- Christogenea Saturdays
TruthVid's 100 Proofs that the Israelites were White, Part 7
Over the first six presentations in this series we covered only 20 of TruthVid’s 100 Proofs, and now that we are past all of the most important of the points he hopes to make, we imagine we may progress a little faster through the next 80. But maybe not. In any case, out of necessity, we may still have to repeat ourselves, finding it necessary to explain things which we have already covered in detail. Our first item this evening is one of those things, so I will do my best to present it from a different perspective.
First, we shall discuss a few important points that may have been missed in our last presentation:
Agriculture – Did we neglect to make mention of the fact that the calendar and feast days were all related to agriculture and the planting and harvest seasons? Only recently, since the dawn of the industrial age, has our own view of a calendar moved away from its dependence upon agriculture, however many of our modern holidays began in celebration of agricultural events such as planting and harvest and first fruits.
White Israelites in archaeology – [in Part 5,] I neglected to mention the 3rd century AD frescos discovered in the synagogue at Dura-Europos in eastern Syria, 275 miles east of the Mediterranean Sea and 325 miles north-northeast of ancient Tyre. These are at least as important as discoveries in Galilee, such as the mosaics at Hukkok, because they are apparently older and much further east that Galilee, in lands that were not controlled by Rome. If these Judaeans in diverse places were White, then the ancient Israelites must also have been White.
Now what follows are the notes which we have prepared for the next of TruthVid’s 100 Proofs. Of course, there were many unwritten digressions and added explanations which are not found here:
(21) A more definitive discussion of the history of Israelite migrations into Greece
Most of the early Greek writers were, or seem to have been, Athenians, who were primarily Ionians. One exception is Herodotus, who was a Dorian from a Dorian settlement in Anatolia which was under Persian rule during his lifetime, so he migrated to Athens. As we have already explained earlier, Ionia, as the islands and coastlands of Anatolia came to be known, were colonizedby Ionians in Attika in the 8th century BC, when the Ionians displaced many Aeolians and Phoenician Carians and Milesians. Around the same time, the Dorians, competing with the Ionians, had also made settlements from Anatolia. The Greek word from which we get Ionian is from a mythical eponymous ancestor, Ion. But in the Old Testament and in Persian inscriptions, the Ionians are identified as Javan, or Yavana, and are the descendants of that Javan the son of Japheth wo is listed in Genesis chapter 10.
The word Hellen, as the Greeks had called themselves, never described a single people or nation. Rather, it described a group of tribes who spoke one of family of dialects belonging to a general language, and the loose continuity of culture and religion among those tribes who spoke them. The earliest Greek writers describe as Hellenes the peoples of four distinct tribes, each with their own dialects and subdialects of the Greek language, and they were the Ionians, Aeolians, Danaans and Dorians. Other Greek tribes are from later divisions of one of these four, and even here the Aeolians seem to have been an early division of the Danaans. However I am persuaded that Aeolians may have also been significantly Phoenician in origin. Modern archaeologists and historians describe the settlements which the Danaans had made in Greece as Mycenaean, after their ancient capital city Mycenae, seven miles north of Argos, which was destroyed in ancient times by the invading Dorians in the 12th century BC. The Danaans were also called Achaeans by Homer, and a mountainous portion of the northern Peloponnese retained the name Achaea.
The Danaans and Phoenicians have frequently been linked together in Greek myths. Cadmus, called “the Phoenician” throughout Classical Greek literature, was the legendary founder of Thebes, a significant city of ancient Greece until it was destroyed by Alexander the Great in 335 BC. Recently, archaeology has revealed a Mycenaean settlement and Linear B tablets under the ruins of the ancient city. Danaus, “the Egyptian” as he also is usually called, was the legendary leader of the Danaans (Danai) who came to Greece from Egypt. In his accounts of the Exodus, Diodorus Siculus reflects the myth that rather than going with Moses, both Cadmus the Phoenician and Danaus the Egyptian had instead migrated to Greece by sea. Four hundred years before Diodorus’ time, the Greek tragic poets told of the flight of the Danaans from Egypt in prehistoric times, although they made a parody out of it.
In Greek mythology, Europa was the daughter of Agenor a king of Tyre, and sister of Cadmus and Cilix, the mythical founders of Thebes and Cilicia. As the Greek Danaans and Phoenicians were called Achaeans by Homer, Herodotus explained that in ancient times the Cilicians were also called Hypachaeans (Histories, 7.91) A third brother, Phoenix, is sometimes said to have been her father, and Agenor her grandfather. Europa was kidnapped from Tyre and sent to Crete on a bull on behalf of Zeus, where she mothered the legendary king Minos, and also Sarpedon and Rhadamanthys. Sarpedon was a hero of the Trojan War who fought on the side of the Trojans, so the time frame for the Greek myth is well within that of the Israelite settlement of Palestine. A full examination of the Greek literature, other myths, such as the legend of Perseus saving Andromeda from the sea monster on the shores of Joppa, show that early Greek civilization is inseparable from its connection to Phoenicia.
Many historians claim that the Dorians had invaded the Peloponnese from the north, where they had mostly supplanted the Danaans and came to inhabit cities such as Corinth and Sparta. But all such interpretations of Dorians originating in the north are sheer conjecture. In Homer, who had described the entire Greek world as he thought it had existed in the 12th century BC, the Dorians are only mentioned as one of the tribes present in the island of Crete, while all of the inhabitants of Greece are Ionian or Achaean or from one of the tribes that are divisions of those. Until it is realized, or admitted, that the Dorians came from Dor in ancient Israel, then the debates are endless and the ancient literature can be esteemed as nonsense.
