Germany Plans to Rearm
Will Assyria Make War Again?
By Neotherm
If Biblical genealogies are right,
And If Genetic Science is right,
Then Herman Hoeh is wrong about the Assyrians.
- Thus saith NeoTherm
I heard on the news this morning that Germany is going to rearm. The War in Ukraine has made German leaders realize that they can no longer rely on the United States for their protection. So they have decided to sink an extraordinary amount of money into rebuilding their military. They will end up having the third largest military in the world after the United States and China. Armstrongists must be experiencing a rush of excitement as they see “Assyria” prepare for battle – against the United States. The complication in the scenario is twofold: 1) Germany is not Assyria and 2) The ancient prophecies concerning Assyria cannot be applied to today.
A Game of Logic
A game of logic best illustrates the problem with the Armstrongist view of Germany as Assyria in prophecy. Consider the following three propositions:
1. The Biblical genealogies are right.
2. Genetic Science is right.
3. Herman Hoeh is right about Germany being Assyria.
In this triad, only two of the propositions can be right. Choose which two you want to be right. They cannot all three be right and we will examine this case by case.
1. If propositions 1 and 2 are right, then proposition 3 is wrong. If the Biblical genealogies are to be believed and Genetic Science is to be believed, then the ancient Assyrians are Y Chromosome Haplogroup J. This is because we have a valid genealogy in the Clans of the sons of Noah in Genesis 10 (erroneously called the Table of Nations) that specifies that Ashur must be the same Y Haplogroup as the Jews. That’s the science as applied to genealogy. Y chromosome haplogroups are traced through the masculine line and the Biblical genealogies likewise trace the masculine line. Here is what the two lines of descent look like:
Noah ➣ Shem ➣ Ashur
Noah ➣ Shem ➣ Arphaxad ➣ Hebrews ➣ Jews and Arabs (Reference population: Qahtanie (Joktani) Arabs who trace their ancestry to Joktan the son of Eber and are 84% haplogroup J with one sample scoring 100%.)
Because of masculine line inheritance, all the patriarchs shown above would have the same haplogroup as Noah. And all would have the same haplogroup as the Qahtanie Arabs. The Qahtanies are used as a reference population because they are not so much mixed in ancestry as the historically more mobile Jews. So we can trace back from the Qahtanies to Noah and down the branch to Ashur following the rule of masculine inheritance of the Y chromosome to deduce that Ashur and his descendants were all haplogroup J like the majority of Jews. But we find that the modern Germans are principally Y haplogroup R – an Indo-European haplogroup not the Middle Eastern haplogroup J. Someone might argue that a mutation occurred so that haplogroup J gave rise to haplogroup R. This couldn’t happen and didn’t happen because R isn’t on the J branch it is on the neighboring K branch. (See Phylogenetic Structure in Wikipedia article titled “Human Y Chromosome DNA haplogroup”) No way Shem could ever have given rise to either the Germans or the British. Therefore, Herman Hoeh misidentified the Germans. This is the position that I feel has the credibility that comes with scientific backing.
Keep in mind that this is an argument from science not an argument from national semi-mythic history or tourist-oriented fable about Assyrian King Ninus.
2. If propositions 1 and 3 are right, then proposition 2 is false. Here the Biblical genealogies are correct and Herman Hoeh has properly identified the Germans as Assyrians. This would be the position of most Armstrongists. But the complication is that it says that Genetic Science, a hard science, is wrong. This is like saying that chemistry or physics is wrong. And this places a burden on Armstrongism, if it is to spread any credible end-time message, to demonstrate that Genetic Science is wrong so the message can be believed. This is a pre-condition to their end-time message. And this pre-condition is as unattainable as demonstrating that chemistry and physics are wrong.
3. If propositions 2 and 3 are right, then proposition 1 is wrong. This means that the Germans are in fact Assyrians and Hoeh was correct. It also means that Genetic Science is right. If those two propositions hold, then the ancient Assyrians were Y Haplogroup R because the modern Germans are Y Haplogroup R. This then means all of the patriarchs identified in the Clans of the Sons of Noah in Genesis 10 would necessarily have to be Y Haplogroup R. Then this means that the people we know as the Jews are not really Jews. And Jesus was born into the wrong group of people.
“We have also a more sure word of prophecy”
But maybe the kind of game presented above is boring and tedious to you. As you yawn, you view it as just the typical rant of an unconverted critic – easily discarded by those whose minds have been opened to The Truth. Here are a couple of points of truth that complicate that facile viewpoint.
1. “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”
2. “The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it.”
When these scriptures are cited, it is almost always in a debate about The Law. But it also mentions the prophets. Jesus stated that the Old Testament prophets in their full and comprehensive scope were speaking about him. He is the fulfillment. And he said these prophets had validity until John the Baptist when reality was invaded by a new and revolutionary Way. All of the prophecies concerning Israel’s punishment by the Assyrians were borne by Christ in his incarnate perfection and suffering. No haplogroups need be tracked. The pure statements of Jesus trump type-antitype or computations of times or any other manipulations of Old Testament prophecy undertaken by apocalyptic Millerites.
Conclusion
Germany will likely rearm and become the third-largest military nation in the world. I am pessimistic about the outcome of this just based on the geopolitics of the last one hundred years. And this development has nothing to do with an ancient Semitic patriarch named Ashur who was a descendant, as the Bible states, of Noah and then Shem and was genetically compatible with the Jews – and not the Germans.
54 comments:
Great post. And what do we do with the very large percentage of Americans who are descended from Germans (after England/Scotland, the largest ethnicity within those of White European ancestry)? Those Assyrians are everywhere!
“Germany will likely rearm and become the third-largest military nation in the world.” -- Neotherm
Well, you probably got that part of it right.
lol, I am wearing a jacket right now with an Assyrian lamassu on it.
HITLER IS STILL ALIVE! ... he will come out of hiding with a fake resurrection from the dead, to lead the German Assyrian people again!
Proclaimed in advance 70 years ago, by Herbert W. Armstrong himself!
http://www.herbert-w-Armstrong.org/Plain%20Truth%201950s/Plain%20Truth%201952%20(Vol%20XVII%20No%2002)%20Aug.pdf
You must not doubt the "End Time Apostle"!
In doing research for this article, I discovered that Herman Hoeh did not originate the idea that Germans are the modern-day descendants of the Assyrians. I think I may have bumped into this once before and then forgot about it. The idea was originated by an English bank clerk named Edward Hine who received inspiration from a "self educated" man named John Wilson. It is interesting that Wilson's lectures also attracted a guy named Charles Piazzi Smyth who was one of the first pyramidologists. Recall that HWA had a more than passing interest in pyramidology.
Hine influenced a British civil servant named Edward Wheeler Bird. Bird wanted to class all Teutonic peoples as Israel. Hine wanted Israel to only be the Anglo-Saxons so he excluded the Germans by designating them as Assyrians. (This foregoing background can be found in Wikipedia.) And then apparently years later Armstrongists tapped into this rich stream of mythology, pseudo-history and idiosyncratic behavior.
