Could you be more specific? As far as I know, we know surprisingly little about movement of people for anything but the most recent history -- and that's what should correlate with genetic tracing.
Yes. "As far as I know, we know ..." There is much forgotten or ignored history that fills in much more of the picture. Why this is so I explain in my upcoming blog under Eschatology Note # 2. For your convenience, I'll place it here, as follows:
In research, whether it be scientific, engineering, or legal, progress is made when the right questions are asked and pursued. Eschatological research is no different. A key question of history has a major bearing on the eschatological picture, a question that has been asked and its answer pursued for centuries in the past. The answer either relegates biblical history to the parochial dustbin or elevates it as the central thread winding through human history, pointing to human destiny. Ironically, the enigmatic answer has eluded both academic history (for reasons to be given later) and the general cultural understanding, yet abundant historical evidence exists to answer it quite affirmatively. And the question is
Whatever happened to the Israelite tribes after their Assyrian deportation?
This is relevant to eschatology because "Israel" appears in various modern eschatological schemes and also because various claims are made in scripture by Yahweh that apply to the nation of Israel. In our time, the word can mean, depending on your theology:
1. That they died out or were assimilated into surrounding people. (Hosea 1:10 says otherwise, though Hosea 8:8 indicates that they will no longer be among themselves but among other nations - notably in cities in Media-Persia.) This presumption crept in after the few who could read Assyrian cuneiform could not find "Israel" in the clay tablets of Nineveh after it was unearthed and moved to the British Museum in London. Yahweh told Israel that he was divorcing them, that they would not henceforth be called by his name (Hosea 1:9). And so it is that Israel is referred to in the Assyrian tablets by their Assyrian name, the "house of Omri" (Bet Kumbri). They did not fade into the woodwork. A century later, they were a force to contend with, and in early AD, some of the Israelite tribes became the Parthian empire. After being weakened in a phyrric victory over the Romans, Parthia was vulnerable to the religiously hostile Persians and was collapsed by them in 226 AD. The Parthians immediately migrated west en masse through the Caucasus to avoid the wrath of the Persians and to join their kinsmen, the Scythians.
2. the Jews. This is a popular evangelical answer, that all that remains of the minor population of a people confined to the minor geographic location of the Levant as Israelites are people who today are called "Jews".
The use of distinct words as labels that trigger distinct meanings in our minds is essential for reducing confusion and clarifying understanding. I have found this to be particularly true of the word "Jew". To distinguish among meanings that differ, I offer the following deconflating definitions:
Israelite: descendant of Israel (Jacob), son of Isaac, son of Abraham
Israeli: citizen of the modern state of Israel
Judahite: descendant of Judah
Judean: descendant of lower-kingdom Israel in Judea
Jew: descendant of the people called that who moved from the Khazarian region of Asia into Europe during the Middle Ages
Judaist: follower of Judaism
Yahwist: follower of the god of Israel, YHWH or Yahweh; not necessarily the same as Judaist.
Shemite: descendant of Noah's son Shem, including modern-day Arabs and various other ethnicities, largely scattered about the Middle East
Semite: follower of the Egyptian god Sem
Anti-semite: opponent of the Egyptian god Sem? In common usage, this instead means "anti-Jew", contributing confusion
These word distinctions are not made in popular or political use today and consequently confusion abounds!
There is a modern controversy in both Judaism and among some Christians over the ethnicity of Jews. Are they Israelites or Khazar Turks, descendants of Ashkenaz, the "father" of the Turks? The apostle John refers twice in Revelation to "false Judeans" (usually translated "false Jews"). I will not address this larger topic here.
3. the church. This is called "replacement theology", that the Christian church has replaced Old Testament (OT) Israel. As we will see, much of the church throughout church history has consisted of Israelites (Hosea 3:5), and by Jesus's strategy the gospel was delivered first to Israelites. But to leave it at that raises conflicts with language given by Yahweh in scripture such as the Davidic covenant - that David's dynasty would continue perpetually - and also promises made by Yahweh to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that their progeny would be like the stars of the heavens or the sands of the sea - a major population group.
