carried away as bullion, but Ezra states
that the Temple vessels taken from Jerusalem had been displayed in
the temples of Babylon and were returned intact, and Josephus spec-
ifies that Nebuchadrezzar "dedicated the vessels he had pillaged out of
the temple in Jerusalem to his own gods" (Antiquities 10:8:154). It
would've made sense for Nebuchadrezzar to preserve the items, both
because of their propaganda value and because of the magical power
that those artifacts might bring him.
(35) Judahite writers accused the northern kings of allowing
temples to gods other than the Lord to proliferate throughout
Israel, but we only have their likely quite biased word on that —
and that the southern kings eventually managed to rid their own
country of the same idol worship before the Babylonian invasion.
(36) Unfortunately, a large part of the treasure of the temples
of Israel and Judah was the cost of construction itself: polished
stone, imported wood, masterwork craftsmanship — the sort of
thing that's not easily transported to a foreign land, so it probably
gets burned on the spot. But there were still plenty of transporta-
bles: idols (in Israel), the Ark of the Covenant (in Judah), fabrics,
sacrificial tools, fittings (incense burners, lamps, etc.), furniture —
all of it made of the finest materials by expert craftsmen, and most
of it covered in gold, encrusted with jewels, and so on.
And the original splendour of Solomon's Temple had been pil-
laged by Pharaoh Shishak in 919 BCE, after the breakup of the
united kingdom, but the kings of Judah had had over three cen-
turies to re-ornament the Temple before the Babylonians again
sacked Jerusalem.
(37) Much more frequently they decided that their security lay
in allying with other kingdoms, large and small, against each other.
(38) Centuries later Christians in Europe were excited about
rumours of the existence of a Christian Empire to the east of the
Muslim Caliphates that could join with the Europeans to squeeze
the Saracens between them. Excited, that is, until the true nature of
that Eastern force was discovered: the Christian Prester John was
really the Mongol Genghis Khan, and the Mongols had no intention
of stopping at Europe's borders after crushing the Moslems beneath
the hooves of their horses.
Of course, once the Mongols were discovered not to be a
Christian ally, it was almost inevitable that they would be declared
to be the opposite: members of the Lost Tribes bent on the destruc-
tion of the Christian world (see note 32). And Jews in Europe were
accused of secretly supporting their eastern cousins, and a number
of Jews were put to death as a result.
(39) Unfortunately, II Esdras, written at about the same time as
Josephus's Antiquities, also described the members of the Lost Tribes
as a multitude, but specifically characterized them as a "peaceable
multitude" (II Esdras 13:12) — not necessarily the sort you'd want to
count on for militarily defeating your enemies.
(40) In fact, the Sabbath River was invoked in the answer to
the Talmudic question of whether the calendar of weekly Sabbaths
had been followed accurately for the more than 52,000 weeks since
19
the Lord revealed the Sabbath to Moses; if anyone doubted the
accuracy of observance, he was enjoined to travel to the east, find
the Sabbath River, and note the day of the week that it changed its
flow.
(41) Since the messiah didn't come to rule over a reunited Israel
at any time from the construction of the Second Temple in 516 BCE
to the Temple's destruction in 70 CE, Biblical texts originally
describing the construction of the First and Second Temples, and
the establishment of the reign of the messiah in Judea, are read by
some Jews and Christians as the prediction of the construction of a
Third Temple, to be followed by the coming of the messiah to rule
over the Earth.
To the Zechariah prophesies would be added any number of
prophecies from other books, such as Daniel 9:20-27, or Ezekiel 38-38;
as well as, for Christians, Matthew 24:1-34 (a description of signs
and portents to precede the Second Coming), Matthew 25:15 (which
links with the passage of Daniel quoted above) and the sequence of
events in Revelations (from Chapter 4 to the end), and I
Thessalonians 4-5. The result is a timeline: the return of Israelites
to Israel, the construction of the Temple, worldwide plagues and
disasters, and either the battle of Gog and Magog, followed by the
Messiah's reign of peace (for Jews); or the Antichrist, the Rapture,
the battle of Armageddon, and Jesus's Second Coming (for
Christians).
Some Christians have been advocating Zionism (the return of
Jews to Palestine) for the last four centuries and more. And in this
context, the founding of the modern nation of Israel in 1948, and
then the Israeli capture of Jerusalem in the 6-Day War of 1967, can
then be seen as prerequisites for the fulfilment of Matthew 24:32-
33, ("Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and
putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is night: So likewise ye, when ye
shall see all these things, know that is it near, even at the doors.") reading the
fig tree as an allusion to the reunited (reestablished) Israel, the
"tender branch" as its young age, and "putting forth leaves" as the
construction of the Third Temple.
In fact, there are a number of Jewish and Christian backers for
plans (and even attempts) to begin construction of a new, Third
Temple on the currently-Muslim-controlled Temple Mount, though
these are obviously controversial, to say the least, and have not
moved beyond the realm of plans.
(Special thanks to Reverend Chris Gudmondsson for some of
the Scriptural citations in the discussion of the Second Coming,
although I take full responsibility for how I interpreted the texts
he pointed out.)
[Editor's note: The Jewish view of the events referenced above
are my addition to the manuscript.]
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 Bless Me,
For I have Sinned
By Allon Mureinik
"for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniq- But even if the character observed her actions, and made sure
uity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth to uphold all the laws and commandments and stray away from sin,
she might still find herself a sinner, according to the method of
generation of them that hate me"
repentance you use in your campaign world.
--Exodus 20:5
One way to achieve this unpleasant state is if the campaign
Sin, redemption and penance have been an important part of myth world uses the Collective Penance paradigm. According to this para-
and fantasy literature since the genre's early days, from Heracles' digm, some symbolic figure, such as a king or a high priest (or even
Twelve Labors to Earthsea's Ged traveling to the end of the world a non-symbolic average Joe in more fanatic religions) can turn the
to battle the shadow he was arrogant enough to unleash on the people he's supposed to represent to sinners if he fails and commits
world. In this article, I will attempt to describe some of the more a sin. According to the penance system used in your campaign, this
common cultural approaches to sins and sinners, and show how it figure might have to find a way to atone for her sins in order to
can be used as the driving force of a scenario, or perhaps even an save the entire community. In other campaigns, the sin might be
entire campaign. atoned for if the wrong committed by the sinner is set right by
another character, not necessarily the one who committed the sin in
the first place, like one of the PCs.