Now, somebody could make a remotely plausible argument based on the idea that Germans are symbolic Assyrians or they are in the spirit of Assyria. It is wholly untenable biologically that they are actual Germans. But Armstrongists already spent themselves on the idea that Germans and Assyrians are literally the same people connected by a migrational history.
In the realm of archaeogenetics, some ancient Assyrian graves were unearthed and some DNA was captured. I recall it was only three burials. Two were haplogroup J and one was haplogroup G. Hardly a broad sample. But there was no German haplogroups R1b or R1a. I hope here is more work done in this area.
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Russia is number 3 - but not very effective - as Obama would put it - they are punching below their weight.
"HITLER IS STILL ALIVE! ... he will come out of hiding with a fake resurrection from the dead, to lead the German Assyrian people again! "
You forget the guy Bob Thiel has a bromance with...Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. Guttenberg would be shocked at how obsessed Thiel is with the guy. Creepy!
The same John Wilson who published Our Israelitish Origin, at that!
NEO writes:
“Now, somebody could make a remotely plausible argument based on the idea that Germans are symbolic Assyrians or they are in the spirit of Assyria.”
(Someone could also make a remotely plausible argument that the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples are ‘typical' Israel).
Typology: Assyria and Nazi Germany - Part 1
Isa 8:6 Forasmuch as this people refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go softly, and rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah's son;
Isa 8:7 Now therefore, behold, the Lord bringeth up upon them the waters of the river, strong and many, even the king of Assyria [Tiglath-pilser III?], and all his glory:...
Isa 8:8 And he [Sennacherib] shall pass through Judah; he shall overflow and go over, he shall reach even to the neck;...
Da 9:26 And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.
"The use of the Euphrates as the metaphor here is very satisfying for two reasons. Assyria came from across the Euphrates; it was a mighty river compared to anything the Israelites had seen in their territory; its floods are swift and devastating. So was Assyria. Like Germany in 1939 and 1940, the Assyrians seemed almost superhuman. They could strike anywhere, it seemed, with speed and power. The majesty of these massive armies must have been stunning in itself" (John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah - Chapters 1-39, NICOT, p.227)
Whether the prophecy of Isa 8:7-8 was a two-part fulfilment (i.e., telescopic), first by Tiglath-pilser and later by Sennacherib; or a single fulfilment by Sennacherib, depending on how the people's reaction and time frame in verse 6 is to be understood, Ahaz's 'alliance' with Assyria would turn out disastrous for his son Hezekiah.
"But such rejoicing will be short lived. Although God's help seems like nothing but a spring while Assyria looks like a great river, that river can quickly "overflow its ... banks," and the edges ("channels") of its floodwaters will reach to the farthest corners of the land. Of course, this is exactly what happened some thirty years later when the Assyrian king Sennacherib came against Judah (Isa. 36-37). Any alliance with Assyria was like an alliance with Nazi Germany. They were simply waiting for the day when they could take you too, as Stalin learned to his chagrin in 1941" (John N. Oswalt, Isaiah, NIVAC, p.150).
Isa 10:6 I will send him against an hypocritical nation, and against the people of my wrath will I give him a charge, to take the spoil, and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.
Isa 10:7 Howbeit he meaneth not so, neither doth his heart think so; but it is in his heart to destroy and cut off nations not a few.
"Any nation that attempts to put itself in the place of God cannot survive... [an] example in the lifetime of many of us that must not be overlooked... is Nazi Germany. The parallel to what Isaiah is talking about here is startling enough that many do not like to bring it up. By the fact is that the Holocaust may well be seen as a modern parallel to the Exile. Then, as now, a mighty power set itself to destroy the people of God. In the case of Assyria and Babylon, they were allowed to succeed to the extent they did only because God permitted it as a source of discipline and punishment for the unbelief of those people. May this perhaps be the case with Nazi Germany? Yet if Germany was a tool in the hand of God, it certainly did not see itself as such. Like Babylon and Assyria, it saw itself as supreme in itself, with the power and therefore the right to destroy whomever it wished. But like Assyria and Babylon, Germany was terribly destroyed and God's Jewish people not only survive but prospered. No nation can set itself up as superior to God and survive" (John N. Oswalt, Isaiah, NIVAC, p.181).
Part 2
"With the possible exception of the Huns, or the wild hordes of Tamerlane, there has probably never existed, in the history of the world, a power so purely and solely destructive, so utterly devoid of the slightest desire to make any real contribution to the welfare of the human race, as Assyria. But the Huns and the hordes of Tamerlane were untaught savages. In the case of Assyria you have a highly organized and civilized people, skilled to an astounding degree in the arts... If you can imagine a man with no small amount of learning, with all the externals of civilization, with a fine taste in certain aspects of art, and a tremendous aptitude for organization and discipline, and then imagine such a man imbued with the ruthless spirit of a Red Indian brave and an absolute delight in witnessing the most ghastly forms of human suffering, you will have a fairly accurate conception of the ordinary Assyrian... the outside, a splendid specimen of highly developed humanity the inside a mere ravening tiger" (James Baikie, Lands and Peoples of the Bible, (New York: MacMillian Company, 1923), p.97).
"Other regimes had perpetrated mass murder... Even more people were murdered for political reasons in Stalin's Soviet Union; and many aspects of life and death in the Nazi concentration camps - especially the vile sadism of the lower ranks - clearly had their analogues in the Gulag. More people would perish as a result Mao's tyranny in China. Yet there was something qualitatively different about the Nazis' war against the Jews and the other unfortunate minorities they considered to be 'unworthy of life'. It was the fact that it was carried out by such a well-educated people, the products of what had been, at least until 1933, one of the most advanced educational systems in the world. It was the fact that it was perpetrated under the leadership of a man who had come to power by primarily democratic means. The Nazi death machine worked economically, scientifically and euphemistically. In a word, it was very, very modern... The overwhelming impression is of professionals turned into psychopaths..." (Niall Ferguson, The War of the Worlds, (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), pp.508-09).
"No way Shem could ever have given rise to either the Germans or the British."
Interestingly, the same applies to Ham and Japheth. They would inherit the same Y-DNA as their father. Which suggests either Noah's wife (or prior wives) had a few lovers on the side, or the concept of all human life on Earth being descended from these three men is wrong. The old "land of Nod" problem again, perhaps, or possibly an indicator that there were other survivors. Of course, the idea that the Western Europeans are the descendants of Shem seems fairly recent and possibly part of BI itself. Earlier writers often held that they were Japheth-descended, not Shem.
Of course, it's all been debunked. But, even if it hadn't been, all of us baby boomers won anyway! We got to live our lives in spite of all of the fear that was laid upon us. I say that realizing that different people left at different times. 1975 to 2022 is a pretty good chunk of life, one that people who left in 1995 envied. But here we are in 2022, and at this point, even those guys from 1995 have had a pretty good patch of life.
