A Commentary on Isaiah, Part 50: A Place of Their Own
A Commentary on Isaiah, Part 50: A Place of Their Own
In the first portion of Isaiah chapter 49 we discussed The Light of the Nations in relation to both the Gospel of Christ, and those for whom the Gospel had been intended, who are the children of Israel and Judah who were in captivity in the islands and coastlands of the West. It is they who were explicitly addressed in the opening verses of the chapter. Then in the course of that discussion, we also hope to have demonstrated the fact that Paul of Tarsus had received a notable commission from Christ Himself to bring the Gospel to those nations, who were the greater number of the scattered children of Israel, not only from the Assyrian captivity, but from as early as the captivity of Egypt, and all of the people who had left by sea to settle abroad during the intervening periods of the Judges and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
In the 8th century BC, western Europe as well as the rivers and seas to the north, were an object of exploration for both Greeks and Phoenicians, but the Phoenicians had already dominated the western Mediterranean, so the Greeks were constrained from that area and from safely reaching the Ocean. The Romans were not yet sailors, as the Roman historian Titus Livius explained in his History of Rome, that they learned ship-building and sailing rather late, in the 3rd century BC, so that they could fight a war against the Carthaginians. So in the later portion of the 7th century BC the Greeks founded a colony at Cyrene, on the coast of Egypt near the Nile Delta, and then at Marseilles, on the Mediterranean coast of France. At Marseilles, there is evidence of an earlier Phoenician presence. In that same century, Greeks had also founded colonies on the coast of the Black Sea both in the Crimea and at the mouth of the Danube River.
A study of this history reveals that the Greeks and Phoenicians who settled these areas did not have any significant opposition, or perhaps any opposition at all. In the 5th Century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited the Greek colonies in the north, and in Book 5 of his Histories he wrote:
For what lies north of this country none can tell with certainty what men dwell there; cross the Ister [Danube] and you shall see but an infinite tract of deserts. I can learn of no men dwelling beyond the Ister save certain that are called Sigynnae, and wear Median dress. Their horses are said to be covered all over with shaggy hair five fingers' breadth long, and to be small and blunt-nosed and unable to bear men on their backs, but very swift when yoked to chariots; wherefore to drive chariots is the usage of the country. These men's borders, it is said, reach nigh as far as the Eneti on the Adriatic Sea. They call themselves colonists from Media….
But the Thracians say that all the land beyond the Ister is full of bees, and that by reason of these none can travel there. This is no credible tale, to my mind; for those creatures are ill able to bear cold; but it appears to me that it is by reason of the cold that the northern lands are not inhabited. [1]
Over four centuries later, Strabo of Cappadocia had corroborated this account indirectly, where he described the tribes of his own time who dwelt in and around the Caspian and Black Seas and the vicinity of the Caucasus Mountains and mentioned “The Siginni [who] imitate the Persians in all their customs, except that they use ponies that are small and shaggy” [2]. Not long before Strabo, Diodorus Siculus remarked on the cold weather, describing the land of the Galatae north of the Danube River as “lying as it does for the most part under the Bears, [it] has a wintry climate and is exceedingly cold”, as he described its deep snowfalls and frozen rivers. The phrase “under the Bears” referred to the constellations which are in the northern sky, and having written those things Diodorus further described the Rhine and the Danube Rivers [3].
So Diodorus corroborated the account of the cold related by Herodotus, but in the time of Diodorus, there were tribes of the Galatae living north of the Danube. However, it is evident that in the earlier time of Herodotus, it was even much colder than in the time of Diodorus and Strabo. Discussing this is a Wikipedia article titled Roman Warm Period which says in part:
The Roman Warm Period, or Roman Climatic Optimum, was a period of unusually-warm weather in Europe and the North Atlantic that ran from approximately 250 BC to AD 400. [4]
More information can be found on this phenomenon from sources more academic than Wikipedia. We would assert that this period of warming had assisted the settlement of northern Europe by tribes from Mesopotamia and the regions around the Black and Caspian Seas, the places where the captives of the children of Israel had been settled.