SIN Another way that a character might find herself to be a sinner

Webster's dictionary defines sin as "Transgression of the law of God; is by using the Generational Penance paradigm. According to this
disobedience of the divine command; any violation of God's will, paradigm, the sins of the father afflict unto future generations. If
either in purpose or conduct; moral deficiency in the character." a character commits a sin without atoning for it, it is passed on to
This definition, however, might slightly change according to reli- his children, and his children's children, and so on until the end of
gious structure of your campaign world. In some religions, breaking time, or until one of them can atone for this ancient sin. According
a law or commandment without intention ("What? Deer aren't to some versions of this paradigm, the sin becomes greater and heav-
allowable as food? Why didn't anybody tell me?") is a lesser sin that ier with each generation it's passed on to, and when the PC is faced
a character can easily gain penance for, or might not even be consid- with a sin committed by her great grandfather, it might be almost
ered a sin at all. In other religions, however, even the thoughts of impossible to atone for.
actions defying the divine law ("I hope a chariot runs him over!")
might be considered a mortal sin. Note that sins aren't limited to In certain cultures, in certain situations, it is also possible to
actively performing some action, and in some religions, not taking pass a sin on from one person to another. This almost always
certain actions could also be considered a sin ("Bless me father for I requires the consent of both parties and some religion ritual, but in
have sinned, it has been seven months since my last confession"). an imaginary world, almost anything is possible.
It is also important to note that in a fantasy campaign where gods
and deities have real power and real influence on the campaign

REDEMPTION
world, a sin can be more than just a moral load on the character's
conscience; it might become a real problem when the local healer's
spells stop affecting the character, bad luck haunts her wherever she After looking into the concept of sin, we should look into the con-
turns and in extreme cases, an avenging angel comes knocking on her cept of redemption and how it can be turned into the driving force
door in the dead of night. of a scenario. But before doing that, we must first distinguish two
different types of sins, or at least two different views on the essence
of sinning, if you will.

21
 The first kind of sins are sins between man and man, meaning
sins where one man causes some sort of harm, be it physical (e.g.
assault, murder), mental (e.g. abuse), social (e.g. slander, libel) or
economical (e.g. theft, vandalism), to his fellow man. In some cam-
paign settings, atoning for such sins would be relatively easy, and
wouldn't include much more than setting the right (e.g. returning
the stolen property, helping rehabilitate the victim of an assault,
etc.). In religions that are more violent and bloodthirsty, a different
method of penance (or punishment) can be employed - the Eye for
an Eye system, for example, where the victim may cause his assailant
the same damage caused to him, thus returning the balance.
In terms of a campaign setting, the really interesting view on
sin is the sin between man and his deity. Under this paradigm, the
damage caused by the sin is greater than the damage inflicted to
the victim himself. The very act of sinning unravels the moral
structure the religion is based on. In this type of campaign setting,
the sinner must not only undo the damage he has caused, but also
seek penance from his deity or from his mundane representatives,
the priests and clerics. This penance might be as simple as paying a
special "sin tax" to the local priest or performing some ritual cleans-
ing, or as difficult as the aforementioned Twelve Labors of
Hercules.
some sin they or their forefathers committed either knowingly or
not. Naturally, when the scenario is based on such a concept, the
characters need to be extra careful not to commit any more sins
(like slaughtering a band of goblins that was simply stupid enough
to stand in their way) en route to their ultimate goal, or they will
drain the quest from meaning.
More sophisticated GMs might take the concept of atonement
given by a religious figure and twist it so that corrupt priests con-
trol settlements, towns and even entire kingdoms by holding the
population's immortal souls ransom. And in the hands of crueler
GMs, it could be even worse - the deity worshiped by those priests
actually exists, and condones their actions.
The perceptive readers amongst you have probably noticed that
I haven't mentioned the civilian law of the campaign setting and
the relationship between it and the religious system of sin and
atonement in this article. Although the tension between these two
systems can be a fertile ground for many adventure seeds, it is sim-
ply too vast to cover within the scope of this article, and I must
leave it to your imagination, or to another article I might write
some day.

The possibilities for creating scenarios based on the concepts of This article originally appeared in issue #26 of The Orc Magazine.
sin and penance are endless. The simplest way to use this concept is This article contains no Open Gaming Content and is © 2006 Allon
to send the characters on an epic, dangerous, quest to atone for Mureinik

22
 The passover
By Scott G. Carter
"And the Lord said unto Moses [...] Thou shalt speak all that the celebration of Passover is a defining characteristic of life in a
I command thee; and Aaron thy brother shall speak unto Pharaoh, Jewish community, and certainly not one to be ignored in a campaign
with Israelite PCs. Such a climactic event, however, does not affect
that he send the children of Israel out of his land. And I will
the Children of Israel alone; its repercussions were felt throughout
harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders the world of Testament.
in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you,
that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine
armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Observance of the Passover
Egypt by great judgments. And the Egyptians shall know that I Exodus chapter 12 describe the event and defines its observation, with
further development in the chapter 23 of Leviticus and elsewhere.
am the Lord, when I stretch forth mine hand upon Egypt, and Commanded as a memorial throughout the generations, the Feast of
bring out the children of Israel from among them. And Moses Unleavened Bread would become one of the three festivals marked by
and Aaron did as the Lord commanded them." pilgrimage to the Temple (the other two being Shavuot, the Festival
- Exodus 7:1-6 of Weeks; and Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles or the the Feast of
Ingathering [Exodus 23:16 and 34:22] both of which will be explored
in similar articles later on). The feast begins on the 15th day of the
The night was still and dark and quiet, punctuated by the screams of
month of Av (also known as Abib, usually between March and April),
weeping mothers. The Angel of Death walked among the people in
the first month of the year.
Egypt. It flowed into their houses and their cattle pens. It visited the
prince in the palace and priest's son in the temple and the poor off-
On the 14th of Av each man, although sometimes in cooperation
spring of servants in the shacks of the lowliest, and everywhere it
with his neighbor, would kill a young spotless sheep or goat and
went it touched the first-born child of the house, snuffing out the
spread the blood around his door. It was roasted and eaten that night
breath of life. Yet at every house where the blood of the lamb cov-
with bitter herbs. Not a bone was to be broken; it was to be eaten in
ered the doorposts and the lintel,
the house, and quickly. The par-
it did not enter; instead it took
ticipants were to be dressed for
no notice of them and passed
travel. The bread eaten with
over their house, leaving all
the meal, matzah, was to be
within alive. Inside those hous-
cooked without allowing it to
es some shook with fear and
rise first, symbolizing the need
awe, others rejoiced and gave
for haste. Any unused portion
thanks to God, the God of
of the animal that remained
Israel. All knew that history
until morning was to be
would never be the same again.
burned.
The tenth and ultimate
Originally the Passover
plague served not only as the
observance and the Feast of
climax of the event leading up
Unleavened Bread were sepa-
to the Exodus, it also made an
rate, not formally combined
indelible mark on the history
until the reign of King Josiah
of the Chosen People and their
of Judah in 621 BCE (2 Kings
neighbors. Ritually observed by
23: 21-23), although his decree
Israel throughout their history,
seems to suggest that the cele-