If the trib were real and started right now, I'd only have to do 3-1/2 years instead of the 4-1/2 decades of tribulation I would have suffered at the hand of the church had I remained an Armstrongite. Come to think of it, math was never one of HWA's strong points. Somehow, he never really nailed down the time of the second coming. Oh well. That probably wasn't about math anyway.
RSK 5:36 wrote, "Which suggests either Noah's wife (or prior wives) had a few lovers on the side, or the concept of all human life on Earth being descended from these three men is wrong."
You got it. This is a long story and I have written about it before. Noah was not the progenitor of all of mankind. Hams wife was not a Black woman. Ham and his descendants were Middle Easterners. The modern-day Hamitic Canaanites, for instance, traced through DNA from ancient times, are the Lebanese and they are haplogroup J and very closely related to the Jews. Japheth did not marry a Mongoloid woman. Japheth and his descendants were all Middle Easterners. The Flood was a local event. It did not affect the Asians living in Asia or the Blacks living in Africa and Europeans living in Europe.
The KJV translators referred to the genealogy at the beginning of Genesis 10 as the "Table of Nations." The Bible calls it the Clans of the Sons of Noah. The hierarchical structure of haplogroups, called a phylogenetic tree (see Wikipedia), does not match the structure of the so-called Table of Nations. So, we have hard-coded in our genomes a very different hierarchy than what is reflected in The Table of Nations. The real hierarchy.
Had the flood been a global event, it would have created a genetic bottleneck of the severest sort. Only three males would have survived the Flood and they would all have the same haplogroup. This was only a few thousand years ago. So, had that been true, everybody in the world would look Jewish (not Ashkenazi but Mizrahi) and everybody would be haplogroup J.
The Bible is about the Jews and their history. It isn't about the Gentiles and their history. There is a lot to be said here. The important point is that the Bible, if properly viewed is compatible with science. It is partisan interpretations of the Bible06][poiuytrewqthat go astray. y
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NeoTherm said. "The War in Ukraine has made German leaders realize that they can no longer rely on the United States for their protection. So they have decided to sink an extraordinary amount of money into rebuilding their military. They will end up having the third largest military in the world after the United States and China".
MY COMMENT - Congratulations NEO! With this statement of yours, you have just legitimized and confirmed for accuracy the many statements made by Herbert Armstrong and his son Garner Ted over their lifetimes regarding Germany in Prophecy - and how Germany would rise again. In Herbert's case, he made his claims while Germany was in rubble after WW2 when no one else would have made such a claim.
I don't give a rat's ass whether Armstrong & Hoeh got "Assyria is Germany" wrong. Or even British Israelism. So what? Armstrong got the MegaTrend RIGHT long before it was ever realized by others including yourself. Even the European Union Armstrong got right which he called "The United States of Europe".
When I look at what is occurring before my eyes today, I see Herbert Armstrong got a lot of MegaTrends right. Of course, his timing was way off. And nothing takes away from the fact that our salvation and hope is in Jesus - the same Jesus who told us to WATCH that we may be accounted worthy to escape all these things.
Richard
Richard
Anonymous 5:33 wrote, "Someone could also make a remotely plausible argument that the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples are ‘typical' Israel"
If you have some familiarity with real history and genetics you cannot make a plausible argument that the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic people are Israel. It is, rather, a fantasy of the rankest sort. Every great war-like nation in history has been cut from the Assyrian cloth. The Assyrians are an archetype. But there is no connection between that general theme and specific Biblical prophecy about the Germans. It can be about the Russians or Japanese just as easily as it can be about the Germans.
For all your writing, I don't get your point. Can you tell me in a few sentences, maybe three, what you are trying to say? Are you trying to say that because Assyria and Nazi Germany resemble eachother culturally that this means they are the same biologically? I hope not because that is ridiculous. Germans should sue Anglo-Israelists for defamation.
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I laugh a little, and cry a little, when I see uninformed posters trot out DNA evidence as proof against Scripture and/or HWA.
Anyone doing even a little research about DNA-based dating will understand that it relies on scientists' assumptions about the rate of mutation. And anyone doing a reasonable amount of reading will understand that the mutation rate is a subject of intense debate. Young Earth Creationists trying to link up the dating with Adam and Noah need only to assume a fast mutation rate, while evolutionists trying to link up the dating with early hominin fossils need only to assume a relatively slow mutation rate.
Both sides are relying on speculation. And the mutation rates being speculated about vary by more than a factor of 50. The same genetic evidence can "prove" a 6,000-year ancestry or a 300,000-year ancestry depending on your assumptions. The same holds true for the base/head of various phylogenetic trees.
If you want to show that the ancient Assyrians have survived to our day and that they have nothing to do with Germany, there are MUCH better ways to do so than to hang your hat on speculative DNA work. Ordinary historical research will get that done, without having to worry whether the DNA is marking a span of 2,000 or 6,000 or 300,000 years.
Anonymous 7:06, "I laugh a little, and cry a little, when I see uninformed posters trot out DNA evidence as proof against Scripture and/or HWA."
I agree with you about the rate of mutation. It is the subject of debate. But in some cases, there is cross validation with archaeological evidence and the array of corroborating dating techniques used in that discipline. For instance, the Mal'ta Boy found near lake Baikal.
The argument I made in this post does not hinge on mutation rate unless you are trying to say that a haplogroup J Shem could give rise to the haplogroup R British because mutation could have happened extremely rapidly. That does not conform to any know experience about human beings. You may just as well say that God took a bunch of Jews and miraculously turned them into Brits - that would have more plausibility. If that is not what you are referring to, I think you have veered off target.
If you examine a phylogentic tree of haplogroups you will see that the hierarchy stamped into our genome does not reflect a line of mutations from haplogroup J to haplogroup R. The empirical and scientifically demonstrable evidence is that it just did not happen.
This means that the Brits are Gentiles. Get over it. There is nothing wrong with being a Gentile. God says we are all spiritual Jews. As Gentiles, we are grafted into the tame olive tree. Only Dean Blackwell espoused the ideas that British-Israelites would be the upper class for all of eternity. I am not even sure that HWA knew he was making the rounds with that idea.
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Anon 7:06:00 PM PST
Good points raised. “ Ordinary historical research will get that done….” absolutely correct.
BI in all its devices is as scripturally unsustainable as its ludicrous sister assumption, that modern day Germans are the descendants of ancient Assyria.
A little honest research without preconceived ideas easily dispels such foolishness.
Within Armstrongism is the opposite.
Finding error to legitimise one’s theories.
Looks like we got a big ol' match race going on at End Times Dragaway! Who will make it to the finish line first? The HWA AA nitro-burning hemi-powered British Israel Special, or the Al Gore all electric Tesla-powered Anthropomorphic Climate Change Experimental?
