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that river were the Dahae, Massagetae and Sacarau- Whither Israel?
cae, '...a huge confederacy of tribes, lords of the Cas-
pian steppes, northward from the great Balkan The Israelites were, in the main, deported to north-west
mountains, to the lower Oxus and the Aral'. This author Persia. It is certain, however, that they did not remain in
says that the Saca language has now been discovered the region of their first exile for any prolonged period.
and identified as belonging to the north Iranian group, Whilst it is true to say that there are isolated pockets of
which included the Sogdian and Parthian.
people claiming to be descended from the Ten Tribes
still living in the remote parts of that region, it is an ines-
The origin of the name Scythia is obscure. It seems capable fact that the bulk of the Israelites moved on
quite definite that the 'fossil' root was something like s- somewhere within a comparatively short period of their
k- and that this was sometimes hardened into s-g-. expulsion from Palestine. The times were turbulent.
Powers and nations rose and fell rapidly; grouped and
A Hebrew Equation regrouped. In all directions the peoples of these regions
were on the move. Somewhere in the tossing sea of
peoples called Scythian, God's people were in existence.
The Scythians, or Skuths, were nomadic tent-dwellers.
The ancient Hebrew-Aramaic word for tent or booth
was Succoth (S-c-th) -- phonetic Sukkah. The Israelites -- L. Buxton Gresty
also had been nomadic tent-dwellers: '...I made the chil-
dren of Israel to dwell in booths....' Quite apart from the God's Obvious Design
projection of the Israel people into Medo-Persia, it has
been established that there had been considerable He- In 1493, the infamous Pope Alexander VI drew the line
brew migration in a northerly and north-westerly direc- of demarcation a hundred leagues west of the Azores
tion from the Tigris-Euphrates area, about the time of between Spanish and Portuguese zones of exploration
Abraham. It may well be that this old Hebrew word sup- in the new world; as it favoured Spain, it was modified
plies the lost derivation. by the Treaty of Tordesillas of 7th June, 1494. The Pope
sought to apportion the world between the Holy Catho-
This theory derives support from the Tel-el-Amarna tab- lic nations of Spain and Portugal. Divine Providence,
lets, which refer to invaders of Palestine c. 1400 B.C. by however, decreed otherwise in allowing the heretical
the name of Khabiru. Many scholars are convinced that British to control one quarter of the world. Why? In
the terms Khabiru and Hebrews are synonymous, al- 1988 Britain commemorated the 400th anniversary of a
though some of these incline to the view that the great historic event which shattered completely the
Khabiru of the tablets were non-Israelite Hebrews who Satan-inspired pretensions of the Papacy: the defeat of
probably invaded further north at or about the same the Spanish Armada.
time as Joshua's conquest of Canaan. Professor T. Eric
Brunner, Professor of Egyptology in the University of The English had always been noted for their "sluggish
Liverpool, mentions that the tablets also refer to a peo- security," but in the Reformation period, a complete
ple called Sagaz. He says: 'It is hard to escape the con- transformation took place in the national character. To
clusion that Khabiru and Sagaz are two names for one find the reason for this we actually have to go back to
and the same people, and this is supported in remark- 975-922 B.C. In that period, as a direct consequence of
able fashion by an inscription found at Boghaz Keui, King Solomon's idolatry, the people of Israel divided
the Hittite capital in Asia Minor, in which the phrase into two nations. Ten tribes rebelled against the Davidic
"Khabiru-gods" is used as an equivalent for "Sagaz- Throne and set up a rival kingdom of Israel in the north,
gods" ' (Egypt and the Old Testament, 1922). Thus we called the House of Israel. The two tribes and their
have this fossil word S-k- or S-g- used to describe He- Levites remaining at Jerusalem continued under the
brew peoples in the second millennium B.C. In the light Throne of the Lord (I Chronicles 29:23) as the kingdom
of this it seems decidedly possible that at least some of or House of Judah.
the Scythian peoples, called by the Persians Sacae,
were pre-Israelite Hebrews who had long preceded the The northern ten tribes found a leader and a spokesman
Ten Tribes in their Iranian habitat. in Jeroboam. But negotiations broke down in the face of
King Rehoboam's strong-arm tactics and then, surpris-
ingly, God forbade him from taking military action to
force the return of the rebel tribes to his rule, informing
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