24
bration was a reinstatement of a celebration during the period of the
Judges that had been abandoned during the monarchy era. Prior to
this era, the celebration of the Passover was likely a family observance,
such as the one described in Exodus 12. Held in Jerusalem, the com-
bined festival began with the observance of the meal as its chief fea-
ture. The celebration lasted for seven days during which nothing
leavened was eaten. On the first and last days there was a "holy assem-
bly" and no work was to be done. On the second day of the festival,
the priest waved a sheaf (an omer) of the earliest matured barley
before the Lord; this was followed by sacrifices of both animal and
cereal on each day of the Passover.
One early noteworthy celebration of the Passover occurred on
the plains of Gilgal. There, Joshua commanded the observance fol-
lowing the mass circumcision of the Israelites who had been born dur-
ing the years of wandering in the desert. It was on that day that
manna ceased to appear, and the children of Israel ate the produce of
the land of Canaan.
Numbers 9:11 and following does allow for those who would be
considered ritually impure during Passover to observe it the follow-
ing month (Pesach sheni, little Passover), a detail of great importance
for devout Israelite PCs.
Israelite PCs and Passover
Certainly prior to the Exodus itself there would be no observance of
the Passover, although there is some archeological evidence to suggest
that ancient peoples living in Canaan may have observed a meal simi-
lar to the Feast of Unleavened Bread to acknowledge the beginning
of the barley harvest. During the Exodus era, particularly during the
years under Joshua's leadership, the celebration of the Passover would
have been a major religious event, zealously observed by all the faith-
ful. Observance of the Passover during this era would be considered
part of Common Observance for the purposes of accruing Piety.
After the era of the Judges, there are suggestions that the obser-
vance fell out of practice, although this observance, or lack thereof,
varied from one generation to the next. If the feast was observed with
any regularity, it was likely stripped of most of its religious signifi-
cance, instead becoming a spring harvest meal. PCs who choose to
make a point of the religious aspects of the celebration, especially in
contrast to their more wicked neighbors, might consider it part of
Uncommon or even Diligent Observance for the purposes of their
Piety scores, depending on the specific era. After Josiah's decree, male
Israelite PCs living in Judah would celebrate it as part of Minimal
Observance, whereas Israelites of the northern tribes who choose to
make the effort to celebrate in Jerusalem may be awarded a bonus
Piety boon.
25
Non-Israelite PCs and Passover
Exodus 11:6 states: "There shall be a great cry in all the land of Egypt,
such as there has not been and such as shall never be again." Such a
thing is unlikely to be forgotten in the years following the Exodus,
and can serve as impetus for a cabal of Egyptian mages and warriors
to seek revenge. Such a group may try to replicate the Night of Death
in the nascent nation of Israel during the time of Judges. Unable to
duplicate the event exactly, they may attempt to use both magic and
trickery to make an Israelite community turn from their faith and
surrender themselves to Egypt, or their goals may simply be wholesale
slaughter timed to coincide with the observance of Passover. Whether
this is the actions of the PCs, or villainous NPCs, will depend on the
campaign. In later eras, Egyptian scholars, studying the events sur-
rounding the Exodus, may venture into Israel seeking the source of
what they interpret to be powerful magics, believing it to be Moses's
Staff or another holy relic.
Canaanites would quickly hear of the rumors traveling up from
Egypt of the disasters that had occurred there. Enterprising
Canaanite PCs may fear the coming of the Israelite magics and quest
for their own counter to it. Alternatively, later-era Canaanites might
reinterpret the event as an act of native gods, and seek that favor to
be used against their enemies.
Beyond the dramatic events of the Passover itself, the enemies of
Israel, such as enterprising Assyrian or Babylonian commanders, may
see the observance as an opportune moment for them to strike. Which
would certainly be the case during the later era of the divided king-
dom when almost all the devout men would be in Jerusalem, leaving
border outposts undermanned.
Using the Themes of Passover
in a Campaign
Leaven, during the Passover observance, comes to symbolize sin.
Campaign set in the time leading up to the celebration can focus on
PC efforts to remove sin, or make restoration for it, both in them-
selves and in their communities. Quests to restore personal piety or to
fulfill holy vows would be appropriate. A GM may wish to use the
preparation for Passover as a motivation for PCs to deal with previ-
ously ignored problems, such as the presence of idolatry, demonic
influence, or a monstrous creature that is surely the representation of
the sin of the people.
The night of the Feast of Unleavened Bread was typically a time
to recount what G-d had done for His people, and not just during the
Exodus. A game session that included, in part or as the whole, a time
for the PCs to tell how they were aided by their faith or protected
from harm during their adventures might be a welcome change of
pace, particularly if the players are notified ahead of time and told
to prepare what a PC may wish to say.
 Another motif in the Passover is haste. The Children of Israel
ate the meal the night before they were to leave Egypt. Their dress
and behavior was a sign of faith that they would indeed be leaving
soon. GMs may wish to encourage a feeling of urgency to the adven-
tures prior to Passover by reminding them of the date and what will
be expected of them as pious Israelites. Timing climatic events in the
campaign to fall close to Passover, either just before or as doom loom-
ing on the horizon, can heighten this feeling of haste.
The major theme of Passover, however, is freedom, both in phys-
ical terms, as when the Israelites were emancipated by the Lord
Himself to be His Chosen People, as well as in the spiritual arena.
Passover is a perfect time for an Israelite PC to change his or her level
of observance to a higher category; though there really is not in-game
benefit to perform such a change at this moment (although an imme-
diate +2 Piety bonus gain would not be out of order), it certainly
26
makes perfect sense from a story point of view, and can enhance a
campaign greatly. Player characters that have grappled with a partic-
ular sin (perhaps via their Flaw) may take this opportunity to make
a promise to rise above it in the coming year. This could lead to an
immediate +3 Piety bonus for the PC, though if he later commits the
same sin he promised to overcome, his Piety loss would be increased
by -3.
Above all, Israelite PCs should be well aware of the themes of
the holiday, and try to utilize them as springboards to enhance the
storyline in a campaign by performing acts that fall within these
themes. By the same token, GMs are encouraged to reward such acts
with in-game benefits such as a +1 or +2 Piety bonus, or perhaps a
modifier to a particular skill roll, or under a specific situation tied
to the themes of Passover.
Era Spotlight:

The Battle of
{ Thermopylae
By Herodotus's account, the Battle of Thermopylae was a disaster
for the Greek city states. Outnumbered, ill-prepared, and betrayed,
nothing went right for the advance force sent by General
Themistocles to review and possibly halt the progress of the Persian
army. On the other hand, the Persian army had made great headway
as it invaded Greece; with land forces numbering in the hundreds of
thousands and, through engineering feats of incredible proportions,
Xerxes and his army managed to catch the Greeks off guard.
Though stymied for two days by some trick tactics made by the
Greek defenders, Xerxes eventually managed to move through the
Hot Gates and burn Athens to the ground. If this were the whole
story, our world today would look very different. However, the
Greeks eventually fought off the Persians and Xerxes went down in
history as the first Persian Ruler unable to extend the boundaries
of the Empire. Greece, on the other hand, ascended to what we see
today as the birthplace of the Western World.
By Eric Hansen
The Battle of Thermopylae, one of the defining moments of
the general war between these two powehouses of the ancient world,
is an excellent option for a campaign set in Ancient Greece.
Conflict, betrayal, bravery, honor all played a role in the battle, and
it just so happens these are all things that make a campaign great.
Whether you enjoy the thrill and glory of battle, or the intrigue of
wartime politics, a good time can be had by any adventuring party.
This era spotlight can be used as a mini-campaign setting for
Trojan War: Roleplaying in the Age of Homeric Adventure, or used with
your regular d20 rules; information to maximize its use with both
sets of rules has been included.

27
 This meant that, in order to cross with an army of nearly 300,000
Xerxes Attacks! soldiers, including a cavalry of war elephants, the Persians would
have to construct a bridge. However, because time played a factor in
the invasion, the bridge would have to be makeshift, yet sturdy
In the summer of 480 BCE, Xerxes I, son of Darius of Persia, sought enough for safety. Drowned armies did not win battles. How Xerxes
to succeed where his father had failed. With an eye toward Greece, solved this was ingeneous: by lashing 600 ships together in two
Xerxes began his preparations for war. Not only would he invade by columns, he was able to make a bridge wide enough to cross the
sea, but also by land. Such a feat required planning and technologi- channel that took relatively little time to construct and dismantle.
cal ingenuity. Reasons for this were twofold: one, prior experience In no time, he had a bridge and his troops were ready to cross into
had shown that the seas can be extremely dangerous in the region, hostile territory.
therefore something had to be done to prevent premature destruc-
tion of the navy; two, in order to make a full show of naval power
and land superiority, Xerxes would have to march into Greece rather Across the Aegean, the Athenian Democratic Assembly had
than transport troops by ship. commisioned the building of 100 new ships, bringing Athens's total
strength to 180 triremes. All totaled, the Greek City States had
Meanwhile, Greece was well aware of Persia's intentions and assembled a naval force 370 strong. Against a major naval power
were girding themselves for a full scale invasion. Superior tactics boasting 600 ships and a greater number of skilled sailors, however,
had won the day at the Battle of Marathon, but even the most bril- victory was unlikely. Nevertheless, Athens was of the opinion that if
liant strategy can be defeated by an overwhelming force. Persia, the Persian Navy was crippled, the army would be cut off without
with its Phoenician Navy, was renowned for its domination of the supplies, sound logic considering the harsh mountainous terrain that
seas. Therefore, the Athenians sought to build more warships in an offered little to an invading force, especially one as large as Xerxes
attempt to defend their home by sea. Sparta on the other hand, had assembled.
ruled by King Leonidas, took upon themselves the land operations.
Their hope in the face of overwhelming numbers was to choose nar-
row points where cavalry is neutralized and numbers mean little. Invasion By Land and
Troops on the Move By Sea
History had taught the Persians of the perils of the Greek side of
In order to invade Greece by land, Xerxes decided the best and the Aegean. In 493 BCE, Darius set 600 ships to sail for Athens. As
fastest route was to cross the Hellespont, a sea channel separating they rounded the peninsula from which Mount Athos rises, a storm
Greece from Asia Minor, at points between one to five miles wide. rose up and decimated the Persian fleet. Darius was forced to turn
back and rebuild. Knowing this, Xerxes
ordered a canal to be constructed to
allow safe passage at that point. In
fact, it was the very ships that had
made Xerxes's bridge across the
Hellespont that sailed ahead to accom-
plish this task. Though he was risking
everything, there were some things
Xerxes could not be leave to chance.

As was tradition, Sparta, the domi-

nant force on land, turned over admin-
istration of the army to Themistocles,
an Athenian. This was to show unity
between the major city states in times
of war. In reciprocation, The Athenian
Navy had given supreme command to
Eurybiades, a Spartan. Themistocles
ordered that an advance force 5,000
strong be dispatched to assess the
Persian progress and scout potential
battle sites. King Leonidas of Sparta
volunteered himself to take on this
task. Other Greek City States volun-
teered, but all regarded the Spartan
The pass at Thermopylae. king as the leader of this expedition.
At the time of the battle, the coastline would have been where the road is, to the right.
Due to the silting of the Gulf of Malis, the coast is now some kilometers away.