This replacement alternative tends to revert in the direction of the heresy of Marcion - that the OT and NT Gods are different, and that the OT can be disregarded if not repudiated. However, every concept in the NT finds its foundation in the OT. Jesus's sacrificial death is meaningless without the legal basis for it in the OT, and to separate them leaves a "Christianity" without a foundation. Replacement theology does not go that far, but it undermines the forward-looking claims of Yahweh, driving Bible students to distrust the OT covenant claims. One can ask, as did the scoffers in Malachi's time, where is the evidence today of God's claims in history of a perpetual dynasty of David or a large population group of Israelites? We will find that it depends crucially on the answer to the above question.
4. descendants of Israel. This is tautologically the correct answer, but where are they? The answer is substantial, and if given simply is not immediately believable to Westerners. The reason is that we have been taught a version of history that does not come from the Bible and Ancient Near East (ANE) archaeology but from the Western university scholars of the Middle Ages. Before the rediscovery and recovery of the Greek and Roman (or "classical") writings via the Eastern Orthodox church and the Spanish Islamic scholars such as Avicena and Averoes, very little was known about ancient history in Europe. There was biblical history, which seemed largely mysterious, limited and uninsightful, and also some ancient localized history such as the Irish Annals of the Four Masters, which is a recorded history of the kings of Ireland, reaching back to the beginning of Hibernia at Tara. Consequently, medieval European scholars, in their excitement over this major discovery of the classical writings, built a historiography of the ancient world on the foundation of the classics.
A minor note is struck here in the background music of this drama in 1844, the year Henry Layard from Britain was funded (from discretionary funding of the British ambassador to Turkey) to unearth Nineveh - a landmark year for the beginning of ANE archaeology. The alternative historiography built upon ANE archaeology (which was guided by OT history) conflicts with the Greeks and Romans, who were of the opinion that they were the only civilized people around. Even so, in NT times affluent Romans would send their sons to British universities because the druidic schools were the leading academic centers. Julius Caesar's account of the druids as primitive and disgusting conflicts with the accounts of the early Greek historians, other Roman historians, and the later early Christian writers, yet his more voluminous account must have influenced the medieval scholars. (See
.) Side note: the clothing of the druids was a white robe with a golden sash. Compare with Revelation 1:13 and 15:6. They were of the line of the Hebrew patriarchs such as Melchizedek and Abraham, and in Britain they converted en masse to Christianity in the early first century.
Julius Caesar was a priest of the Babylonian Mystery religion and the first Roman emperor to be deified in a pagan temple in Alexandria, Egypt. (See the book
Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy, available on the Web.) Caesar began the military campaign in Britain with the goal of eradicating druidism from the Britons and later, under Claudius, Christianity. They did not succeed; Celtic Britain was never subdued - the Silurians were never conquered - and Boadicia later led the Britons in nearly driving the Romans from the island, finished by Constantius of Colchester and his politically-oriented wife, Helen, the parents of Constantine. When the Silurians, led by Caradoc (Caracticus to the Romans) while fighting the Romans, were betrayed into their hands by the Northumbrians, the royal family was taken captive to Rome. A million Roman citizens lined the streets to look upon the Silurian leader with fear and awe as he was paraded through the streets of Rome with his captured family. Caracticus's speech to the Roman Senate, in perfect Latin, so impressed both the Senators and emperor Claudius, that he won the day and was the only enemy in the history of Rome, as captured and not conquered, to have been given a reprieve. In the Middle Ages, school children memorized his speech as though it were the Gettysburg Address.
What is consequently overdue in our time is a major reconstruction of Western history on the foundation of the answer to the question under consideration here. Support of the answer has filled books and has been researched by not just an outlier historian or two but by a school of historians who emerged in the 1800s, driven by new data from ANE archaeology. They fill in the missing European history, and especially the ethnic origin of Europe. In retrospect, the answer is obvious, yet it is not what is taught in the schools nor is it is the dominant academic history even today which, having been built for centuries on classical history, would be difficult to uproot in the minds of contemporary historians. Yet the evidence is overwhelming and is attributable in large part to developments in the 19th and 20th century. And the answer is ...
