Assyria Is Coming! (Brought to You by the Same Crackpot Who Has Been Wrong About Everything Else)

Bob Thiel has once again climbed into the prophetic costume trunk and emerged as Hosea. Not the actual 8th-century BC prophet who lived and spoke to a specific people in a specific historical crisis, but a modern cosplay version complete with British-Israelism decoder ring, concentration-camp warnings, and the solemn assurance that the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand are about to be hauled off as slaves to serve the Europeans. The performance is so familiar it could be scheduled on the calendar right next to the memorial he notes for July 31.

The core move never changes. Take a book written to the northern kingdom of Israel in the decades before the Assyrian conquest of 722 BC. Re-label the ancient tribes with modern English-speaking nations (Manasseh = USA, Ephraim = the rest of the Anglo-Saxon club, Judah = the modern state of Israel). Re-label ancient Assyria as Germany or a German-led Europe. Then announce that the original prophecy is really about us, right now, and that only those who accept this particular mapping will understand when to flee. The rest of the Bible is then pressed into service as supporting scenery: Daniel 11, Leviticus 26, Amos, Isaiah, and a Catholic medieval prediction for good measure. The result is a detailed future in which invading armies set up camps, Anglo-Saxons are shipped to Europe as forced labor, cities burn, and the “Philadelphia remnant” has already escaped because they alone possessed the secret decoder.

This is not exegesis. It is national identity cosplay dressed up as prophecy. British Israelism has been dismantled by genetics, linguistics, archaeology, and simple historical literacy for generations. The Anglo-Saxon peoples are not the lost tribes of Israel. The northern kingdom was carried into Assyrian exile in the 8th century BC; that is the historical fulfillment of the core warnings in Hosea. The book is not a coded map of 21st-century NATO alliances or EU policy. Treating it as such requires the same elastic imagination that once turned the Soviet Union into the King of the North and then quietly swapped in whoever was currently convenient.

The concentration-camp-and-slavery flourish is pure escalation. Hosea does speak of judgment, exile, and hard labor. It does not describe modern industrial slavery under European administration, nor does it require modern readers to invent logistical details about who will staff the camps and which English-speaking populations will be sorted into which rail cars. That level of specificity is supplied by the interpreter, not the text. Once you have already decided that “Assyria” equals contemporary Germany and “Ephraim” equals the UK and its cousins, the rest of the horror story writes itself. The same method can, and historically has, produced any number of failed dates and shifting villains.

Under the New Covenant, the entire apparatus is unnecessary. The New Covenant is not a refined version of national covenant curses aimed at physical descendants of Jacob. It is the fulfillment of the promise that God would write His law on hearts, forgive sins, and create one new people in Christ drawn from every nation. The categories that matter are not Manasseh, Ephraim, and Assyria. They are in Christ or outside of Christ. Judgment is real; so is the call to repentance. But that judgment is not a tribal score-settling based on 19th-century speculative Anglo-Saxon ethnography. Believers are not required to track which modern army might one day fulfill an 8th-century BC oracle against Samaria in order to know whether they are safe. Safety is found in the finished work of the Son of God, not in correctly identifying the end-time identity of the lost tribes and then fleeing to the appointed place of safety before the King of the North’s trains start rolling.

Hosea’s final verse still stands: “Who is wise? Let him understand these things.” Wisdom in this case includes recognizing when an ancient prophetic book is being used as a delivery system for modern fear and self-appointed authority. The Crackpot Prophet can keep the costume. The rest of us are free to leave the stage.