So we would assert that the extremely cold climate of the early Iron Age had kept men from settling the European interior, although they had been able to settle on the western coasts by sea, and that a period of warming had facilitated the migrations of the tribes later known as Germanic and Sarmatian from out the old world of the Assyrians and Persians and into a relatively new European world. So as we have also discussed, although Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans had explored the lands to the north, from the Black Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, as best as they could, when the Galatae appeared in the Italian Alps and had sacked Rome itself, the Roman historian Livy, speaking of a council held by certain cities of the Etruscans in response to their appearance, had written that:
There was now in the greatest part of Etruria a strange race, new settlers, with whom they were neither securely at peace nor yet certain to have war. Nevertheless, out of regard for the blood and the name and the present perils of their kinsmen, they would grant that if any of their young men wished to serve in that war, they might do so without let or hindrance. Of such recruits it was said at Rome that a great number had come in, and so domestic differences began to subside, as generally happens, in the face of a common danger. [5]
The “domestic differences” there were between the Romans and the Etruscans, and the common danger was the recent appearance of the Galatae in the north, whom the Romans had called Gauls. Livy was writing of the time preceding the sack of Rome by the Galatae in 390 BC. So when the Gauls appeared, they could not have been from the land later known as Gaul, which was well-explored by the Greeks at Marseilles, or Livy could not have described them as “a strange race, new settlers”. Italy below Rome was called Magna Graecia in ancient times, and the Romans were very familiar with their Greek neighbors. We would assert that the tribes of the Galatae had migrated from the East as the climate had warmed, and had settled in both Gaul and northern Italy around the same time. Originally, the Romans had called all of the Germans by the name Gauls, and only later coined the term Germania, as they believed that the Germans in the east were the original or authentic Gauls, while they esteemed that those of Gaul had apparently mixed with the much earlier inhabitants, such as Phoenicians or Greeks.
Returning to Isaiah, of course, much of Israel and Judah in the Assyrian captivity were still in northern Mesopotamia and the surrounding regions at the time when Isaiah had written these words, and they would not pick up and leave for new lands for many decades, or even in some cases, centuries from Isaiah’s own time. Yet now the words of the prophet shall reveal that they would outgrow the places in which they had been settled, and move to new homes much further away. So another assertion we must make here is that this prophecy which we are about to encounter in Isaiah explains a portion of the process of the fulfillment of a much earlier prophecy, which had been given to King David by the prophet Nathan about 300 years before this time, where we read in part, in 2 Samuel chapter 7:
10 Moreover I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more; neither shall the children of wickedness afflict them any more, as beforetime…
For the children of Israel, Palestine was never really a place of their own, as it had been possessed by the tribes of Canaan, quite often ruled over by the Egyptians, and inhabited by Philistines, Rephaim, Kenites, the various Canaanite tribes and also by various other tribes whose origins are obscure. This situation persisted for over two thousand years between the time of the Tower of Babel event and its conquest by the children of Israel in the days of Joshua, and some of those tribes had evidently been in Canaan for far longer than that. So here Nathan, who spoke those words to David in Jerusalem, must have spoken in reference to some other place which was far from Jerusalem, to which Israel would eventually move.
It is evident that at least many of the children of Israel had taken to the seas as early as the time of the Song of Deborah in Judges chapter 5, where Dan is described as having been on ships, and Asher in his port cities on the coasts of Palestine. Then a relatively short time after that of David, there are accounts of Hiram and Solomon’s ships of Tarshish, a reference to the place known historically as Tartessus, which was situated on the opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea, on the peninsula later became known by the Hebrew name Iberia. Those ships had sailed from Tyre, a city of Asher, and men from other cities in Israel had also settled in colonies in various places across the sea, something of which the Scriptures say very little.
However, in ancient times men must have known this. So, for example, a king of Sparta in the 2nd century BC had written to a high priest in Jerusalem and said, in part: “21 It is found in writing, that the Lacedemonians and [Judaeans] are brethren, and that they are of the stock of Abraham.” This is recorded in both 1 Maccabees chapter 12, and in the histories of Flavius Josephus, in Book 12 of his Antiquities of the Judaeans. So in the passage as Josephus had recorded it, we have:
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.
That letter was written in the early 2nd century BC, before the subsumption of the Edomites into Judaea had begun.