But history does tell us that the Dorians came from Israel. In Book 12 of his Antiquities, Flavius Josephus records a letter which the king of Sparta had sent to the high priest at Jerusalem, probably around 160 BC, or maybe a little sooner: “226 Areus, king of the Lacedemonians, to Onias, sends greetings. We have met with a certain writing, whereby we have discovered that both the Judaeans and the Lacedemonians are of the same family, and are derived from the kindred of Abraham. It is but just, therefore, that you, who are our brethren, should send to us about any of your concerns as you please. 227 We will also do the same thing, and esteem your concerns as our own, and will look upon our concerns as in common with yours. Demotoles, who brings you this letter, will bring your answer back to us. This letter is four square; and the seal is an eagle, with a dragon in his claws.” The letter went unanswered for a long time, because of the troubles which the people at Jerusalem had suffered on account of the Seleucids. But after they had their victory over the Greeks of Syria, Josephus records their answer, in Antiquities Book 13 where he wrote that certain messengers sent to Rome had “came to Sparta, and delivered the letter which they had received from Jonathan [the high priest] to them; 166 a copy of which here follows” and the letter said in part: “167 When in former times a letter was brought to Onias, who was then our high priest, from Areus, who at that time was your king, by Demoteles, concerning the kindred that was between us and you, a copy of which is here appended, we both joyfully received the letter, and were well pleased with Demoteles and Areus, although we did not need such a demonstration, because we were satisfied about it from the sacred writings, 168 yet did not we think fit first to begin the claim of this relation to you, lest we should seem too early in taking to ourselves the glory which is now given us by you.”
The letter from the king of Sparta to the high priest at Jerusalem which was preserved by Josephus is also preserved in chapter 12 of the apocryphal 1 Maccabees, and in chapter 14 the later emissary mission which the Judaeans had sent to Rome and Sparta is described, which Josephus had also described in subsequent passages of his Antiquities. So here we have full corroboration of the assertions of Paul of Tarsus, where in his first epistle to the Corinthians, who were also Dorian Greeks, he told them in chapter 10 that “1 Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; 2 And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea…” In the ancient Greek accounts, it is explained that the Dorians were brought to the Peloponnese by the sons of Heracles, because they were expelled, as retribution against the Achaeans. But Heracles was identified as a Phoenician, having been born at Thebes in Greece to Alcmene, a Phoenician woman impregnated by Zeus, and while I believe the myth represented a more enigmatic truth, the Phoenician connections to Palestine and Israel should be clear enough.
(22) The full and complete history of the Phoenicians
The Israelite conquest and occupation of the coast of Palestine from as far south as Joppa, a port used by Solomon (a Chronicles 2:16), and north to Sidon is quite obvious in Scripture, even if in the period of the Judges a particular man rose up to become king over the city of Tyre, a predicament which David had later accepted. Hiram had nevertheless submitted himself to David. So the connection of Cadmus the Phoenician to Moses and the ancient Israelites is explicit in the account of the Exodus repeated by Diodorus Siculus, and although it is probably not literally true, it does represent truth. The Greeks, whose writers were predominantly of the tribes of the Ionians, gave that same coastal land the name Phoenicia after their word for the purple dye which the inhabitants of the coast had produced. In the Old Testament, wherever we see references to Greeks or Grecians, the underlying word is Javan, or Yavana, referring to the Ionians. The so-called “golden age” of Phoenicia began shortly after the Israelites came to inhabit the land, and Hebrew arts and letters were brought to Greece by the Phoenicians, as the ancient Greeks themselves have described.
Here I cited an article at Christogenea, which itself contains relevant photographs and links to sources, titled Earliest Greek Writing is Phoenician.
But speaking even of much more ancient times, the terms Hebrew, Israel or Judah were not generally used by Greeks of the Classical period. In Against Apion, Book 1, Flavius Josephus cited Herodotus where he spoke of circumcision and said “the Phoenicians and those Syrians that are in Palestine, confess that they learned it from the Egyptians” (Histories, 2.104). The ancient Egyptians did practice circumcision, but the Philistines, whom Scripture informs us were descended from the Egyptians, did not maintain the practice, and neither were the Canaanites circumcised. So in response to that statement by Herodotus, Josephus made the remark that “there are no inhabitants of Palestine that are circumcised excepting the Judaeans”, the term he used to describe Israelites. In his Histories, Herodotus referred to the people of Judah as the “Syrians of Palestine”, or even simply as “Syrians” in his account of the death of Josiah king of Judah where he died at Megiddo fighting the Egyptians around 609 BC (Histories, 2.159).
In that same book, Against Apion, Josephus said that “166 Nor was our nation unknown of old to several of the Greek cities, and, indeed, was thought worthy of imitation by some of them. 167 This is declared by Theophrastus, in his writings concerning laws; for he says that “the laws of the Tyrians forbid men to swear foreign oaths.” Among which he enumerates some others, and particularly that called Corban: which oath can only be found among the Judaeans, and declares what a man may call ‘A thing devoted to God.’” Here Josephus took for granted that by referring to Tyrians, Theophrastus was referring to Israelites, and he asserts that only “Judaeans” had such laws, by which he means the Israelites of his own time and place. Theophrastus was a Greek philosopher and follower of Aristotle in the 4th century BC.
This impact which the Phoenicians had on Greek history predates the expansion into the Western Mediterranean which mostly transpired from the time of King Solomon and Hiram king of Tyre’s “ships of Tarshish”. The temple in Jerusalem was built in the 12th year of Hiram king of Tyre, and Carthage was founded in the 156th year, according to Flavius Josephus in Book 1 of his Against Apion. Then in Book 2, citing Greek sources, he gives the date of the founding of Carthage to be the first year of the 7th Olympiad, which by the typical chronologies would be 752 BC.
The popular date for the founding of Rome is 753 BC.