28
 Of all the potential battle sites, the mountain gorge of Tempe
in northern Thessaly, and the seaward mountain pass of
Thermopylae, were chosen as the most favorable. Thessaly was
known for its isolation and unfreindly terrain. At the time, the pass
of Thermopylae consisted of a track along the shore of the Gulf of
Malis so narrow that only one chariot could pass through. On the
southern side of the track stood the cliffs, while on the north side
was the gulf. Along the path was a series of three constrictions, or
"gates" (pylai), and at the center gate a short wall that had been
erected by the Phocians in the previous century to aid in their
defense against Thessalian invasions. The name Thermopylae (hot
gates) comes from the hot springs that were located there. If the
Greek army were to have any success against the massive Persian
Army, it would be at these sites. The advance force set out to make
preparations for the defense. Before departing, the Spartans con-
sulted with the Oracle of Delphi. The oracle bespoke doom for the
mission. Nevertheless, Leonidas and his men departed in the summer against the Persians, Sparta was celebrating the festival of Carneia.
of 480 BCE.
The Best Laid Plans...
Upon reaching Thessaly, the Greeks were taken by surprise. Not one, reinforce Leonidas and the 5,000 men under his command.
but two things shook them to the core. First, the Persian army was
Xerxes orders the Hellespont be beaten into submission.
larger than they had imagined. At the Battle of Marathon, the last
time the Greeks had fought the Persians, the Persian offense was
composed of 20,000 men. What the Greeks saw under Xerxes com-
mand was more than ten times that number. The second surprise
they recieved was that the Persians had arrived so quickly; the
Persians had swept across the northern coast faster than anyone had
expected. Little did the Greeks know at the time that the Persians
had sent their own advance column to bribe and otherwise influence
those along their route to allow safe passage and trade. Able
Thessalonians were also drafted into the Persian army. This meant
the Greeks had no choice but to make their stand at Thermopylae.
King Leonidas ordered his men to fall back to Thermopylae and
then he dispatched a messenger to Athens to request that
Themistocles deploy the full army to Thermopylae.
In Ancient Greece, festivals were kept with a religious fervor.
Feasting and partying were almost required of citizens, who willing-
ly accepted. At the time King Leonidas was preparing for battle
Unfortunately for Leonidas, one of the customs of Carneia is no
troops can be deployed at that time. Even though Themistocles was
Athenian and appointed general of the army, the Spartans still
retained executive power. It was their indecision over keeping cus-
toms during Carneia that resulted in no other troops being sent to
Unaware that no reinforcements were coming, King Leonidas
began field training his men. The Persian army, knowing of the
Greek's vastly inferior numbers, had expected the Greeks to retreat.
Instead, Persian scouts found the Greeks performing calisthenics.
Xerxes dispatched emmisaries to request surrender. Leonidas refused,
demanding war. Morale was high in the Greek camp and though the
Persians outnumbered the Greeks, Xerxes felt apprehension toward
what was to happen next. Leonidas, after all, had made his point
clear and the only option was to fight.
Confrontation:
Days One and Two
Day one of the battle occured on what is assumed by modern histo-
rians to be August 11, 480 BCE. Recently, Persia had conquered
Medea and it was the 20,000 Medes, urged on by the whip, who first
attacked the Greek defenders. The Greeks formed a line to meet
the attacking army, but then suddenly broke ranks and appeared to
flee. Whether it was hubris or a true underestimation of Greek tac-
tics, the Medes broke into a disordered charge whereupon they fell
into a trap. The Greeks turned about, reformed, and fell upon the
Medes with a fury. The casualties were high on the Persian side and
the Medes were forced to retreat.
Xerxes was infuriated that so few men could do so much. For
this reason, he decided on the second day to attack with his
Immortals, an elite band of warriors who answered directly to
Xerxes. He was sure they could quell this puny uprising.
Unfortunately, this was not so. By using similar tactics, the Greeks
again beat back their attackers, holding the pass one more day.
29
Affliction: Day Three The Spoils of Defeat
It was at the point when King Leonidas's defense was proving suc- Those three days ended in a huge loss for the Greeks. The Greek
cessful that disaster struck. Ephialtes, whose name is associated with naval operations had also failed to accomplish its goal of weakening
the Greek word for nightmare, betrayed his country to the Persians. the Persian Navy and thus cutting off the Persian army from its
Little is known concerning why he did this, whether it was fame, supplies. The Persians sacked Athens and burned it to the ground,
fortune, or self preservation. Whatever the reason, Ephialtes showed while its citizens fled to the island of Salamis. It would be a long
to Xerxes a small mountain trail by which he could move his troops time before the Athenians would see their home again.
and outflank the Greeks. By the time Leonidas learned of this
treachery it was too late and there was no sign of reinforcements. By Herodotus's account, the Battle of Thermopylae was a
crushing defeat, but with that defeat came a newfound pride.
Outnumbered and about to be outflanked, Leonidas made a Everyone that had made it to safety knew it was because of a hand-
bold decision that sealed the fate for him and his 300 strong royal ful of men's decision to stand and fight knowing full well they
guard. He sent the Athenians home to warn the people the Persians would die. That Greece meant that much to those men burned into
are coming and to evacuate Athens. He and his 300 remained, along the survivors' hearts a resolve to unite and take back what was
with 400 Thebans and 700 Thespians, to hold the pass long enough theirs. They did, and from that seemingly insignificant battle on a
to buy time for those retreating. They took up positions on a little tiny stretch of land by the ocean, the Western World was born.
hill and encircled the summit making a massive phalanx, then wait-
ed for the Persians to arrive.

People and Places

Angered by the stubborness of Leonidas, Xerxes made one last
attempt to coax surrender from the Spartans. Getting none, he
ordered his men to fall upon them without mercy and kill them to

of Ancient
a man. The Greeks, with superior weapons and armor, at first held
strong. Hoplite infantry included a long spear and bronze plated
mail. The Persian Army on the other hand was equipped with short-
er weapons and very light armor. The phalanx, a tactic employed by
hoplites where men make a square with their backs turned inward,
proved a superior tactic in the battle.
Greece
Things were going more difficult on the ground than planned,
so Xerxes ordered his archers to attack. The archers were the pride
A History of the Greek
of the Persian military. It was well known that it was the archers,
not the foot soldier, who won the battles for Persia. Xerxes ordered
them to fire so many arrows it would "blot out the sun," to which it
People
is said that one Spartan retorted, "Then we shall fight in the Before looking at the various geographical regions of Ancient Greece
during this period, a familiarity of the ethnic groups is in order.
shade." Unfortunatly for the Persians, the hoplites bronze armor The three were Ionian, Dorian, and Aeolian. Of the three, the most
and shields were able to deflect the arrows, which were too light to relavant to our discussion are the Ionians and Dorians, as these two
penetrate them. Again, the Greeks had kept an easy victory from founded Athens and Sparta, respectively. Aeolian Greeks come into
the Persians. play as they were the primary inhabitants of Thessaly, where the
battle of Thermopylae took place. Other minor groups include the
As the day wore on, things started to change for the worse. Illyrians and Thracians (thra-kee-ans) which occupied the neck of
land along the Aegean's Northern coast. A look at these various
The Greeks' spears began to break and cracks began to form in their ethnic groups is important because each one helped to shape the
lines. Leonidas was drawn away from the wall of defense and killed. geography of Greece in its own way.
A phalanx of men fought their way into the throng and retrieved
his body. It was not long after though that every Spartan lay dead
and every other Greek soldier was killed or in chains, forced now to Dorians
fight against those they had just moments before defended.
The Dorians were a warlike people. In approximately 1100-1000 BCE,
However, even the best tactics can be defeated with overwhelming
the Dorians swept southward battling fellow Greeks in what was to
numbers, and the Persian war machine moved on. be the final prehistoric invasion of the peninsula. They swiftly took
command of several sites in the Peloponnese on the Southern tip of
Greece. From there they moved eastward and founded several island
states and cities in Asia Minor. Of these, the most noted are
Halicarnassus (the birthplace of Herodotus), Crete, Rhodes,
Syracuse, and most noted of all, Sparta. Is it any wonder that
Herodotus, who by this evidence shared an ethnic tie to the