It is quite unlikely that a people such as the Spartans, who, like the Corinthians, were a branch of the Dorian Greeks and quite proud of their heritage, would have contrived such a thing in exchange for some political favor for which they had never asked. It is just as unlikely that Josephus would have accepted the claim without criticism, if he had thought that it could not have not been true. But it is far more unlikely that Paul of Tarsus would have told the Corinthians, in chapter 10 of his first epistle to them, “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;” if it had not been true, and therefore we have three independent witnesses, two of them in Scripture, that Dorian Greeks were of the children of Israel. There is a fourth witness in Homer, even if it is merely circumstantial, as he placed the Dorians on the island Crete during the Trojan War, from which island they had invaded the Peloponnesus just two generations later. Homer never mentioned Dorian Greeks as having been anywhere else, although he described all of the tribes dwelling in and around the Greeks in his account of the Trojan War.
Our purpose in this discussion is to show that the children of Israel had been settling abroad, and especially in Europe, for quite some time before the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities. Earlier, in Isaiah chapters 23 through 25, in the words of The Burden of Tyre it is fully apparent that the Tyrians were of Israel, and it is also explained there, that many of them sought passage to the isles of the West, in order to escape the encroaching Assyrians.
The ancient Greek writers had described many of the settlements of the Phoenicians, which is the name that they gave the inhabitants of the northern coast of Palestine during the height of the presence of the children of Israel in the cities on that coast. The proof that Israel had indeed possessed and inhabited that coast is found in 2 Kings chapter 14, where there is a prophecy which Jonah had evidently uttered in reference to Jeroboam II, king of Israel, who ruled Israel for forty one years in the first half of the 8th century BC. So there we read:
28 Now the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, and all that he did, and his might, how he warred, and how he recovered Damascus, and Hamath, which belonged to Judah, for Israel, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?
The king of Hamath had subjected himself to David, as it is recorded in 2 Samuel chapter 8, and then, speaking of Solomon in 1 Kings chapter 8 we read:
65 And at that time Solomon held a feast, and all Israel with him, a great congregation, from the entering in of Hamath unto the river of Egypt, before the LORD our God, seven days and seven days, even fourteen days.
That phrase, “the entering in of Hamath”, reveals that the children of Israel had possession of all of the coast of Palestine as far north as the mouth of the Orontes River, the river which could be entered to sail to Hamath, which was in the interior. The mouth of the Orontes is in modern Turkey, just above the westernmost point of its border with modern Syria, and about 68 miles west of Aleppo in Syria. The ancient site of Hamath, which is still a large city, is about 75 miles southeast of the mouth of the Orontes River in a straight line, however the river takes many curves and bends before a ship may reach Hamath from the sea, and since Roman times, when dams for irrigation had been built, the river has been unnavigable.
In any event, since the children of Israel had been in control of the coast of Palestine as far north as Hamath, they may readily be identified with the Phoenicians of the so-called Golden Age of Phoenicia, which is roughly from the late Judges period to the time of Jeroboam II. The end of that Golden Age came in the form of the Assyrian conquests of Israel and its outlying territories, although Tyre itself would thrive for several more centuries, and maintain its connections to its colonies throughout that time. Once Tyre was destroyed, to a great extent the Carthaginians held a hegemony over the Phoenician colonies of the West, until Carthage was destroyed by Rome, and then Gaul, Iberia and Britain were swallowed up by the Roman Empire.
To these Phoenicians the ancient historian Herodotus and many who had followed him had attributed a trade in tin from the isles which would later become known as the British Isles, and amber from the shores of the far northern seas. Modern archaeologists have rediscovered the truth of this in relatively recent years. For example, an article published in 2019 by the British Royal Society of Chemistry stated that “Ingots of tin found in bronze age shipwrecks off the coast of Israel were smelted in the south-west of England, suggesting an ancient trade route existed between the two regions.” [6] While we generally trust the ancient historians, and therefore we have known these things for many years, it is nice to see them vindicated in this regard. To mine and smelt significant amounts of tin in Wales, and organize its being loaded onto ships for Palestine, would require a rather large colony of both men and women, who would live near the mines for an extended period of time. We would assert that these were the people who later became known as the Welsh, and evidently their language proves the connection.