Regarding the possibility of the end, I used to say "Who cares, it's party time!" but these days more than two shots or a couple of beers give me a headache, and the rock n roll has worn out. The consequences are not so consequential any more, because the life "they" (the alleged light-bringing Lucifers who came through the radio waves and slick publications into our lives) threatened was not going to be able to be experienced has already been lived, lived for me mostly in wandering around in search of devices to fix. Seems like that was the main drive I was born with, and it is pretty damned fulfilling.
In that general category of things to fix, it would be nice to know that some day we may have all the answers to the deep philosophical questions which haunt us, but I've come to see even that not so much as a beginning, but as another huge dead end. With all the answers, what would motivate us? Without the answers, the odyssey continues, although perhaps on a slightly different, hopefully elevated, level.
I will make a similar point here as I did on a past post, in which NEO mentioned Germany. If you are going to argue that the Germans are Assyria, then that presents a bit of a conundrum for the idea of some sort of pure blooded monarchy descended from King David when you look at the direct ancestry of the British Royal family. When you start looking at family trees, various branches quickly lead back to Germany, as well as connections with other European countries. Queen Victoria's ancestry was tied to Germany, as was her husband Albert's. These are the grandparents and direct ancestors of the modern branch of the British monarchy. Their original family name was Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which was changed to Windsor during WWI.
George I, who ascended the British throne in 1714 was also German born, and of the House of Hanover, which was a European royal house of German origin. His father was ruler of the Principality of Lüneburg, and Principality of Calenberg, and was immediately subordinate to the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire at that time. His mother Sophia, was the granddaughter of James I, through her mother, Elizabeth Stuart. Intermarriage between royal houses of Europe was a common practice, making many of the ruling families of the day related in one way or another.
Sophia became heir presumptive to the British throne because she was the nearest Protestant relative to the reigning Queen, Anne. George then became Anne's heir presumptive upon his mother's death. Queen Anne wasn't able to have children of her own, so the throne went to George upon her death. She was the last official Monarch of the House of Stuart, and though George's mother was the daughter of a Stuart, his father's ancestry from the House of Hanover, made him a Hanoverian King of Britain.
Concerned Sister
Look back in the history of the period. Despite the Armstrongist fluffing of HWA, he was hardly the first on that topic.
Brits are Gentiles. Get over it. There is nothing wrong with being a Gentile. God says we are all spiritual Jews.
Today's Armstrongists seeem content with the idea that Germans are spiritual Assyrians and that Americans/Brits are spiritual Manasseh/Ephraim.
Page after page of DNA-talk won't shake Armstrongists as deeply as the simple historical fact that the "British" royal family has been indisputably German for several centuries.
While I believe that the rational use of history can effectively counter British-Israelism, I regard genetics as the nuclear option. I scanned yesterday an article on Germany as Assyria published by one of the leading Splinter Groups. It was two things: 1) A re-hash of this topic as presented in Hoeh's Compendium and 2) an exercise in obscurantism. It was rife with references to early historical sources and made ad hoc connections across assertions of uncertain origin that would make a conspiracy theorist blanch. Genetics blows away all of the cruft immediately.
So far, in my blogging against BI using genetics, I have had no Armstrongist construct an effective counterpoint to genetics. I had one commenter deny that I could know the haplogroup of Abraham and repeated this over and over again with the rationality of a broken record. For this persistent commenter, if you do not have a time machine to go back in time and draw a blood sample you apparently cannot know any historical figure's haplogroup. Hence, HWA is right. Maybe we should use the "time machine" argument against all of the historical references orchestrated by Hine and Hoeh. Maybe the veracity of these cited historians is in question unless we can go back in time and validate for ourselves. For that matter, we cannot really know that Jesus was a Jew without a time machine. He might have been haplogroup R like the White supremacists claim. All of this is sophomoric.
One commenter here decried, "I laugh a little, and cry a little, when I see uninformed posters trot out DNA evidence as proof against Scripture and/or HWA." Then let us see what Armstrongism has to offer. Here is what they need to explain. Jews are haplogroup J and the British are haplogroup R. And these two haplogroups are quite distant from each other in the phylogenetic tree indicating that they are really two very different peoples. Yet Armstrongism asserts that they are very closely related, actually descended from the same Biblical patriarch, Abraham. They must then have the same haplogroup, but they do not. Not even close. How in reality does that happen? Is that not a legitimate question? Is something this profound just worth crying a little and laughing a little? Give me a break.
I think Armstrongists follow this defense: when cornered, deny or ignore the truth. And, further, I think their comparison of the Germans with the Assyrians are invidious. Whatever the anti-German term is that is comparable to what anti-Semitism is for Jews. Anti-Teutonic? While it is unlikely that any German organization will ever sue them, what does it say about their regard for people? Is it really Christian?
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So here is another issue. How useful and effective was Herman Hoeh's reliance on arcane historical sources in the construction of his anthropology ("The Origin of the Nations!" and the Compendia, for instance. I always thought that melodramatic exclamation mark was droll.) So let us do a little exercise in verification and validation on Hoeh's methodology:
The Western Europeans were misidentified as Israel. Most of these people are haplogroups R and haplogroup I rather than the Jewish haplogroup J.
Germans were misidentified as Assyrians but are haplogroup R.
West African Blacks were misidentified as Canaanites (haplogroup J) but are haplogroup E.
Native Americans were misidentified as Canaanites but are haplogroup Q.
Australian Aborigines were misidentified as Canaanites but are haplogroup C.
Russians were misidentified as being Asiatic (Japhetic) but are mostly haplogroup R1a
Spaniards were misidentified as Asiatic but are mainly R1b.
The Finns were misidentified as a tribe of Israel but are mainly haplogroup N (Asiatic)
Herman Hoeh misidentified all the major peoples of the world except the Chinese and the Japanese, and it was a no brainer that they were Asiatic (Japhetic). Anyone can see that Hoeh's methodology fails. No wonder he denounced the Compendia. For Armstrongism, it should be back to the drawing boards rather than stubborn protraction. How does one base end-time, heavily racial/geopolitical prophecy on Hoeh's methodology? Is any rational person going to find this alternate history credible? Does this bespeak a bright future for Armstrongism?
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RSK
Agreed. British-Israelism was an official doctrine of the Anglican church before HWA was even born in 1892. In Queen Victoria's day, there were British-Israelite societies and books published on the topic. HWA did a copy and paste, claiming it as revelation from God.
.....endless genealogies, which minister questions.......are unprofitable and vain.....
Examining the description of Assyria given in the bible and history books, and comparing this to Germany's behavior in the past one to two hundred years, the two are very similar. To me, this strongly implies that Assyria and Germany are one and the same.
British Israelism is really the core of Armstrongism. It is the Armstrong hook, the basis of their "save your ass" religion. Church members either pretend not to understand genetics, they ignore and filter out the sheer mountain of valid information which totally debunks BI, or they come up with ridiculous and implausible counters like this speed of mutation thingie. When I read that explanation from a recent commenter, it reminded me of the argument a young Earther advanced to explain away the light from certain stars which were billions of light years away. Rather than being one of the recognized constants of the universe, he postulated that the speed of light varies. Others attempted a similar ploy with the Big Bang theory and the Doppler Effect as it relates to color of light. To real scientists, these objections and explanations are absolutely preposterous.
