On Genesis, Part 14: The Japhethites

On Genesis, Part 14: The Japhethites

It was quite early in my Biblical studies when I had realized the importance of the table of nations descending from Noah which is found in Genesis chapter 10. The gravity of understanding the character of the nations which are listed in this chapter cannot be overstated. That is because Noah and his family were saved from the complete destruction of the children of Adam for one reason only: that they were perfect in their genealogies, which is their descent from Adam, or what we would call today their race, at a time when the balance of that race was described as having been corrupted, because they had committed miscegenation with the Nephilim. Therefore we must realize the importance of preserving that race, as it is the will of Yahweh God which He had expressed in the preservation of Noah. While we cannot preserve it without Him, as Christians we have a duty to love and to keep His commandments. This is indeed a Christian obligation, as Christ had said, where it is recorded in Matthew chapter 5: “19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” When He spoke those words, He was speaking in reference to the law and the prophets. That does not bode well for modern churchmen, who shall have no excuse for ignorance.

Any honest man who studies archaeology and history and who reads Genesis chapter 10 from the perspective of classical antiquity, where one must consider the nations of the sons of Noah in their ancient forms rather than in their modern conditions, must ultimately face the fact that all of the descendants of Noah were originally White, or what was called in the past Caucasian or considered to be related to modern Europeans. As a digression, the words of the prophets also explain the modern condition of those nations, and we may make some references in that regard as we discuss them here. In the 19th century, White Europeans were termed Caucasian because learned men who studied this aspect of history had realized that to a great extent, the early settlers of Europe had migrated from Mesopotamia and the ancient Middle and Near East by travelling through the region of the Caucasus Mountains. That view is oversimplified, but for many of our Keltic or Germanic or even Slavic ancestors it is certainly true. Others had come from the east at an even earlier time, in which most of them had migrated by sea rather than by land.

Today in academia, in the media and in the churches, there is a general consensus that race does not exist, or that it exists only as a social reality but not as a scientific reality. These claims are easily refuted and they themselves are not scientific. Differences in physiognomy and in biological features which exist among the various races are far deeper than skin color, yet modern institutions won’t discuss them honestly, because it is racist to do so. So instead, they ignore the differences or even deny that they exist. Yet it has recently been discovered that computer algorithms reading medical scans can accurately detect the race of the individuals where even human experts fail, a phenomenon which has been reported by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [1]. So they blame the computer programs for being racist, when in reality it is the so-called experts who are insufficiently educated and who are not really experts at all. In the end, the institutions would rather dumb down their computer programs than educate their experts, because the computers are smarter than the experts, since they at least recognize racial differences, which serves to prove that race must exist. So their own technology is a witness to their abject stupidity.

[1 Artificial intelligence predicts patients’ race from their medical images, by Rachel Gordon, https://news.mit.edu/2022/artificial-intelligence-predicts-patients-race-from-medical-images-0520, accessed May 11th, 2023.]

Furthermore, the fact that race exists was recognized both by ancient Hebrews, Egyptians and Greeks, as we shall see in their own literature. Some commentators will claim that what is Caucasian is more than just a skin color, and we would agree, however we would not accept the classification of arab or oriental bastards as being Caucasian, which is what leads them to make those claims, while history clearly shows that they are of mixed races. Furthermore, the study of genetics is flawed because at least on most occasions, geneticists generally take it for granted that modern populations are representative of ancient populations, an idea which history also refutes. These claims are also no different than the Medieval Roman Catholic Church tales which sought to identify the sons of Noah with different races, as they are created for political reasons, and not as representations of any empirical truth.

In the Medieval period, the Roman Catholic Church, in its wayward endeavor to incorporate all of the world’s races into its communion, had fabricated stories attempting to explain various races as having come from the different sons of Noah. Thus sprung tales that Ham was black, or that all Europeans are of Japheth, and that Jews and Muslims, and sometimes even Asians, are Shemites. Other versions admit that Caucasians are Shemites while imagining Orientals to be Japhethites. Of course, depending upon what the particular source may be, there are several other variations of these claims in relation to different races. But all of these tales were created for political reasons, and they certainly do not reflect any Biblical, historical or genealogical truth. They are soundly refuted by either Bible, history or genealogy. But because most men do not actually read the Bible or classical history, they simply accept the lies and they defer to the authority of the Church. Thus it is described in the Revelation, of all those who worship the beast.

Now for another digression: If men would only part themselves from their useless entertainments, it would be easy for them to find time in the winter months to read the Bible and at least some of the Classics. Reading the Bible from cover to cover is said to take no more than around 72 hours for the average man. In the United States, there are about 21 weeks for an NFL football season, and televised games are usually three-and-a-half hours long. So sacrificing one football game each week, a man would have 73 ½ hours to read the Bible through that season alone. If he passed on one entire season of football, during which men typically watch several games each week, he could read the Bible, Homer, Herodotus and Strabo in a single season, and perhaps even more than that. Then those men would know much more than either their pastors or their priests, since the clerics surely spend much of their own time watching football. Once they gained such an education, they would probably never want to watch football again. Facing one’s Creator, who Himself had ensured men that His Word would remain freely accessible, there will be no excuse for ignorance.