In some of the earliest writings of the Greeks, such as the Tragic Poets of the 5th century BC, the Phoenicians were described as blond and fair-skinned, and as having been more advanced culturally than other nations, as they had been credited with having brought the use of letters and many of the other arts to the Greeks. Thebes in Greece was probably the most notable of the Phoenician settlements, and also early Caria, while there were more in Thessaly and elsewhere. Therefore, in all of this it may be evident that the plan of Yahweh to give the children of Israel a place of their own had been already unfolding even over several centuries before the time of David, and now we hope to elucidate it further throughout these remaining chapters of Isaiah, where here we shall see hints at the mere beginning of the migrations of what would ultimately become the Germanic people.
Where we left off in Isaiah chapter 49, there was a promise that Yahweh God would never forget Israel, as a woman could never forget her suckling child, and there was an expression which was certainly fulfilled in Christ, where the Word of Yahweh had said that “I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands”, along with a promise that “thy walls are continually before me”, apparently even in times when the children of Israel did not have any cities with walls. Now as we proceed with Isaiah, in his time it looks as if the children of Israel would have some periods of migrations in their future, before they would finally be settled in a place of their own:
17 Thy children shall make haste; thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth of thee.
“Thy destroyers” would at this point be the Assyrians, and ultimately also the Babylonians, who were already destined to destroy Jerusalem, but who would not do so for at least another hundred or so years after this was written. So here it should be without doubt that the captivity of Israel are still being addressed collectively, and although we have asserted that the isles and coastlands were chiefly in the West, since the terminology first appeared in Isaiah chapter 41, they were also in the north as the Israelites had settled around the Black and Caspian Seas in the time of their captivity, and along the rivers of Mesopotamia and points even further north and west, along the Black Sea in Anatolia. However as we have also already discussed while citing Isaiah chapter 66, they would be sent to places in the West, and we shall surely mention that repeatedly where the subject arises on several other occasions throughout these closing chapters of Isaiah.
Thy children shall make haste: this clause is translated quite differently in other sources. The New American Standard Bible has “Your builders hurry”, and the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible “Your builders are working faster than”, joining the clause to what follows, which are the words “your destroyers”. Having followed various Dead Sea Scrolls copies of Isaiah for this chapter, the editors of The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible state in a footnote that the scroll known as 1QIsaiaha does have sons rather than builders.
In 1 Kings 5:18, for example, there is a word which obviously refers to builders, which is בנה or banah (Strong’s # 1129) and the plural form which appears in the text is בני or baniy. In Strong’s Concordance, he agreed with the King James Translators who read this as the Hebrew word for sons, or children, which is בן or ben (# 1121) in the singular, and has the same plural spelling as builders, בני or beniy, or baniy, since the verbs being supplied for English transliterations are negotiable. In his Vulgate, Jerome also interpreted the word as builders as it also is in the Septuagint.
However here, on account of the context of the verses which follow, we must agree with the translation of the clause as it is in the King James Version, and read the word as sons, and the reasons for this are made evident in verses 19 through 22, especially. So we would read the opening clause to read “Thy children shall make haste”, from a word which means to come or go quickly, to be hurried, but also to be practised or skilled, which adds to the confusion surround the word baniy, and whether it refers to builders or to sons. The word in question is מהר or mahar (# 4116), and Brown-Driver-Briggs offer both sets of definitions for the same spelling, under consecutive entries in their Hebrew and English Lexicon. However in those entries, they admit that the definition of practised or skilled is derived from other Semitic languages, and they offer no Biblical examples for such a meaning in Hebrew. [7]
Later in this chapter it is evident that the children of Israel will not be building, but that rather, they will be migrating. Therefore we must agree with the King James Version and its translation of the clause as “Thy children shall make haste”.
Since the opening verses of this chapter, Yahweh had been portrayed as having been speaking to Jacob, and this is still the circumstance, as he now speaks to him in reference to his children, and this further substantiates our preference for the translation of the foregoing verse:
18 Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold: all these gather themselves together, and come to thee. As I live, saith the LORD, thou shalt surely clothe thee with them all, as with an ornament, and bind them on thee, as a bride doeth.