If the ACOGs were to admit that British Israelism is a disproven theory, what would they become? Basically, Jews for Jesus, or Messianic Jews. They would lose their sense of urgency, because it would mean that God was not going to use the tribulation to punish the melting pot nations in which most English-speaking white people reside. Further, they could not claim that keeping the sabbath, holy days, clean meats, and tithing were the reason why God revealed His "truth" about prophecy to Armstrongites, since observing these things had obviously not prevented them from believing in a laughably false theory.
It's hopeless for most Armstrongites until it's not. We successfully escaped a very toxic church, which means that others can as well. All that we can do is to continue to put the information which can make people think out there for them, and hope for the best. These cults are already in negative growth and have been for some time. I find joy in that. I have no problem with people who want to keep the sabbath and holy days and to restrict their diets to ceremonially clean meats. Many Jews find great joy in these practices, but are not encumbered with the toxic elements HWA introduced into the mix.
NEO writes:
“If you have some familiarity with real history and genetics you cannot make a plausible argument that the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic people are Israel.”
But I am not making that claim in this comment.
You wrote earlier:
“...somebody could make a remotely plausible argument based on the idea that Germans are symbolic Assyrians or they are in the spirit of Assyria”.
I was following more or less in your terms of reference “symbolic” and “sprit of”.
Ge 12:2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
I was implying that the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic Peoples are ‘typical’ of what you would expect Israel would be doing, both good and bad, in the modern world.
"...10 of the original 12 Hebrew tribes, which, under the leadership of Joshua, took possession of Canaan, the Promised Land, after the death of Moses ... were named Asher, Dan, Ephraim, Gad, Issachar, Manasseh, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, and Zebulun - all sons or grandsons of Jacob. In 930 BC the 10 tribes formed the independent Kingdom of Israel in the north and the 2 other tribes, Judah and Benjamin, set up the Kingdom of Judah in the south. Following the conquest of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians in 721 BC, the 10 tribes were gradually assimilated by other peoples and thus disappeared from history. Nevertheless, a belief persisted that one day the Ten Lost Tribes would be found" (Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Eze 37:21 And say unto them, 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:
Eze 37:22 And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel;
Are the Ten Tribes still lost today?
(When Cyrus let the Jews return to Israel, the majority elected to stay in Babylon as they had it too good there as opposed to the difficult situation in the Promised Land; cp. the American Jews after WW2/1948 as a ‘type’).
"Cyaxares and Nabopolassar made an alliance for the purpose of dividing Assyria. In 612 Kalakh and Nineveh succumbed to the superior strength of the allies... the Babylonians and the Medes ... conquered Harran in 610... In 609 the remaining Assyrian troops had to capitulate. With this event Assyria disappeared from history" (The Neo-Assyrian Empire, Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Is Assyria still lost today?
Mic 5:2 But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.
Mic 5:5 And this man shall be the peace, when the Assyrian shall come into our land: and when he shall tread in our palaces, then shall we raise against him seven shepherds, and eight principal men.
Mic 5:6 And they shall waste the land of Assyria with the sword ... thus shall he deliver us from the Assyrian, when he cometh into our land, and when he treadeth within our borders.
Mic 5:7 And the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people as a dew from the LORD...
Mic 5:8 And the remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles in the midst of many people as a lion among the beasts of the forest, as a young lion among the flocks of sheep: who, if he go through, both treadeth down, and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver.
“Again, note that Assyria is a synecdoche for all of Israel’s enemies and that Micah represents the messianic age by using the traits of his own age... the Messiah will deliver his flock from Assyria when it invades the sworn and holy land” (Bruce Walke, Micah, The Minor Prophets, p.709).
NEO do you see “the Assyrian” here as symbolic Assyria? If so who do you think they are today?
Do you think that Israel has the potential with around 10 million people and a GDP of $372 billion to be a lion amongst the peoples/Gentiles of the future? Even if you double the figures?
Part 2
Isa 11:14 But they shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines toward the west; they shall spoil them of the east together: they shall lay their hand upon Edom and Moab; and the children of Ammon shall obey them.
Isa 11:15 And the LORD shall utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian sea; and with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the river, and shall smite it in the seven streams, and make men go over dryshod.
"All of the prophecies concerning Israel's punishment by the Assyrians were borne by Christ in his incarnate perfection and suffering. No haplogroups need be tracked. The pure statements of Jesus trump type-antitype or computations of times or any other manipulations of Old Testament prophecy undertaken by apocalyptic Millerites."
Do you also spiritualize Israel's future in regard to their "waste of the land Assyria" and their subduing of their enemies.
"Germans should sue Anglo-Israelists for defamation."
I am not going to sue myself. My paternal great grandfather was part of the German migration of the nineteenth century. Hence I have a German surname and heritage.
It doesn't matter if you believe or not believe in BI, we are going to get you the third time around:
"So the dream of the Holy Roman Empire has remained. It has bemused every generation of Germans since Charlemagne...
"Even when institutions are disintegrating and decaying, their leading ideas sometimes live on. And remerge, often in distorted and even horrendous forms. So it was the Berlin-Rome axis came into being; the link was the Church. So it was that the Concordat between the Vatican and the Third Reich was signed. There was perhaps no basic differences between the attitudes of Pius XII to Hitler and Leo III to Charlemagne. "Heresies," as Sir Thomas Browne wrote,
do not perish with their Authors, but like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up again in another... Opinions do find, after certain Revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them... men are lived over again, the world is now as it was in Ages past, there was none then, but there hath been someone since that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self.
"If this is true then can we be sure that history has written finis to what was perhaps the grandest design ever conceived by man: the Holy Roman Empire? (George Bailey, Germans: Biography of an Obsession, pp.363 & 360-61).
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within" - Will Durant
HWA will be proven right - a Holy Roman Empire, that turns into Babylon the Great, with her allies, will be God's instrument of justice on the Anglo-Saxon world.
"Every modern transition of world power supremacy has involved an ally or former colony of the previous hegemonic power. Holland was a breakaway possession of Spain. England was an ally of the Netherlands, and from 1689 trough 1702 both states shared the same sovereign, the Dutch-born William III. The United States was a former colony and intimate ally of Britain..." (James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg, The Great Reckoning, p.137).
"History is coming full circle... It is now Europe's turn to ascend and break away from an America that refuses to surrender its privileges of primacy. Europe will inevitably rise up as America's principal competitor... Should Washington and Brussels begin to recognize the dangers of the growing gulf between them, they may be able to contain their budding rivalry. Should they fail, however, to prepare for life after Pax Americana, they will ensure that the coming clash of civilizations will be not between the West and the rest but within a West divided against itself... and America remains largely oblivious" (Charles A. Kupchan, The End of the West, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2002, p.42-44).