In our recent discussions on Genesis chapter 6, we had cited certain writings found in the Enoch literature and the sectarian writing called the Genesis Apocryphon which was discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, in which Noah himself was depicted as having been so white in his appearance that it was feared by his father that he was the offspring of angels. Now we do not necessarily accept this account as being canonical, but it certainly does reflect what the ancients had believed where they interpreted the portion of that chapter of Genesis which declares that Noah was “perfect in His race”, or, as the King James Version has it, “perfect in his generations”. If Noah’s genealogies were perfect, as the Scripture informs us, and if Noah was White, as the ancients had understood him to be, then all of his sons and their sons must also have been White, and men should confront that truth and accept it, rather than wrangling with it on account of their own feelings, or assist the designs of some priest on account of their own plans to use their perceived religious authority to exert control over the entire world.

If race was not a Biblical reality, then there should have been no commandments against race-mixing, nor should there have been any reference to “strange flesh” by the apostle Jude, nor should Rebekah have been weary of her life because Esau had taken wives of the daughters of Heth, as we read in Genesis chapter 27. Neither should Paul of Tarsus have warned the Corinthians not to engage in race-mixing fornication, for which he had used an example of race-mixing from Numbers chapter 25 in order to illustrate his point, where he wrote in 1 Corinthians chapter 10. Neither would Adam have been told not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and neither would Yahweh have destroyed Adam’s descendants in the flood of Noah, for the express reason that they had corrupted themselves by intermarrying and having children with the Nephilim. This was the act to which Jude referred as the pursuit of “strange”, or different flesh. Therefore to the Christian, race does exist, and it should be a matter of paramount importance not to mix one’s race with others, because it is a commandment which was repeated by the apostles of Christ.

Once it is realized and admitted that the descendants of Noah were all White, then the meaning of the words “this is the book of the generations of Adam” has an entirely different significance. Once it is realized and admitted that the other races on this planet are simply never included in the Biblical narrative, unless they are disparaged with euphemisms as they are on a few occasions, then one may begin to develop a truly Christian worldview, and a proper and orderly perspective of the creation of Yahweh God as well as a much more profound understanding of the significance of many of His commandments. Once it is realized and admitted that all of the descendants of Noah were White, then the warnings of Yahshua Christ in Revelation chapter 2, that He would kill the children of fornicators, the same word which Jude and Paul had used to describe race-mixing, also become much more ominous in light of Scripture, history, and current events.

Once I did realize these things, and the impact which they have on any interpretation of Scripture, and once I was sure in my studies that this view was correct, I felt compelled to share what I had learned. So some time in early 2003 I wrote an essay titled The Race of Genesis 10, which I had sent to my mother in New York so that she could type it for me and forward an electronic copy to Clifton Emahiser. When he received it, Clifton had printed it and sent it to me for proofreading, and that entire process took several months. Later, Clifton published abstracts from that essay in his Watchman’s Teaching Letters for August and September of 2003, which may have been the first historical writing of mine which Clifton had published. In 2006, the paper was published separately at Israelect.com, and of course, at Christogenea once I was able to publish my own papers in 2009. In October, 2011, I presented the essay in a podcast, and at that time I made some minor revisions. Here, discussing Genesis chapter 10 in this format, of course we shall employ material from that essay, and where I can, I also hope to elaborate with further proofs of our assertions.

When I wrote that essay, I found this subject to be so important to foundational Biblical understanding that I had opened it by stating that “We are only going to travel the history of this planet once. There are no second chances. One history, one Bible, one trek from the garden of Eden to the gathering of the Wheat.” On the path of life, we certainly have no second chances, and we shall indeed be judged for our decisions. If the sons of Noah were originally all different races, then we can be assured that race does not matter, and that it does not exist. But then, why does Bible, in both Old Testament and New, have commandments forbidding race-mixing? Why was it even a problem that the daughters of Adam were bearing children with the Nephilim? But if the sons of Noah were all White, then we may clearly see our obligation before God. Here in Genesis chapter 10, the words of Scripture become historically verifiable, as this is the first chapter in which historical and archaeological records may actually be investigated in a manner which sheds light on Scripture. So in that regard, opening that essay I also borrowed a saying from Epictetus, where he wrote that “the beginning of learning is the investigation of names”, and that certainly is true here in Genesis chapter 10.

1 Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.