“All these” who gather themselves together must be the children of the foregoing verse. Earlier, in Isaiah chapter 48, Jacob is portrayed as recounting words which Yahweh had spoken to him, where we read in part: “5 … Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the LORD, and my God shall be my strength.” Now we see that the scattered children of Israel shall ultimately be gathered, and when they are, Jacob is portrayed as clothing himself with them all, as a bride puts on an ornament. This is an allusion to Israel as a nation being the bride of Yahweh, and the reconciliation with Yahweh which the bride shall have in Yahshua Christ.
So the children of Israel are portrayed as gathering themselves together, and since at this time they are spread across Europe and Central Asia, from Britain to Bactria, at least, that gathering would be quite a miraculous feat. We would assert that ultimately, they had gathered in Europe, through the migrations of people later known as Kimmerians, Scythians, Sakae, Galatae, Massagetae, Sarmatians and others. Various tribes of these peoples had migrated into Europe from Central Asia or from Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia for at least 12 centuries, beginning from about the middle of the 7th century BC. Once they accepted Christianity, they were an ornament upon Jacob Israel, as the bride of Christ.
But as we continue, it is evident that such a time is still far in the future:
19 For thy waste and thy desolate places, and the land of thy destruction, shall even now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants, and they that swallowed thee up shall be far away.
This indicates a time when the children of Israel in captivity would become far removed from those who had taken them captive, and where we read the words “even now” it is evident that the process of separation may have already begun. During the Assyrian period, it was only about 50 years after the first Israelites had been taken captive by the Assyrians, in the days of Tiglath-Pileser III, that the Khumri or Kimmerians, Israelites of the captivity, had begun to make war upon Urartu, a nations neighboring Assyria to the north, in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, who were independent of the Assyrian Empire, and not long after that time, another branch of the Kimmerians had attacked Lydia, far to the west in western Anatolia. Then near the end of the 7th century BC, Kimmerians took part in the destruction of Assyria itself.
But this is also both a promise and an indication that the children of Israel would become quite populous in the places of their captivity, to the point where they outgrow the lands in which they are held captive. Saying this, we interpret the phrase “the land of thy destruction” to refer to the places where they were brought captive when they were destroyed, rather than Palestine, the place in which they had been destroyed. The next verse substantiates the interpretation:
20 The children which thou shalt have, after thou hast lost the other, shall say again in thine ears, The place is too strait for me: give place to me that I may dwell.
There are words here which create a redundancy of sorts, and are not found in the Hebrew, so we must prefer the translation of the verse as it is found in the New American Standard Bible, which mostly agrees with what is found in The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible:
20 “The children you lost will yet say in your ears, ‘The place is too cramped for me; Make room for me that I may live here.’
The final word, here, was unnecessarily added by the translators of that edition, and it is not found in the Hebrew, so it certainly does not belong. Therefore, as we had asserted concerning verse 19, here in verse 20 the place which is too strait, or cramped, for the children of Israel is indeed the place of their captivity. So from the place of their captivity they are portrayed as saying in the ears of Israel: “The place is too cramped for me; Make room for me that I may live”, and now this is followed by further indications that they shall indeed move to other places.
21 Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children, and am desolate, a captive, and removing to and fro? and who hath brought up these? Behold, I was left alone; these, where had they been?
Here Yahweh is still speaking to Jacob, and the words attributed to Him indicate that even Jacob himself would be surprised at the proliferation of his children once he gets to see them. But where Jacob is portrayed as having professed that he is “a captive, and removing to and fro”, or as the New American Standard Bible has it, “an exile, and a wanderer”, it is apparent that the children of Israel may already have been wandering from the places of their captivity, in search of greater spaces in which to dwell.
The first Israelites were taken into captivity in the days of Tiglath-Pileser III, before 743 BC. The Israelites of Samaria were taken captive in 721 BC. The children of Judah taken from the forty-six fenced cities which Sennacherib had conquered were taken circa 701 BC. Later, even after this point in the life of Isaiah, further Israelites would go into captivity from Tyre in the days of Ashurbanipal. These are only the captivities which had been recorded in Scripture or in inscriptions, relating to Israel proper, and ostensibly many Israelites were also taken captive in the Assyrian conquests of the lands which had been held by Israel in the north, from Damascus to as far north as Hamath.