Because they are "warlike"? This could defining quality could describe 95% of historic empires and civilisations.
NEO writes:
“Here is what they need to explain. Jews are haplogroup J and the British are haplogroup R.”
Not all the British, at least according to eupedia.com, are of haplogroup R:
“Clan Graham is a Scottish clan of probable Anglo-Norman origin that settled in Scotland in the 12th century. The clan chief obtained the title of Lord Graham (1445), then Earl of Montrose (1503), Marquess of Montrose (1644), and eventually Duke of Montrose from 1707 to this day. The Clan Graham DNA Project identified the ancestral Graham lineage as belonging to J1a-P58 > [...] > YSC234 > L858 > YSC76 > Y3442 > FGC8223 > BY65 > ZS1541 > L1253 (aka Z18183), a clade that formed about 800 years ago. Notable family members included James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, who served as viceroy and captain general of Scotland, and John Graham of Claverhouse, 1st Viscount Dundee, a Jacobite hero who rallied Highland clans loyal to King James VII. Both have been the subject of works by Walter Scott”.
europedia.com also noted:
Looking at the map of J1-P58, it is easy to assume that P58 is a marker of Arabic ancestry because it reaches its maximum frequency in and around the Arabian peninsula. That would be an oversimplification...
The common ancestor of the J1-L858 men alive today dates back to approximately 4500 years ago, a time that corresponds to the development of the the oldest Semitic languages, like Akkadian and Amorite. In fact, L858 is not specific to the Arabian peninsula, but is also found among the Jews (especially Z640 subclade), Lebanese, Syrians and Iraqi, among others. In other words L858 cover all the region where ancient Semitic languages were spoken, well before Arabic even existed. That is why L858 should be seen as more widely Semitic and not just Arabic, even if the many Levantines and Mesopotamians were later Arabicised. The Jews are of the these Semitic people who were not Arabicised, and hardly anyone would argue that Jews are Arabs genetically, or vice versa.
Do you guys realize that if Trump gets back in office, and starts actually "cleansing" the culture, exterminating and deporting minorities, it may end up being Germany and NATO who step in and put a halt to all of that, rescuing all of us who love America as it was and is, and not Trump's MAWA vision of it?
Think about it!
Examining the description of Assyria given in the bible and history books, and comparing this to Germany's behavior in the past one to two hundred years, the two are very similar. To me, this strongly implies that Assyria and Germany are one and the same.
Assyria seems also to have migrated to the island of Japan and to the Korean peninsula. But I can't be sure whether the Hutus or the Tutsis were the Assyrians who migrated to Africa.
Actually, if we examine warlike empires and their dealings with Africa, the Belgian Empire (basically the Congo area) was just about as large as German colonial holdings in Africa. Yet we don't see Armstrongists pushing to identify Belgium as Assyria. Was that because of King Leopold's friendship with HWA? Or because nobody was willing to admit that Belgian chocolate (like its other dessert dainties) is crap compared to German or French confections? If Belgium might actually be Assyria rather than Asher, and its capital now hosts the capital of the EU, somebody had better revise HWA's old prophetic identifications, right quick!
That is true, but I was referring to the notion of "the United States of Europe". It precedes HWA. He didn't invent the term, nor was he the first to speculate about it.
Yes, you could use the exact same "implies" argument to say Assyria is China, the Mexica, the Zulu... especially if you're going to compare a very vague overview of at least two eras in Assyrian history (while conveniently omitting two others) with a "one or two hundred years" for Germany. I could "prove" that Assyria became Nepal with that kind of juggling.
Now, Assyrians were indeed quite violent. They would sacrifice captives from the nations around them and their own citizens alike to their chief god in most gruesome fashion. Sometimes on feast days they would flay the skins from their victims and run around wearing the bloody skins. One nation trifled with them by sending disagreeable emissaries - the Assyrians flayed them alive, tanned the facial skins, and sent the faces by messenger all around their known world as a warning. While they had a fine sense of architecture and city planning - constructing some of the most well-organized and efficient cities of that time in world history - they treacherously forced their neighbors to submit to them by arranging a rigged game upon which peace terms were wagered.. until the next game, anyway. They were accustomed to violently murdering infants and young children (it was believed that doing so would create favorable crops for them). And with the astronomical knowledge they amassed from civilizations that had come before, they created fascinating calendars and almanacs that are still debated by historians today.
Actually, I'm describing the Aztecs, not the Assyrians. :)
1:12 wrote
“Queen Anne wasn't able to have children of her own, so the throne went to George upon her death. She was the last official Monarch of the House of Stuart, and though George's mother was the daughter of a Stuart, his father's ancestry from the House of Hanover, made him a Hanoverian King of Britain.”
But it is still the Stewart bloodline that is the link to the Kings and Queens of Britain. (The difference, of course, is that Davidic kinship is patrilineal - Christ didn’t inherit the throne though His mother).
Nu 13:2 Send thou men, that they may search the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a ruler among them.
Nu 13:6 Of the tribe of Judah, Caleb the son of Jephunneh.
Jos 14:14a Hebron therefore became the inheritance of Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenezite unto this day...
Caleb was a Kenezite ‘ruler’ of Judah. So is it so bad that George 1 was a Hanover King of Britain? (This is based on a Kenezite being originally non-Israelite.
“If you are going to argue that the Germans are Assyria, then that presents a bit of a conundrum for the idea of some sort of pure blooded monarchy descended from King David when you look at the direct ancestry of the British Royal family.”
Why is it a conundrum? The Davidic monarchy was also not pure blood: Rehoboam’s mother was an Ammonite; (it is suggested that Batheseba may have been Hittite ).
The Judah line was also not ‘pure blood’ - Tamar (Canaanite), Rahab (Canaanite) Ruth (Moabite).
That's another good argument against Anglo Israelism, 3:36. To use a term with which everyone will be familiar, the royal lines have been Samaritanized. And, the same thing has happened to commoners. By this stage in time, everyone is everything.
Back when I attended AC, some of the faculty and ministry had advanced and bought into the theory that God supernaturally caused the Manassites to decide to emigrate to America, and the Ephraimites to remain in England. With the mapping of the human genome came the realization that that type of thinking was very naieve indeed.
Somebody is doing some good thinking. The minute you admit that Assyria, and Israel are symbolic, and not literal, it opens the door to other symbolism, such as that the 7 attitudes of the churches in Revelation being just that as well, symbolic attitudes rather than literal church eras.
Armstrongism is a very literalist religion. The more that knowledge increases, the more we see that a strict literalist approach is just not possible. Had it been, we'd be sipping the best of wine with Jesus in the Kingdom today rather than discussing dna.
Richard wrote, "Congratulations NEO! With this statement of yours, you have just legitimized and confirmed for accuracy the many statements made by Herbert Armstrong and his son Garner Ted..."