Now we have already provided the meanings of the names of the sons of Noah on several occasions earlier in this commentary. However here we shall state only that Shem may mean noted or renowned, Ham hot or heat, and Japheth extended or broad. As we have also previously noted, Japheth was the oldest of the three, as he is called “Japheth the elder” in Genesis chapter 10 (10:21), and Ham seems to be the youngest of the three, as he is described as the “younger son” of Noah in Genesis chapter 9 (9:24). Yet every time they are mentioned together in Scripture, they are listed in the order seen here, as “Shem, Ham and Japheth”. But where their descendants are listed here, they are listed in the order of Japheth, Ham and Shem. Both of these orders seem to be for literary purposes, since neither of them are in precedence of birth. For some reason, Shem was favored although he was not the eldest, but here in this chapter it is evident that his descendants are listed last because they would have precedence in the ensuing narrative. Since Abraham, the central character of Genesis from chapter 12, is of the line of Shem, then only the descendants of Shem in the line of Abraham are listed down to the time of Abraham. All of the others are listed for only a couple of generations, but that helps us to identify them in history, ostensibly so that the children of Israel would know which nations had come from Noah, and also be able to tell which nations were not of Noah.

But before we continue, one other aspect of our contentions with traditional Roman Catholic Church teachings in relation to this table of nations must be discussed. Not every one of these nations can be identified in history with absolute accuracy. Outside of Scripture, which from the time of Abraham was focused solely on his family and those with whom they had come into direct contact, history as it is known to us was not generally recorded to any sufficient degree until after the 6th century BC. The only knowledge of history from before that period is pieced together from inscriptions found on surviving ancient monuments and other archaeological discoveries. But if we can identify at least some of the descendants of Shem, Ham and Japheth as having been White from the records of history and archaeology, then we must admit that they all must have been White, and corroborating this is the fact that none of these nations can be identified as having been red, yellow, black or brown. There is not one indigenous non-White tribe which may be identified in the record of Genesis chapter 10, as the nations listed had existed in the earliest times. Some of them have subsequently been overrun with other races, but that was not their original condition.

So first we have the descendants of Japheth:

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2 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.

Gomer is the first son of Japheth: The Hebrew word גמר or gomer as a verb, where it appears five times in the Psalms, generally means to complete or fulfill, or to bring to an end or conclusion. Outside of the Psalms it appears only as a name. So except for where this account of the children of Japheth is repeated in 1 Chronicles, the only mention of Gomer which is of consequence is found in Ezekiel chapter 38. There, in a prophecy which forebodes a future time in which the nations gathered by Gog would array themselves against the children of Israel, we read in part of “6 Gomer, and all his bands; the house of Togarmah of the north quarters, and all his bands: and many people with thee.”

The national identity of Gomer is difficult to document from ancient history or inscriptions, since the name Gomer itself is not found outside of the Bible. The name is not found in Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian or Persian inscriptions, so far as I could investigate from the quite numerous available archaeological sources. But in Book 1 of his Antiquities of the Judaeans , the Judaean historian Flavius Josephus had made the mistake of associating Gomer with the Galatae, an error which was probably derived from its phonetic similarity to an earlier Greek name for the Galatae, which is Κιμμέριοι. Likewise, in that same place he had identified Magog with the people whom the Greeks had called Scythians. Many historians since then have followed these mistakes. Oddly, they do not follow Josephus where his contemporary and more accurate records identify at least most of the Judaeans as Idumeans, or Edomites.

But in Assyrian inscriptions, the word which the Greeks had translated as Κιμμέριοι is Khumri, which is a transliteration of the Assyrian form of the name of Omri, a notable king of Israel. The Assyrians called Israel by the name Bit Khumri or Humri, which is the Biblical House of Omri, at the time when they had been taking the Israelites into captivity and resettling them in the north. Such an identification is certain from the inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III [2], Sargon II [3] and others. In Assyrian inscriptions of that time, the name by which the Assyrians identified Israel is always called Hu-um-ri, or Humria, which should be pronounced in our language as Khumri. That the h should actually be pronounced as a kh is evident in many Assyrian place names. Elsewhere in the Assyrian inscriptions Hilakku stands for Kilikia or Cilicia [4], and the Biblical region and river called Habor which is mentioned in 2 Kings chapters 17 and 18 is in modern times spelled Khabur [5]. The same phenomenon exists for the Hebrew letter ח, het or heth, which in English is sometimes transliterated only as an h, which the King James Version had done rather consistently, while in the Greek of both the Septuagint and the New Testament it was more often transliterated with a χ (chi), our hard ch, as Strong did in all of his definitions where the letter stood in proper nouns used as names.