Evidently, these people were resettled mostly on the Assyrian frontiers to the north, something which can be substantiated both from Scripture and inscriptions, whereas this chapter informs us in prophecy that they shall not stay in those places, yet in some time future to that of Isaiah, they shall indeed gather themselves together. So in reference to this we read in the very next verse:
22 Thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I will lift up mine hand to the [Nations], and set up my standard to the people: and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders.
Strangely, the Septuagint has islands instead of people, where we read “and set up my standard to the people”. While the Hexapla of Origen is wanting any mention of that difference, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible also has people.
This seems to be a further description of the earlier prophecy where we read in verse 18 that “all these gather themselves together”, in reference to the “children [which] shall make haste” in verse 17. The Nations here seem to be the Nations of Israel, the twelve tribes and whatever their political divisions may have been in the time of their captivity, so that they would actually carry their own children in their arms. Ostensibly, to a place of their own. This would also seem to correlate to a prophecy found in Deuteronomy chapter 32:
8 When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.
The bounds of Israel in Palestine had not been outside the bounds of the people, which is apparently a reference to the people of the Genesis 10 nations, because Palestine had been inhabited by Philistines, who were a division of Ham’s son Mizraim and who were not an accursed people, and the Canaanite tribes, who had been accursed, but who were nevertheless descended from Ham. So it seems that while there was a greater reason for having Israel settle in Canaan, from the beginning there was a place of their own, where others had not dwelt, but which had been assigned from the beginning and only revealed to David in 2 Samuel chapter 7.
Now as a result of the favor which Yahweh would grant them:
23 And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers: they shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet; and thou shalt know that I am the LORD: for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me.
Of course, we do not have any specific examples of the fulfillment of this prophecy, however the children of Israel, in the places in which they were held captive, had indeed taken many of their captors as captives, as it is prophesied in Isaiah chapter 14, where we read in part “2 … and they shall take them captives, whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors.” This is found, in part, in the writings of Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who had written the following in Book 2, Chapter 43 of his Library of History:
But now, in turn, we shall discuss the Scythians who inhabit the country bordering upon India. This people originally possessed little territory, but later, as they gradually increased in power, they seized much territory by reason of their deeds of might and their bravery and advanced their nation to great leadership and renown. At first, then, they dwelt on the Araxes River, altogether few in number and despised because of their lack of renown; but since one of their early kings was warlike and of unusual skill as a general they acquired territory, in the mountains as far as the Caucasus, and in the steppes along the ocean and Lake Maeotis (the sea of Azov today) and the rest of that country as far as the Tanaïs River ... But some time later the descendants of these kings ... subdued much of the territory beyond the Tanaïs River as far as Thrace ... for this people increased to great strength and had notable kings; one whom gave his name to the Sacae, another to the Massagetae, another to the Arimaspi, and several other tribes received their names in like manner …
And after enslaving many great peoples which lay between the Thracians and the Egyptians they advanced the empire of the Scythians on the one side as far as the ocean to the east, and on the other side to the Caspian Sea and Lake Maeotis; for this people increased to great strength and had notable kings, one of whom gave his name to the Sacae, another to the Massagetae, another to the Arimaspi, and several other tribes received their names in like manner. It was by these kings that many of the conquered peoples were removed to other homes, and two of these became very great colonies : the one was composed of Assyrians and was removed to the land between Paphlagonia and Pontus, and the other was drawn from Media and planted along the Tanais, its people receiving the name Sauromatae. Many years later this people became powerful and ravaged a large part of Scythia, and destroying utterly all whom they subdued they turned most of the land into a desert. [8]
The children of Israel had appeared in Assyrian history in the 8th century BC, as Kimmerians and then later as Scythians, Sakae and Gimirri or Gamirra, of which the first and last of these names, as we had explained earlier, in Part 11 of this Commentary on Isaiah, are both transliterations of the word Khumri, the name which described Israel in the Assyrian records pertaining to Samaria and the portion of Palestine over which the Israelite king Omri had ruled.
It seems that once the children of Israel were settled into the promised place of their own, and the apostles of Christ had caught up to them, whereby they had accepted Christianity, perhaps they may have realized that what had happened had fulfilled the Word of Yahweh concerning their ancestors, and then it would have been true, that “… thou shalt know that I am the LORD: for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me.” It is not quite true to this day, but one day it will certainly be true.