No that is a confirmation of what my Dad said. You don't have to be faux prophet to hold and opinion.
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Anonymous 1:43 wrote, "NEO do you see “the Assyrian” here as symbolic Assyria? If so who do you think they are today?"
I see Assyria as totally irrelevant at this time. And Assyria has been irrelevant since John the Baptist. The Prophets were relevant up to the time of John and all the Old Testament prophecies (the only place in the Bible where the Assyrians occur) culminated in Jesus. Read the section of my post on prophecy.
I made a tongue-in-check statement that Armstrongism would have been better served by considering the Assyrians as symbolic. The literal Armstrongist theory of Assyria certainly does not have any traction.
The Assyrians today are the Assyrians. They still live in the Middle East though they have mixed with other peoples. They are by far and large Christian. See Wikipedia article titled "Assyrian People."
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Anonymous 2:22 wrote, "Not all the British, at least according to eupedia.com, are of haplogroup R"
That is true. Not all. European genetic history reflects three invasions. First, haplogroup I. These people were the early hunter-gatherers. Some think they are to be identified with Cro-Magnon. Many of these people live in Southern Scandinavia but haplogroup I is found throughout Europe.
Second, people of haplogroup G invaded Europe. They were early agriculturalists. Lastly, haplogroup R invaded Europe. These people were steppe pastoralist from the steppes of Eurasia. So, you have people from all these populations in Europe. You also have scattered everywhere some haplogroup E and J. I don't know where they came from. But Clan Calhoun among the celts is a haplogroup E clan. Adolf Hitler was haplogroup E as was Albert Einstein. Haplogroup E is identified with North Africa.
Europe was quite a mix even in ancient times. In most populations there is a predominant haplogroup. Autosomal studies, rather than haplogroup studies, provide a better picture of connections.
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Anonymous 10:14 wrote, "Examining the description of Assyria given in the bible and history books,and comparing this to Germany's behavior in the past one to two hundred years, the two are very similar. To me, this strongly implies that Assyria and Germany are one and the same."
I believe you understand that you cannot connect two peoples biologically based on perceived behavior. Lots of nations are warlike. Similarity in persona is an argument used in the Splinterist article that I read a few days ago. Really a light-weight article. It stated that Germans and ancient Assyrians are alike in behavior. I think this is a calumny against the German people. They also stated that the Germans and Assyrians looked alike. I have seen a lot of Assyrian art and I have never noticed a resemblance. If the Assyrians had the art materials to truly depict themselves, they all had black, very curly, maybe frizzy, hair. Very un-Teutonic.
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And arguably more brutal.
hairstyle trivia:
* factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub402/entry-6041.html
The Assyrians are regarded as the first true hair stylists. Their prowess at cutting, curling, dying and layering hair was admired by other civilizations on the Middle East. Hair and beards were oiled, tinted and perfumed. The long hair of women and the long beards of men were cut in symmetrical geometrical shapes and curling by slaves with curl bars (fire-hearted iron bars).
The Sumerians and Assyrians as well as Egyptians, Cretans, Persians and Greeks all wore wigs. In Assyria, hairstyles often defined status, occupation and income level. During important proceeding high-raking Assyrian women sometimes donned fake beards to show they commanded the same authority as men. Queen Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs of Egypt, did the same thing.
* blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk
We only have to look at paintings and carvings from the ancient world to see that having curls was a fashion that crossed many cultures. Babylonian and Assyrian men dyed their hair and square beards black, then crimped and curled them with basic curling irons.
[“Born a natural blonde [with blue-eyes], Elvis Presley began dying his hair black from a very early age...” (Elvis’ Obsession With Having Jet-Black Hair, lassiccountrymusic.com).
* myhairdressers.com:
Assyrian kings and nobility around 1500 BC liked curly hair. To achieve the look, they had their hair curled with iron bars heated in a fire, starting a trend that lasts today – albeit a little more safely...
Lice were a major problem during the Enlightenment, so men would shave their heads and wear wigs instead.
In the 18th Century the predominant style was for the wig to be as white as possible. If you were poor, this meant adding copious amounts of flour to the wig. The rich would use a combination of starch and pleasant smelling oils such as lavender.
3:36 PM asked, "Why is it a conundrum? The Davidic monarchy was also not pure blood: Rehoboam’s mother was an Ammonite; (it is suggested that Batheseba may have been Hittite )."
For HWA and others within the WCG, the matter of the racial "purity" of Israel was of great importance. His ideas of this racial purity and separation of "Gentiles" from "Israelites" was even used as justification to enforce racial segregation within the church to the point that at one time separate social activities were held at the Feast, and racial dating and intermarriage were forbidden, and still continue to be taboo within several, though not all of the modern COG splinter groups.
I am aware that the Davidic line wasn't devoid of Gentile blood, but this fact was largely ignored by HWA and others who have promoted the BI idea, which includes the aspect of the Davidic throne being transferred to Ireland via the marriage of one of Zedekiah's daughters to an Irish prince, who as the theory goes was also of Israelite decent, with the decedents of that royal line ultimately being "overturned" to England.
The idea that the line would then later be so heavily tainted with the Gentile bloodline of "Assyrians" or Germans to the point that the names of their family dynasties were transferred to the Israelite/Jewish throne is counterintuitive to the idea that the bloodline and ultimately the link back to David is pure and uninterrupted.
Also, as was acknowledged, throughout most of history the bloodline has primarily been traced through the male line of decent, rather than the female in most cases. Any daughters of David who married into other families would not have been considered legitimate heirs to the Davidic throne, but instead would have been absorbed into the family line of their husbands. In most cases women weren't even considered legitimate heirs to the throne unless there were no male heirs in the line of decent. Thus to claim that the Davidic throne was somehow "transferred" to a completely different geographical location via a female descendant of an Israelite/Jewish king marrying a prince of another land runs completely counter to how these things work.
When I married my husband I took his last name. Our children bear his last name. While the blood of my father, grandfather, etc. makes up part of their ancestry, they carry the name of my husband, as do I. If I was a king's daughter, and married into another royal family in another land, I would adopt my husband's name and crest, and our children would carry his name, not the name of my father. If I became queen in that land, I would be queen of that land. I would not be representing the throne of my male ancestors, but instead I would be representing the royal line and territorial authority of the family I married into.
There are circumstances, as is the case of the current British Monarch, of a female inheriting the throne of her father and her husband becoming her consort. But in these cases the husband leaves his own land of origin and adopts the land of his wife, not the other way around.
Concerned Sister
"So far, in my blogging against BI using genetics, I have had no Armstrongist construct an effective counterpoint to genetics."
Yeah, that's what I'm wondering:
The $plinters claim to have the same Broadband-heavenly-hotline funneling profundity into their Birdbrains as the Des-Moines-Dropout, the Portly-Portland-Plagiarist claimed...so it should be no trouble at all to refute this 'DNA science' and defend the very important Anglo-Israel plank of their "gospel".