Contrary to Flavius Josephus, the ancient Persians did not distinguish the Kimmerians from the Scythians. In the multi-lingual inscriptions which they left to posterity, it is evident that they considered these people to be one and the same. In an Akkadian inscription of the Persian king Xerxes, there are mentioned “the Amyrgian Cimmerians” and “the Cimmerians (wearing) pointed caps”. A note accompanying the translation of this inscription which appears in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament informs us that in the Persian and Elamite versions of this same text these “Cimmerians” are called “Sakans” [6]. To this we must compare similar language used by the Greek historian Herodotus, who in his description of the nations which were allied with Persia in Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, had written of the “Amyrgian Scythians” and said that “The Sacae, or Scyths, were clad in trousers, and had on their heads tall stiff caps rising to a point…. They were in truth Amyrgian Scythians, but the Persians called them Sacae, since that is the name which they give to all Scythians.” In a footnote at this passage in his edition of Herodotus, George Rawlinson noted that: “According to Hellanicus, the word ‘Amyrgian’ was strictly a geographical title, Amyrgium being the name of the plain in which these Scythians dwelt.” [7]

So comparing the Akkadian, Persian and Greek inscriptions, of which these are only examples, it should be readily discerned that the Israelites of the Assyrian deportations were called Kimmerians, and they were also called Scythians and Sacae, or Sakae. While we did not want such a digression with the Scythians, since it is 2,500 years too early for them here in Genesis chapter 10, it is necessary to dispel the notion that the Kimmerians are Gomer, which is certainly not true. But of course, the Assyrian inscriptions would not have been available to Flavius Josephus.

[2 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament, 3rd edition, James Pritchard, editor, 1969, Harvard University Press, pp. 283-284; 3 ibid. pp. 284-285 4 ibid. p. 284; 5 Wikipedia article on the Khabur River, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khabur_(Euphrates), accessed May 11th, 2023; 6 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament, p. 316; 7 Herodotus, The Histories, 7.64, translated by George Rawlinson, Everyman’s Library, Knopf, 1910, 1997, p. 537.]

As a further digression, some commentators have opined that Hosea’s taking of a wife named Gomer (Hosea 1:3) is a prophetic indication that Gomer was one of the tribes among which the Israelites were dispersed, and to which they had later joined themselves after their deportation by the Assyrians. This hypothesis is credible, although I have not been able to positively identify any tribe of the secular records of the 7th or 8th centuries with Gomer in particular.

3 And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah.

In the prophecy in Ezekiel chapter 38 Togarmah is allied along with Gomer and others against the children of Israel in the last days, where he is also said to be located “in the north quarters”. Riphath is not mentioned again in Scripture, except for where this genealogy is repeated in 1 Chronicles chapter 1. Where Strong’s Concordance lists the Hebrew word for Riphath in its Hebrew lexicon (# 7384) he explained that in some manuscripts it appears as Diphath, an example of the common confusion of the letters ר, or resh, and ד, or daleth, which occurs frequently in Hebrew manuscripts.

Ashkenaz and Togarmah are also mentioned in that passage in 1 Chronicles, but Ashkenaz is also mentioned on one other occasion in Jeremiah chapter 51, where we read “Set ye up a standard in the land, blow the trumpet among the nations, prepare the nations against her [speaking of Babylon], call together against her the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz; appoint a captain against her; cause the horses to come up as the rough caterpillers.” Within the context of the prophecy in that chapter, Ashkenaz is described as being one of the tribes subject to the Persians and Medes in their later conquest of Babylon. Here the tribe is placed in the mountains north of the Mesopotamian plain, later called after the Hebrew names Ararat and Minni, or Armenia.

But like Gomer, the names Ashkenaz and Riphath do not appear in secular records, in ancient histories or inscriptions, so far as I can find. So with that, it is apparent that these sons of Gomer, and Gomer himself, had lost their peculiar patriarchal identities in the histories which were written by other nations, except that the prophets of Yahweh had known where they were still located, and in those prophecies they are found among the enemies of Israel in Ezekiel chapter 38. It is quite likely that they also served as enemies of Israel while they were still subject to the earlier Assyrians. It is most likely that the sons of Gomer were located in and around the Caucasus Mountains, the Black and Caspian Seas and the Eurasian Steppe.

That these tribes lost their identity in histories written by other nations is evident where Togarmah is mentioned in an ancient Hittite inscription where the Hittite king Suppiluliumas, who called himself “I, the Sun Suppiluliumas, the great king, the king of the Hatti land” boasted of destroying the kingdom of the Mittani, and among his enumeration of the mountain districts which he had vanquished, he lists “half the country of Tegarama”, which is certainly the Biblical Togarmah [8]. Suppiluliumas is reckoned to have lived in the 14th century BC, and ruled about a hundred years after the Exodus. The Mittani kingdom was a Canaanite empire of the Biblical Horites, or Hurrians, who are mentioned later in Genesis chapter 10 under the gloss Hivite, which we shall discuss in reference to the descendants of Ham.