30
Spartans, would choose to highlight them in the battle of
Thermopylae? The Dorians were noted for their brutality and slave Athens
culture, two things that persisted in Sparta 600 years after the
Dorian invasion. Along the west coast of the Aegean, Athens stood as one of the
most influential cities in Greece and the Western World. Athens is
attributed to be the birthplace of democracy, and stands as an
Ionians example of architectural and theatrical wonder. Athens is situated
in an area of Greece called Attica, which is made up of rolling
The second major ethnic group at the time was the Ionians. Ionian plains where olives and grapes are grown in abundance. Rising up 300
history is nearly the polar opposite of the Dorians; rather than feet above the city proper is the Acropolis, where numerous temples
playing the invader, the Ionians comprised the people left occupying stood in tribute to the gods. This outcropping also provided a
cities along the Western Coast of the Aegean at the fall of the defensible position both toward the plains of Attica and the ocean.
Mycanean Empire circa 1150-950 BCE. Rather than a warlike people, In addition, the Athenian navy was a power to be reckoned with by
the Ionians were known for their learning and aesthetic taste. invaders.
Nevertheless, they were known to band together and become a fierce
opponent in the face of adversity. Over time, the city of Athens Athens was the primary antagonist of Sparta. From the early
became the de facto protector of all Ionian Greeks, a responsibility days when the Dorians swept down from the north, Athens had
it accepted readily. Other smaller Ionian settlements were scattered repelled invasion after invasion to keep itself free. Only during the
about the Mediterranean and Aegean seas, which most likely helped
Athens in becoming the strongest naval power in Greece. Peloponnesian wars in the late 400s BCE did Sparta finally break
through the Athenian defenses. However, Athens remained political-
The other ethnic groups ebbed and flowed into power, especial- ly important and has remained today as a Western influence.
ly the Macedonians, of which Alexander the Great was a member.
The Thracians were the most isolated, keeping to themselves all the
while partaking in Greek Culture.
Thessaly
Thessaly is a region north of Athens made up of wide plains sur-

Important Regions of
rounded on all sides by mountains. On the Southern border is
Thermopylae, to the west is the Pindus mountain range, to the
north the mountain pass of Tempe, which separated Thessaly from

Ancient Greece, Macedon. However, to the East is the most recognized landmark in
Thessaly and possibly all of central Greece, Mount Olympus.
Thessaly is also thought to be the home of Jason of mythical fame.

ca. 480 BCE The harbor he was said to depart from was on the Gulf of Pegasae
(now Volos).

Sparta The people of Thessaly were ruled by the aristocracy, and were
known for their prowess with horses. During Alexander the Great's
Sparta was one of the greatest city states in Greece. Life in Sparta reign, the people of Thessaly were famed for their service as cavalry.
was hard and fast. At the age of seven, children became wards of However, at the time of Xerxes's invasion, the Thessalonians were
the state. Boys were drafted into the military and forced to train captured and forced to fight against their fellow Greeks.
and serve for the rest of their life. If they married, they were for-
bidden from seeing their wives until the age of thirty. Women were
also trained in combat, though they served a lesser role in the for-
mal military. Because men trained constantly in the military, work
Macedon
was performed by helots, or the slave class. Helots were made up of To the North of Thessaly, Macedon was a kingdom well known for
prisoners of war and people sold to Sparta by other nations. Spartan possessing very diverse terrain. To the west was the Thermaic Plain
men wore their hair long, sometimes tied in tresses. which made up the heartland of Macedon. To the South, the
Thermaic Gulf, which the Haliacmon and Axius rivers flowed
The Spartan form of government was an Oligarchy, or ruled by toward. To the north were deep valleys as wells as forests and moun-
a collective of noble classes. Despite this, Spartans eschewed person- tains. In fact, the name comes from an ancient Greek word for
al wealth and built their homes of wood. Sparta looked more like a "highlander." As diverse as its terrain, the peoples making up the
monarchy of Macedon were Dorian-Greek, Thracian, and Illyrian.
sprawling village than a city. Sparta was without city wall or many
stone monuments even at its height of power. The Spartan Acropolis
At the same time Xerxes I was sweeping through Greece,
was nothing more than a dirt mound housing the Temple to
Macedon was just coming into its own. Alexander I (reigned 485-440
Athena, the patron Diety of Sparta, and Artemis Orthia. The tem-
BCE) began hellenizing Macedon. However, by bribe and force,
ple to Athena was called Athena Chalkioikos, and its walls were cov-
Xerxes pacified the region and passed through it unhindered. He
ered in plates of bronze depicting mythical events. These were
possibly also added forces to his army. How ironic it is that one
Sparta's major monuments and stood to the west of the city on the
hundred years later, Alexander II of Macedon, otherwise known as
bank of the Eurotas.
Alexander the Great, would bring the Persian Empire to an end.