I always think of the relief of the Siege of Lachish, where the Assyrians are depicted with tall helmets, macho long curly beards and hair... while the Israelites have little weenie beards.
Anonymous 10:02
Thank you for this example because it illustrates an important point about the quality of evidence. Your implicit assertion is that the Assyrians could look like the Germans because the Assyrians were skilled in styling their hair to look a certain way. So, we do not see what they really look like but rather we see what the fad back then dictated. This is the kind of oblique evidence that Hoeh and other Armstrongists frequently invoke. Somebody in ancient times saw somebody else and they were White people therefore they had to be Israelites. You know the deal.
We do not know what the Assyrian fad hair styling amounted to. We do not know how long such fads were in place. While appearance can be informative, it is secondary or tertiary evidence. The primary evidence is that if the Bible is true and if Genetics is a science, then the Assyrians were haplogroup J. And if they were haplogroup J they looked like other haplogroup J people in the Middle East - they mostly have dark, curly hair. And this is how the Assyrians depicted themselves. The Assyrians were Semites, so they probably looked like other Semites - like the Arabs and the Mizrahi Jews. That is an unassailable argument.
The argument that Assyrians were manipulating their appearance, so they really looked like Germans is not nonsensical but very weak.
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Concerned Sister
Very interesting comments. I don't think people now understand the importance that racial purity held for Armstrongists last century. One of the "credentials" of HWA was his racial purity. I heard one high ranking minister brag about this from the pulpit in Big Sandy. Now we understand from the findings of genetics that HWA, along with other Europeans, had Neanderthal ancestry. ("Roughly two percent of the genomes of Europeans and Asians are Neanderthal." - National Geographic Society.)
Most European countries signal a mélange of haplogroups R, I, G, E and J. The Romans marched through many countries and some of the legionaires came from conquered nations. There are people in England that have haplogroups that indicate that in their masculine line they are descended from Sub-Saharan Blacks. The theory is that this was brought to Britain by Roman legionaires. A good ancestry test can help a person to suddenly "get real." All the fantasy of racial purity gets blown away, in spite of your odd Armstrongist Uncle who talks it up at family reunions.
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Thanks Concerned Sister for your reply to my question.
But, would you please simplify what you are saying so that I may understand your point.
Regards
11:26...
My general point is that at this time the predominant bloodline of the British royal family is German. To prove this one only has to look at their family tree. This makes them not only Gentile, but descendants of modern day Assyrians, if the teachings of HWA and others concerning the identity of Germany is to be believed.
This presents a problem for those who believe in the idea of the British throne being a modern day continuation of the throne of David, and want to maintain the presumption of a pure or at least dominant Jewish/Israelite bloodline, since the people who currently occupy the throne would at best have an extremely tenuous link to any female descendant of David.
My secondary point is that lines of descent and eligibility to claim the right to the inheritance of a royal throne tend to follow general rules and guidelines, with male descendants generally being given precedence over females down through history. This of and by itself would call into question the legitimacy of any claim made by a female descendant of David to occupy the throne, especially at that time, as long as there were other living male descendants, and there were. Simply being related to a king, or a descendant of one doesn't necessarily make you a legitimate heir to the throne.
European royal families have intermarried for hundreds of years. English kings and queens didn't always marry their offspring off amongst their own peoples, but formed political ties with other countries through intermarriage with other ruling or noble families of those countries. Even to this day, most of these families are related to each other in one way or another.
Hope this helps. There are other holes in this theory, but I have tried to keep my comments contained to the immediate topic.
Concerned Sister
Thanks Concerned Sister/Martha? for your reply.
In regard to the British royal family, though they have a lot of ‘German’ blood and ancestry, for me, it is the Stuart bloodline that is critical - the link to the throne.
With Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who could trace her ancestry back to Robert II, the first Stewart king, the royal family began to move in a better direction; with Diana and Kate when Prince George becomes king the royal family will have further distanced themselves from their German heritage.
In regard to the “throne of David” below is my understanding - there is no presumption that you are not unaware of most of what I state - a bit like Stephen’s address in Acts.
2Ch 9:8 Blessed be the LORD thy God, which delighted in thee to set thee on his throne, to be king for the LORD thy God: because thy God loved Israel, to establish them for ever, therefore made he thee king over them, to do judgment and justice.
In regards to the British Royal Family - despite the Davidic typology - Queen Elizabeth II does not sit on the throne of Lord. While the law is called the law of Moses, it is God’s law; and while the throne is called the throne of David, it is God’s throne - Moses being the mediator and the Davidic kings being God’s vice-regents on the earth.
While Zedekiah was the last king to sit on the throne of David, he really ruled as regent, as the legitimate king was in prison in Babylon. (Zedekiah is not mentioned in the royal line in Matthew).
Jer 33:14a Behold, the days come, saith the LORD
Jer 33:17 ... David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel;
2 Kings and Jeremiah end with Jehoichin being released from prison - a note of hope that the Davidic line would continue, and in the latter case, would fulfill God’s pledge in Jeremiah 33.
The ideal Kingdom of God over Israel has a Temple, a divine king enthroned in the Most Holy Place (cp. Eze 43:1-7a), and a human descendant of David on the throne of the Lord, as vice-regent.
So while Zerubbabel was involved in building the second Temple, he was not king, but he was rewarded in that the Messiah would his descendant. There was also no ‘dwelling presence’ in the Second Temple.
The ideal Kingdom of God is yet future which requires Jesus Christ to fulfil the second half of His prophetic week, when He raises up the tribes of Israel and builds Ezekiel’s Temple.
Just as He appointed Peter during his first half week, to be His shepherd - feed my sheep/lambs - in His absence, He will appoint one of His relatives to be His Shepherd King, in His place - a vice-regent as was Solomon.
With Christ’s death James was heir apparent to the throne of David. Perhaps a descendant of James or Jude may provide the line of kings to rule on the throne of the Lord during the Messianic Age as per 33:17 above.
Jer 33:18 and the Levitical priests shall never lack a man in my presence to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings, and to make sacrifices forever.
With Jesus Christ having a dwelling presence in Ezekiel’s Temple, while in heaven, animal sacrifices will be required for cleaning of the Temple to maintain His presence there - for without Christ there will be no covenant.
Eze 20:40 For in mine holy mountain, in the mountain of the height of Israel [behar merowm yisrael], saith the Lord GOD, ... I require your offerings, and the firstfruits of your oblations, with all your holy things.
Eze 17:23 In the mountain of the height of Israel [behar merowm yisrael] will I plant it: and it shall bring forth boughs, and bear fruit, and be a goodly cedar...
1Ch 29:1b Solomon my son, whom alone God hath chosen, is yet young and tender [rak - adjective]
Eze 17:22 I will crop off from the top of his young twigs a tender one [rak - adjective used as a noun],
The place where God will plant the Messiah is Mount Zion - the mountain height of Israel; the exact same phrase in 17:23 and 20:40 - the Bible interpreting the Bible.
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