[8 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament, p. 318]

As for the mountain districts mentioned in this Hittite inscription, the terms Ararat, Minni, and Armenia are Hebrew terms which describe the land, and not the names of any particular tribes, and the passage in Jeremiah associates those lands with Ashkenaz, so it is likely that the other sons of Gomer lived in that same region, as we have just seen of Togarmah in this inscription. So the sons of Japheth were also the first Caucasians, the first White tribes of the historical record to dwell in the region of the Caucasus Mountains. But the Assyrians only used the term Urartu to describe the same region, and that term is akin to the Hebrew word Ararat. So by the time when they are mentioned in Assyrian inscriptions, much later than the 13th century BC, the people of the area were no longer known by the names of Gomer or his sons. Then at a much later time, from the 7th century BC, did the Kimmerians pass through the same area. Having been conquered by the Mittani, the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Persians, and even later by Greeks and Romans, if they retained any knowledge of their original identities among themselves it is certainly lost in all of the histories or inscriptions of their conquerors. As we shall see, others of the tribes listed in Genesis chapter 10 had also lost their national identities by the beginning of the historical period. Over the centuries leading up to historical times, there were several great empires which had competed with one another at diverse times, and which had absorbed lesser tribes, so that their names were lost to history or remained unknown to outsiders.

Magog is the second son of Japheth: His name only appears in Scripture here and in the copy of this genealogy found in 1 Chronicles, and in the prophecies of the gathering of the nations against the children of Israel which are found in Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39, and in a parallel prophecy found in Revelation chapter 20. Over 1500 years before the Germanic Rus conquered the land which bears their name today, the prophet Ezekiel wrote of Gog being the leader or prince of Rhos or Rosh, Meshech and Tubal (Ezekiel chapter 38). While that interpretation of the Hebrew word ראש or Rosh is challenged, that is the way in which it was also interpreted in the Greek Septuagint and in some other modern English translations from the Hebrew, but not in the King James Version or the Latin Vulgate.

The location of the land of Magog and the tribe itself are lost to history. However in light of the relationship which Magog is later prophesied to have with Meshech and Tubal, which Ezekiel chapter 38 illustrates, Herodotus mentions two tribes among those under Persian dominion, the Moschi and the Tibareni [9]. Strabo also discussed the Moschi and the Tibareni in his Geography, and explains that the land formerly held by the Moschi, whom he placed just south of Colchis in the Caucasus mountains, was encroached upon by the Colchians, Armenians and Iberians [10]. Therefore not finding a historical Magog in the records of Mesopotamia or Anatolia, perhaps it is safe to conjecture that if the tribe had not lost their identity before the advent of the historical record, perhaps it is rather because they had lived outside of it, in the steppes north of the Caucasus Mountains in what would later be known as Russia.

While mention of the Iberians is a digression, as they also belong to a much later time, we only do so because they serve to place the Moschi and Tibareni in the historical period. The Iberians were certainly Hebrews, a portion of the Scythians who had not yet migrated away from the region of the Caucasus mountains. Iberia, from the noun eber, is a Hebrew word denoting the other side of something. Strong’s defines the Hebrew word עבר, eber or heber (# 5676), as the region across, or beyond, and as a verb (# 5674) to cross over. In ancient times, the Iberian peninsula was evidently given its name because it was reached by crossing over the Mediterranean Sea. In Classical times, there was a land called Iberia described by Strabo as being just across, or north of the Caucasus Mountains [11]. Both lands must have been named by the ancient Israelites, the first by the Phoenicians and the latter by those of the Assyrian deportations.

[9 Herodotus, The Histories, 3.94, 7.78; 10 Strabo, Geography, 11.2.18; 11 ibid., 11.3.3.]

It is evident that for many centuries before the beginning of the historical period, tribes which had descended from Noah had migrated through the Caucasus Mountains or around, or perhaps through, the Black and Caspian seas, moving into the Eurasian Steppe. The contemporary Russian archaeologist S.A. Grigoryev, in papers such as The Sintashta Culture and Some Questions of Indo-Europeans Origins and other works has demonstrated that the archaeological remains of the Steppe did not come from the people generally known as the Scythians, but from forerunners to the Scythians. He states that “Scythian migration through Iran, Near East and the Caucasus took place at the beginning of the Iron Age.” If he meant to refer to the iron Age in Central Europe, that date is very agreeable to our own chronology, as it would be a reference to the 8th or 7th centuries BC. He also shows that the earlier Sintashta people who predated the Scythians on the Steppe also originally had come from the regions of Syria and Anatolia. Therefore the archaeological record shows that people had been migrating from out of the Biblical world and into the Eurasian Steppe, and this is fairly consistent with the Biblical narrative and what we may be able to glean from early historical records.

But in the period of Assyrian conquest and the resettlement of conquered populations in the north, namely that of the Israelites, or Khumri as they were called, there was subsequently much upheaval in the regions of the Caucasus Mountains, northern Mesopotamia and Anatolia. For example, Diodorus Siculus relates the humble beginnings of the Scythians along the Araxes river in northern Media, explaining the origins of the various Scythian tribes from this common source, and their spread northward and both to the east as far as India and to the west as far as the region of Europe north of Greece and Thrace [12]. These migrations can be corroborated in many other sources, both historical and archaeological, and caused shifts in the populations of tribes which had previously inhabited those and the surrounding regions.