31
Thrace
Though bordering Macedon on the East, Thrace (Thra-kee)
remained a non-Greek state throughout the time of Xerxes's Persian
invasion. What made it of importance to the Greeks was heavy
deposits of gold and silver. To this end, many Greeks emigrated to
the Thracian coast. However, the majority of the population did not
speak Greek and possessed physical features more common to
Europe, such as fair skin and red hair.
In addition to gold and silver, Thracians exported wheat, tim-
ber and slaves to the Greeks. Thrace was dominated and hellenized
by Alexander the Great. Today, the region is split between Turkey,
Greece, and Bulgaria.
Major Personalities
Xerxes I
At the age of 32, Xerxes I took power in 486 BCE upon his father's
death. A devout worshipper of Zoroastrianism, Xerxes I most likely
felt he was on a divine mission to conquer Greece. He attempted
this much sooner than anyone had expected in 480 BCE, but ulti-
mately failed the following year when his army was decimated at
the battle of Plataea, north of Athens. According to Herodotus,
Xerxes was a man driven by a lust and greed for power, but given to
extreme cowardice. He is the object of the Greek term hubris, or
pride which results in self-destruction. Whether this was the victor
telling the story is a secret of the ages. The Old Testament paints
another, more favorable picture of him in the Book of Esther (King
Ahasuerus).
King Leonidas of Sparta
Little is recorded about Leonidas of
Sparta, but what is tells much about
the man and what he stood for. He
was the 17th of the Agiad dynasty
of Spartan kings, one of the sons
of King Anaxandridas II of
Sparta, who was believed to be a
descendant of Heracles. An
inconic episode that demonstrate
the laconic matter-of-fact brav-
ery for which Leonidas and the
Spartans were famed is that, on
the first day of the siege, Xerxes
demanded the Greeks surrender their
arms, to which Leonidas replied, "Come
and get them." He was a man willing to
die free for Sparta than live in slavery as a
Persian. He faced literally impossible odds and
willingly gave his life with his men for the benefit
of the general Greek forces.
32
Herodotus
Dubbed the world's first historian, Herodotus recoreded the history
of the Persian Wars. He was born in 485 BCE in Halicarnassus, a
Greek port city in Asia Minor, which at the time was under Persian
rule. What made him stand out among his contemporaries was that,
instead of providing a first person account, Herodotus sought out
those who had been involved in the events and recorded their obser-
vations. His history of Greece was published in 425 BCE, five years
before his death.
Using The Battle
of Thermopylae in
your Campaign
The era of the Persian invasion of Greece can make for a very ful-
filling historical campaign. The social and economic upheaval guar-
antees an exciting campaign whether the player characters desire
political intrigue or manning the frontlines of a battlefield. All
classes can play their respective roles to the hilt and in a wartime
situation all will be necessary. Moreso, during a war to repel an
invader, there is more work to be done beyond merely opposing the
enemy with the sword. It could be said the player characters have
greater chance of being caught up in an adventure against their will
than they do of ever having to mill about for random encounters.
At the time of the invasion, the Greek army was
divided. 5,000 men had been sent as an
advance force, and the rest stayed behind.
If your players choose to play a role in
the advance force or as mercenaries to
carry out a mission in the field,
they will have their work cut out
for them. Moving 5,000 men miles
and miles across a rocky coastline
is no easy task. There are supply
lines to be established, scouts to
deploy, and camps to establish.
Player characters could take part
in any or all of these tasks and all
could lead to a rollicking adventure.
Perhaps villagers welcome the army to
bed down in their fields, only to betray
them to the enemy for money. Maybe while
scouting out the best route for travel, the players
come upon an entrenchment of soldiers. The players could
even be sent to investigate why supply lines have suddenly been cut
off.
 Just because the players decide to hang back and not join the
advance force doesn't mean they'll be left without adventure. A
group interested in intrigue will find much in the way of adventure.
Ancient Greece would unite only to fight a common foe, and even
then the bond was tenuous. Some historians believe that the Spartan
council left King Leonidas without aid intentionally, that the excuse
that it was a religious holiday was merely a ruse. Players could be
caught up in a power struggle between Athens and Sparta and have
to negotiate terms to prevent the two bodies splitting up and going
their separate ways. They could be given the choice to align with
and prove themselves to one or many factions devoted to the many
ruling bodies of the various City States, both military and political.
This could create many enemies and friends and lead to further
adventure.
Using Trojan War:
Roleplaying in the Age
of Homeric Adventure
If you are using this Era Spotlight as a campaign for Trojan War,
using the race and class information provided in that book is highly constantly; more than that, however, the Ancient Greeks relied heav-
recommended, as these are better thematic fits for the story. The
information provided below is included in case you are using stan-
dard d20 rules, or are adapting the setting information to your own divine the fortune of that army. These seers were fiercely loyal. If
campaign world.
Barbarians, Fighters, Paladins,
and Rangers
Of all the character classes, the fighter will have the easiest time
fitting into a campaign. Might made right in ancient times, and
empires rose and fell on the battlefield. A fighter could be neces-
sary not only as a soldier, but as a personal champion of a civic
leader loathe to get his hands dirty. Paladins, rangers, and barbar-
ians would also play a large role, though the latter may have a hard
time fitting in with the more "civilized" society than they would
fighting for their homeland.
Ba rds and R o gues
One cannot ignore the necessity of rogues in a wartime campaign.
Their diverse skills can be a boon to anyone desiring secrecy or sub-
terfuge. In the case of facing overwhelming numbers such as the
Greeks did against the Persians, guerilla warfare, though without
honor, could have been practiced. The dangerous terrain of the
Grecian coastline could be made even moreso were a few traps laid
in an army's path. An army bedding down for the night could fall
prey to surgical sneak attacks on the officers. At home, a rogue
becomes a carrier of information. Lurking in dark hallways, he can
become privy to some of the city state's deepest secrets.
Bards would be able to excell in this politically-charged envi-
ronment; their many social skills, along with their bardic abilities
(easily disguised as part of an oration or performance) would make
them some of the most sought-after agents for all sides involved, let
alone for independent factions seeking to move in during the chaos.
When all is said and done, also remember the bard's talents would
be required to record all that had been done and put it in song, on
paper, or on stage.
Arcane Spellcasters
Practitioners of arcane arts such as wizards and sorcerers would have
a place, though they may be seen as indistinguishable from clerics.
Otherwise, they could be viewed as touched or strange people who
lived outside social norms. The people of Greece looked always to
the gods for everything. The Greek Pantheon had a god for every
purpose. Were a wizard to show his power and not attribute it to a
god, people could get suspicious or even hostile. Nevertheless, a wiz-
ard or sorceror could be revered as a great vessel of the gods' power.
That or he could take the place as an advisor, using his intelligence
and knowledge to advance himself.
Divine Spellcasters
Clerics would be an indispensible part of a campaign set in this
time period. First of all, their healing skills would be demanded
ily on seers and divinations. Many seers would travel with an army
and would continue their art of reading the entrails of animals to
any had seen what would come upon the Spartans those days at
Thermopylae, they stood by and died with their king despite their
knowledge. Druids could play a similar role but for the nature
dieties. Alternatively, druids (along with barbarians) could belong to
some of the northern, non-Greek, peoples, either conscripted into
Xerses's army, or following the general devastation like vultures.
New Game Rules
In order to create characters that better fit a campaign set in the
time of the battle of Thermopylae, the following adjustments
should be made to the standard d20 human race based on ethnic
group. This is to account for the cultures that evolved from these
ethnic groups. As they were the dominant Greek cultures at the
time, humans are divided into Ionians and Dorians.
Ionian (Athenians)
The Ionians valued intellect over brute force. When they repelled
the barbarian incursions from the north, they did so with superior
strategy. It was from this group the concepts of democracy arose.
Base stats as normal for a human, though Ionians tend to have high-
er-than-average Intelligence and Wisdom.
Language: Ionians speak their own language, Athenian, in addition
to a common tongue that all Greeks understand.
Special: Ionians in general have developed a heightened sense of the
aesthetic; they possess a +2 racial bonus to all Appraise checks.
33
Ionians are also taught the art of conversation and debate; when
conversing in their native Athenian language, they gain a +2 racial
bonus to all Bluff, Diplomacy and Sense Motive checks.
Dorian (Spartans)
The Dorians were a warlike tribe that came down from northern
Greece and settled in the Peloponnese, founding what became
Sparta. The Dorians and Spartans valued strength above all and
forced every male into the military for training at the age of seven.
Base stats as normal for a human, though Dorians certainly display
higher-than-average Strength and Constitution scores among their
ranks.
Weapon Focus: Due to their lifelong training with this weapon,
Dorians gain the Weapon Focus (hoplite long spear) feat as a bonus
feat.
Language: Dorians speak their own language, Spartan, in addition
to a common tongue that all Greeks understand.
Prestige Class:
Greek Hoplite
The word 'hoplite' comes from the Greek word hoplon, meaning an
item of armour or equipment and consequently the entire equipment
of the hoplite. In Athens, nearly every middle- to upper-class male Weapon Proficiency: A Greek hoplite is proficient in all simple
citizen was a hoplite, while in Sparta, all males were considered
hoplites.
A hoplite was more than an a soldier: he
was specially trained in combat with
the long spear and wore a suit of bronze armor (use the same stats
as chain mail). Hoplites also trained in special melee tactics such as
the phalanx, which both enhanced defense and aggression in combat.
When paired against the lighter armor and smaller weapons of the
Persians, the Greek hoplites eventually helped to bring the Greek
Empire to the forefront of civilization.
Hit Die: d10
Requirements
In order to join the ranks of the hoplites, a character must meet
the following requirements.
Š Alignment: Any nonchaotic.
Š Base Attack Bonus: +5
Š Feats: Armor Proficiency (Medium), Power Attack, Shield
Proficiency.
Š Special: A hoplite must own a shield worth 20 gp or more*;
must be a citizen of one of the Greek city-states; and must swear an
oath of fealty to Greece.
(* If using standard d20 rules, this requirement is met by a round
heavy steel shield, though change the material to bronze; if using
Trojan War, use the round bronze shield.)
Class Skills:
A Greek hoplite's class skills are Climb(Str), Intimidate (Cha), Jump
(Str), Listen (Int), Spot (Wis), Swim (Str).
Skill points at each level: 2 + Int Mod.
Class Features:
All the following are features of the Greek hoplite prestige class.
weapons, the short sword and the hoplite long spear. He is also pro-
ficient with light armor, medium armor, and shields (except tower
shields).
Weapon Focus (hoplite long spear) (Ex): Upon join-
ing the Greek hoplites (or conscripted as a Spartan),
34
Table 1: The Greek Hoplite
Base Fort Ref Will
Level Attack Bonus Save Save Save Special
1st +1 +2 +0 +0 Weapon Focus (hoplite long spear)
2nd +2 +3 +0 +0 Phalanx (+2 AC max.)
3rd +3 +3 +1 +1 Athena’s Endurance
4th +4 +4 +1 +1 Phalanx (+4 AC max.)
5th +5 +4 +1 +1 Athena’s Fortitude