They remained blind in that aspect, as Paul had also written, in Romans chapter 11, “25 … that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the [Nations] be come in.” It will not be until the time of the Elijah ministry promised by Yahweh in the words of the prophet Malachi, which Christ had also professed in Matthew chapter 17, that “11 ... Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things.” That was a summary of the prophecy of Malachi, so the restoration of all things is a reference to the restoration of all things between Yahweh God and the children of Israel, as it is the stated purpose of Elijah in Malachi chapter 4 that: “6 ... he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” We would assert that this is also the purpose of our Christian Identity endeavor, however it is Yahweh Himself who shall choose when it is that it shall be heard in the wider general world.
In any event, in their flight from captivity, it is fully evident that the children of Israel had humbled kings and queens, and had subdued nations, the beginning of which we have witnessed from the pages of Diodorus Siculus, who wrote in the middle of the 1st century BC.
Now the Word of Yahweh asks, and answers, a rhetorical question:
24 Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered? 25 But thus saith the LORD, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered: for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children.
The children of Israel would not have builders for a long time, but they did make haste, and the destroyers which took them captive were laid to waste, and often by the Israelites themselves. The Kimmerians or Scythians had participated alongside Babylonians, Medes and Persians in the destruction of Nineveh and the other Assyrian cities in 612 BC, and the Persian king Cyrus had Scythians and Parthians among his armies, who were of the children of Israel, when he had taken Babylon in 539 BC. Later, according to two different accounts by the ancient historians Ctesias and Herodotus, both of the 5th century BC, Cyrus was killed in a battle with one division or another of those same Scythians, either across the Oxus River east of Persia, or the Araxes River West of Persia. But in a third account, according to the 4th century BC Greek historian Xenophon, Cyrus had died peacefully at home.
However even if these words were not completely fulfilled by the 4th century BC, they would be fulfilled, as the Parthians, Macedonians and Romans who had all conquered portions of the ancient world were also all of the tribes of Israel. Therefore over the five or six centuries following the captivity of Israel, it certainly was fulfilled in one way or another, where Isaiah continues with the final clause of this chapter and we read:
26 And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I the LORD am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.
Looking back at this history, and understanding its fulfillment today, we certainly do know that Yahweh is Lord, as He had announced here in verse 23, and that Yahweh is the Savior and Redeemer of Israel, as we read here in verse 26. Waiting on Him, the children of Israel shall never be ashamed, and now, in the Revelation of Yahshua, there is a further promise that all who oppose White Christians, and who oppose Him, shall ultimately be destroyed. He shall be glorified in the fulfillment of that promise, which had not yet happened, but which certainly shall happen. Christians should live with the expectation that it will happen at each and any moment.
Looking back at this history, we should also see the fulfillment of Deuteronomy 32:8, 2 Samuel 7:10, and understand that this is how the children of Israel had obtained a place of their own, and it is also how the promises to Abraham and Jacob had been fulfilled, that their seed would become many nations, and kings would come from their loins. Then finally, it is how Jacob was glorified, but most importantly, when the people of Europe accepted Christianity, it is how Yahweh Himself was glorified, because His Word had indeed become true when the children of Israel were preserved in these migrations, and had ultimately returned to Him in Yahshua Christ.
This concludes our commentary through Isaiah chapter 49.
Footnotes
1 The Histories, Herodotus, Book 5, Chapters 9-10, Loeb Classical Library, translated by A. D. Godley: Harvard University Press, 1920 thru 1925, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/ Herodotus/5a*.html, accessed November 14th, 2025.
2 Geography, Strabo, 11.11.8.
3 Library of History, Diodorus Siculus, 5.25.1 ff.
4 Roman Warm Period, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period, accessed November 14th, 2025.
5 History of Rome, Titus Livius (Livy), 5.27.6-10.
6 Bronze age tin from Israeli shipwrecks was mined in Britain, Tom Metcalfe, Chemistry World, The Royal Society of Chemistry, https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/bronze-age-tin-from-israeli-shipwrecks-was-mined-in-britain/4010404.article, accessed November 13th, 2025.
7 The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, Hendrickson Publishers, 2021, pp. 554-555.
8 Library of History, Diodorus Siculus, 2.43.2, 2.43.5-7.