[12 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 2.43.1-5.]

Madai is the third son of Japheth: Madai is identifiable with the Medes, which is evident simply by checking both terms in Strong’s Concordance since they are both the same Hebrew word מדי or Maday (# 4074). The Greeks wrote Mede as Μῆδος, the ‘η’ in English being rendered by either an ‘a’, or an ‘ê’ or ‘e’. Herodotus had written that “These Medes were anciently called by all people Arians” [13], although it is more likely that the term “Aryan” was rather used by Israelites who once sojourned in Media, something with which Dr. George Moore agrees in his 1860 book The Lost Tribes and the Saxons of the East and the Saxons of the West, with New Views of Buddhism. The term Ar-ya appears to mean “mountain of Yah” in Hebrew, something which the Israelites were often called, for example in Daniel chapters 2 and 9 , and that the Greeks had Israelite tribes in Media confused with actual Medes. The prefix ar from the Hebrew word הר or har, which is a mountain is a feature of many other Scythian and Parthian names. There is an assumption that the word Aryan comes from a Sanskrit word for noble, however we would assert that the Sanskrit language followed much later. Regardless, the nation of the Medes having fulfilled a destiny in history which the prophets had already assigned to Madai, there should be no doubt of this identification.

[13 Herodotus, The Histories, 7.62.]

Portions of the children of Israel were resettled by the Assyrians in the cities of the Medes, which is stated in 2 Kings chapters 17 and 18. In the Book of Ezra, in chapter 6, the prophet describes a decree of Cyrus which was found in a city of the Medes (6:2) by the later Persian king Darius regarding Jerusalem, which he had been duty-bound to execute, as the prophet Daniel referred several times to “the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not.” In Isaiah chapter 13 Yahweh declared that He would stir up the Medes against Babylon, and even in many Greek writings of the 5th century BC, namely in the Tragic Poets, the word Medes was used interchangeably to describe the Persians as well, although the Persians themselves were not Medes, but because the Medes were partners in the Persian empire. In Jeremiah chapter 25 the Medes are mentioned alongside Elam, the Hebrew word for Persia, and in chapter 51 the Medes are mentioned in a role fulfilled in history by Persia. In Daniel chapter 5 the empire of the Medes and Persians is mentioned, that Babylon would fall to it, and, as we have said, in chapter 6 there are several references to the “law of the Medes and Persians”. As late as Acts chapter 2, Medes are mentioned alongside of Persians, who are called Elamites in agreement with their Hebrew name. Since Elam was a son of Shem he shall be discussed later in this chapter.

In an epigram which is said to have been inscribed on the grave of the 5th century BC Tragic Poet Aeschylus, and which the later Greek writers Athenaeus and Pausanius had said was penned by Aeschylus himself, we read: “This tomb hideth the dust of Aeschylus, an Athenian, Euphorion’s son, who died in wheat-bearing Gela; his glorious valour the precinct of Marathon may proclaim, and the long-haired Medes, who knew it well.” [14] So as a young man the poet was a Greek soldier at Marathon, and when he recounted the battle he described the Persians as Medes. In The Persians, a tragedy written by Aeschylus, he referred to the Medes as the losers at Marathon (line 236). Later, in a conversation between a chorus of courtesans and Darius, the father of Xerxes, he referred to both Persians and Medes (lines 786-792). But Aeschylus, and the ancient Greeks in general, had considered the Persians to be kin to the Dorians. This is found earlier in the same tragedy, where there are words which the poet put into the mouth of Atossa, the wife of Darius, which read in part: “I dreamed that two women in fair vesture, one apparelled in Persian garb, the other in Dorian attire, appeared before mine eyes; both in stature far more striking than the women of our time, in beauty flawless, sisters of the selfsame race.” [15] So the Persians and Dorians were considered to be of the same race, but not the Medes. From a Biblical perspective, the Persians and Dorians were both Shemites, and the Medes were Japhethites.

There are historical indications that the Medes are found in the Slavs of today, even if the distinctions between tribes which are presumed to be either Scythian, or Germanic, and Sarmatian, or Slavic, are not always clear, which is apparent as early as the Germania of Tacitus. The Slavs may be traced to a people that the Romans and Greeks called Sauromatae, or in English, Sarmatians. Diodorus Siculus, discussing certain Sakae or Scythian kings, states that “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 [which were districts in modern day Turkey along the southern shore of the Black Sea], and the other was drawn from Media and planted along the Tanaïs [a river north of the Caucasus mountains which empties into the Black Sea from the northeast, flowing through modern Ukraine], its people receiving the name Sauromatae. Many years later this people became powerful and ravaged a large part of Scythia….” [16]

This reflects a partial fulfillment of a prophecy in Isaiah chapter 14, which was made in reference to the captivity of Israel, where we read “1 For the LORD will have mercy on Jacob, and will yet choose Israel, and set them in their own land: and the strangers shall be joined with them, and they shall cleave to the house of Jacob. 2 And the people shall take them, and bring them to their place: and the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the LORD for servants and handmaids: and they shall take them captives, whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors.” The last part of that clause qualifies the use of the term strangers earlier in the verse, to refer to the other Adamic nations by whom Israel had been taken into captivity. While the Persians and Medes did not take Israel captive during the period of their own empire, they were subject to the earlier Assyrians and Babylonians and contributed to the invasions of Israel and Judah as their subjects. So with this, there being so many Slavs among the Germanic peoples today, we also have a realization of the fulfillment of Genesis 9:27, that Japheth would dwell in the tents of Shem.