a character is issued a hoplite long spear, the main weapon of the Athena's Endurance (Ex): The hoplites are specially trained to
hoplite. If a hoplite looses or breaks his hoplit long spear, he must resist pain. One Spartan folk story speaks of a boy who caught a
pay for its replacement (5 gp). fox on his way to training. When his training began, he hid the fox
The Greek hoplite also gains this feat as a bonus feat. If the under his shirt. The fox became hungry and began to bite the boy's
hoplite already has this feat, he then gains Weapon Specialization skin. The boy, however, showed no sign of pain or weakness because
(hoplite long spear) as a bonus feat. he knew he would dishonor his family if he was caught disobeying
The hoplite long spear is a martial weapon that uses the same the instructor. Eventually, however, his wounds became too great and
statistics as a regular long spear, except it has a range increment of the boy dropped dead. This story illustrates the capacity for
20 ft., and weighs 6 lbs. If you are using Trojan War, the hoplite longhoplites to withstand damage.
spear is the same as the footman's spear (pg. 61). The hoplight gains Diehard as a bonus feat. In addition, when
making a standard action, a hoplite may make a DC 18 Fortitude
Phalanx (Ex): The phalanx was a Greek tactic where multiple sol- save to avoid losing the normal 1 point of damage. At 5th level, the
diers would group together and fight tightly alongside one another. hoplite may make full round actions, though he automatically loses
If a Greek hoplite is adjacent to another hoplite (or a character who 1 point of damage after completing the action.
knows this tactic, via a feat or a class ability), they each gain a +2
circumstance bonus to AC. At 2nd level, a hoplite can only benefit Athena's Fortitude (Ex): In additon to their ability to continue
from one bonus to Armor Class from a phalanx, regardless of fighting when other's have long since dropped dead, Greek hoplites
whether he has a hoplite at both sides. At 4th level, he may benefit have the uncanny ability to avoid massive damage. Once per day, if a
from two such bonuses (for a total +4 bonus to AC), provided he hoplite has suffered massive damage and fails the required
has a hoplite at either side. Fortitude saving throw, he may make a second saving throw to avoid
dying from massive damage. Hit point loss, however, is normal.

Table 2: Timeline of Major Events

490 BCE 700 Thespians make final stand at Thermopylae. King Leonidas
Darius I is defeated at the Battle of Marathon. and his Spartans are killed. Others are killed or captured and
forced to fight for Persia.
486 BCE
Darius I dies. His son, Xerxes I assumes power. September 17, 480 BCE
Persians sack Athens and burn it to the ground.
485 BCE
Herodotus is born in Halicarnassus. September 20, 480 BCE
Greeks win unlikely naval victory at the Battle of Salamis. Xerxes
480 BCE
returns to Persia, leaving his army to occupy Greece.
Xerxes I commits to conquering Greece by crossing the Hellespont.
Summer, 481 BCE
August 11, 480 BCE
Greeks defeat Persian army at battle of Platea. Persians are driven
Battle of Thermopylae, day 1. Medes are beaten back to Persian
back across the Hellespont to Asia Minor. They will never cross it
line by the 5,000 man advance force from Greece.
again.
August 12, 480 BCE 465 BCE
Battle of Thermopylae, day 2. Xerxes's Immortals also beaten back. Xerxes I is assassinated.
Ephialtes betrays the Greeks.
425 BCE
August 13, 480 BCE Herodotus's account of the Battle of Thermopylae is published.
King Leonidas of Sparta orders Athenians and others to fall back 420 BCE
and warn of the Persian advance. 300 Spartans, 400 Thebans, and Herodotus dies.

35
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