Everyone agrees that Europe was settled by "barbarian" tribes coming in from Asia from the early third century to about 900 AD, when migrations largely ceased, the barbarians settled down, and medieval European civilization evolved. Who were they? The word "barbarian" alone is indicative, as a contraction of "barbed" or bearded "Aryans". Who were the Aryans? See Isaiah 29; they were the residents of Ariel, which in Hebrew means "the lion of God" and is recognized in the OT as a name for Jerusalem. The barbarians were Israelites, who characteristically had beards and were far from being the primitive savages they were depicted as by the Romans. The Israelite Parthians were militarily superior to the Romans, having lost one battle against them in their history and having won all the rest.
The most concentrated source of literature by the school of historians reconstructing European history that I know is at
www.artisanpublishers.com, a printer specializing in books from this school of historians. (Start with the book by archaeologist E. Raymond Capt,
Missing Links in the Assyrian Tablets.) I have searched the Web for rebuttals of the thesis that the Europeans are Israelites and that most of Assyrian-deported Israel went west to populate Europe, but have not found anything substantial - mostly scoffing since it does not fit Western history. When mainstream historians encounter this question, they are lost; the answer is somewhere "in the mists of history" they say. Yet in 2 Esdras 13 of the OT Apocrypha - books that were in the Protestant Bible until taken out relatively recently - tell us where Israelites migrated: to Arsareth, which is where ancient Scythia was located, northwest of the Black Sea. Ancient historians Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Flavius Josephus, Strabo, Poseidonius, and others fill in the history of the early migration of the Israelites into Europe. They were not called "Israelites" but by the Assyrians were called Gomri (after King Omri of Israel). Language morphs over time: Gomri => Gimri => Kymbri => Cimmerians, and by the Persians (and Medians) called the Sacae (after Isaac, as Yahweh said would happen - Genesis 49), and Skuthoi or Scythians by Greeks such as Herodotus.
That the Europeans are Israelites (as are also Aryans in northern India and possibly even the Beluchistanis in Pakistan, who claim to be, and others) casts the eschatological picture in a whole new light, for now Israel as the West is quite important in global affairs, and has driven human civilization since the Middle Ages, in the Spanish and then British empires, addended by Dutch, French and German colonies over the globe, and along with them, Western culture, led by the British. The lingua franca of today is English and Western influence in even somewhat remote places such as Uzbekistan or the Xinjiang province of China is obvious. This fulfills Yahweh's promise that the Israelites would be numerous and the Israelite thread of history central to human history.
Similarly, the continuity of the Davidic dynasty continues through the royalty of England, with Queen Elizabeth being the most prominent monarch in the world for decades. European royalty over the generations is thoroughly intertwined, yet the particular path through history from David to Zedekiah, then the first of Jeremiah's "overturns" to Ireland, when he takes Zedekiah's daughter to Spain, then Erie, to marry the king of Ireland, then Scotland and the third overturn to England comes down to the present reigning royalty in England, who are Scottish since James I of England (who was James VI of Scotland). How this works into eschatology deserves another part to this sequence. The genealogy chart hanging in Buckingham Palace traces QE2 back to Judah through several lines of descent. Judah is the leading tribe; the sceptre goes to Judah, according to Jacob. The other royalty of Europe descend from Israelite royalty, such as the Parthian Arsacids - who sent the "three kings of orient" to visit Jesus, the newborn king.
In conclusion, a paradigm-shifting understanding of the origin of Europe both clarifies and simplifies much of the history-telling about the West. That most Israelites are Europeans also casts a different light on the state of Israel, though it must be kept in mind that scripture is careful to distinguish between the different destinies of the northern and southern Israelite kingdoms (Ezekiel 37:15-28).
It is not surprising that a paradigm shift in understanding Western history should take time. Once certain ideas are deeply embedded in the cultural consciousness, it is difficult to change them. Translational errors made a few centuries ago in English Bible translation, though correctable now, are not quickly made by translators lest they be accused of changing "the word of God". And so it is with Western history.