[14 Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, Fragments, translated by Herbert Weir Smyth, Loeb Classical Library volume 146, Harvard University Press, 1926, 1999, p. 521, Fragment 272 (495 Wecklein); 15 Aeschylus: Suppliant Maidens, Persians, Prometheus, Seven Against Thebes, translated by Herbert Weir Smyth, Loeb Classical Library volume 145, Harvard University Press, 1927, 2001, p. 123, 129, 177; 16 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 2.43.5-7.]

Javan is the fourth son of Japheth: Javan (Genesis 10:2) is identified in Strong’s Concordance with the Ionian Greeks (# 3120), as the Septuagint translators had also seemed to do, rendering the Hebrew word יוני, or yavaniy (# 3125), as Ἰωύαν (Iōuan). This was not a coincidence, since on the Behistun Rock, as well as other Eastern inscriptions, these Greeks are called Yauna, or Yavana, for which Sir Henry Rawlinson wrote Ionians in his famous translation of that inscription. Other Persian inscriptions assure this same connection, as does the Hebrew scripture in Joel chapter 3, where the Hebrew word for Javan is translated as Grecians. These Ionians once inhabited the coasts of Anatolia [modern Turkey] and many of its islands, the land which was generally called Ionia throughout the Classical and Hellenistic periods, and also were the founders and principal inhabitants of Athens in Greece, and of other cities on the mainland in Europe. In Isaiah chapter 66 (66:19), there is a prophecy which has been fulfilled in ancient times, which lists Javan along with the Japhethite nations of Tarshish and Tubal as some of the places where the Israelites in captivity would ultimately be sent by Yahweh.

The Ionians, or Javan, are connected with Tyrian sea trade twice in Ezekiel chapter 27, in verses 13 and 19. In verse 19, there is a mention of the trade with Tyre which Dan and Javan had conducted together, and the reference is to the Danaan and Ionian Greeks, as a portion of the tribe of Dan had left Egypt at an early time and settled in Greece, and they were known in ancient Greek literature as the Danaans. Therefore in the King James Version in Ezekiel 27:19 we read: “Dan also and Javan going to and fro occupied in thy fairs: bright iron, cassia, and calamus, were in thy market.” This is a clear reference to Danaan Greeks and Ionian Greeks. But some newer Bible translations write Vedan - a word which exists nowhere else, and the Hebrew construction of a letter ו or vav prefixing דן or Dan actually means “and Dan”, for which the King James Version properly has “Dan also” since the name of Javan is also prefixed with the same letter ו or vav. Evidently, the newer translations make this innovation in order to further obfuscate history and protect their errant identification of ancient Israelites with modern Jews. The truth is that many of the Greeks were actually Israelites, with the exception of Javan and his sons, and none of them were ever Jews. [17]

[17 See Classical Records of the Dorian & Danaan Israelite-Greeks, by this same author and available here at Christogenea, /essays/classical-records-dorian-danaan-israelite-greeks, accessed May 12th, 2023]

4 And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.

Of the sons of Javan, in addition to Javan himself, all of his sons are identified with the sea trade with Tyre in Ezekiel chapter 27: Kittim (or Chittim) in verse 6 where the Latin Vulgate has Italy, Elishah in verse 7, and Tarshish in verse 12 where the Septuagint and the Vulgate have Carthaginians. But the name Dodanim is problematical. Where it is read as Dodanim here in Genesis, in the Septuagint it is Ῥόδιοι both here and where the genealogy is repeated in 1 Chronicles chapter 1 (1:7). This is evidently another case of confusion with the Hebrew letters ר or resh, and ד or daleth, and Dodanim should be read as Rodanim, or Rhodians. This mistake by the Hebrew copyists for Rodanim is also attested in Strong’s Concordance (# 1721), which further indicates that it was spelled correctly as Rodanim in the Hebrew manuscripts in 1 Chronicles 1:7, and that is verifiable although the King James Version has Dodanim there as well. The word, whether it is spelled as Dodanim or Rodanim, is a plural form of a noun for which Strong’s did not offer a definition, stating only that the word is “a plural of uncertain derivation.” Where the King James Version had Dedan in Ezekiel 27:15, which is the name of a son of Cush, the son of Ham, in the Septuagint it reads Ῥόδιοι or Rhodians, who were the Greeks of the island of Rhodes.

Both Elishah and Kittim are identified with the island Cyprus, with several varying spellings of these names found in ancient inscriptions. Kittim, usually spelled as Chittim, is the word for Cyprus throughout the Hebrew prophets. Among several inscribed ostraca discovered in Arad, a Biblical town in the south of Judah, which are dated to the period before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldaeans, we read: “To Eliashib – and (as) of now: Give the Kittiyim three baths of wine and write the exact date. And from what is left of the old wheat grind up one (kor) of wheat to make bread for them. Serve the wine in punch bowls.” [18] Apparently this Eliashib was a servant and was expected to accommodate guests from Kittim.

[18 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament, p. 569.]

In Numbers chapter 24 there is a prophecy of Balaam which reads in part: “24 And ships shall come from the coast of Chittim, and shall afflict Asshur, and shall afflict Eber, and he [in reference to Asshur] also shall perish for ever.” There it is certain that the Hebrew word for Eber (# 5677) should not have been interpreted as a name but rather, as a common noun meaning the region beyond in reference to Asshur, which is the Assyrians. In Isaiah chapter 23 we read: “1 The burden of Tyre. Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for it is laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in: from the land of Chittim it is revealed to them.” Then a little further on: “12 And he said, Thou shalt no more rejoice, O thou oppressed virgin, daughter of Zidon: arise, pass over to Chittim; there also shalt thou have no rest.” Here, Israel is disparagingly referred to as the “daughter of Zidon”, a city of Asher in which there were a considerable remnant of Canaanites who had been in bondage to Israel. So in this passage, it is evident that Kittim was between the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, and the land of Tarshish, where the first island encountered would be Cyprus.

Later in history, it is evident that Kittim was interpreted to represent inhabitants of the greater Mediterranean in general, which accounts for some of the errant interpretations in early translations of Scripture, but that is far from true. While Greeks and Phoenicians had settled most of the lands adjoining the sea, only a small portion of the Greeks were actually of Kittim. In Book 1 of his Antiquities of the Judaeans (1:128), Flavius Josephus reflects this opinion where we read: “Cethimus [Chittim] possessed the Island Cethima. It is now called Cyprus: and from that it is that all Islands, and the greatest part of the sea coasts are named Cethim by the Hebrews: and one city there is in Cyprus that has been able to preserve its denomination: it has been called Citius [or Kition], by those who use the language of the Greeks, and has not, by the use of that dialect, escaped the name of Cethim.”

But in antiquity, Elishah, which is often spelled as Alashiya or Alasiya, can be connected with Cyprus with even more certainty than Kittim. In an ancient Egyptian inscription dated to the 11th century BC containing an account titled The Journey of Wen-Amon to Phoenicia, the title character is compelled to board a ship on the Phoenician coast, where we read: “So he loaded me in, and he sent me away from there at the harbor of the sea. And the wind cast me on the land of Alashiya.” [19] There, Alashiya is clearly a reference to Cyprus. In an even earlier Egyptian inscription of Thutmose III, who ruled in the 15th century BC, Alashiya is listed in a roster of cities or countries under tribute to Egypt. [20] The country was vanquished after a rebellion of the so-called “sea peoples” against Egypt, according to an inscription of pharaoh Ramses III. There we read where he boasts of his military might that: “No land could stand before their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at [one time].” [21] Alashiya was also mentioned in even earlier Hittite inscriptions. [22, 23]

[19 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament, p. 29; 20 ibid., p. 242; 21 ibid., p. 262; 22 ibid., pp. 352, 356; 23 Further reading: Where Was the Kingdom of Alashiya, DailyHistory.org, https://dailyhistory.org/index.php?title=Where_Was_the_Kingdom_of_Alashiya&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile#cite_ref-9, accessed May 12th, 2023]

The last of the sons of Javan to discuss is Tarshish, which was a region of what is now southern Spain and which was known to the Greeks as Tartessus. For some unknown reason, in Ezekiel chapter 27 and in various other verses in both the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate identify Tarshish with Carthage, but in making that error those two versions are not always consistent with one another. Although for several centuries before and after the Septuagint was translated, the Carthaginians were in control of Iberia, which is where ancient Tarshish was located, Carthage had not yet been founded when the ships of Tarshish were first mentioned in the Bible, in the narrative of the reign of Solomon as the king of Israel.

According to Flavius Josephus, the temple in Jerusalem was built in the 12th year of Hiram king of Tyre, and Carthage was founded in the 156th year, which he explained in Book 1 of his treatise Against Apion. This information is not found in Scripture, however Josephus had the good fortune to have access to the Chronicles of Tyre which had been translated into Greek by Hecataeus of Abdera, a historian of the 4th century BC. In Book 2 of Against Apion, citing Greek sources, Josephus gives the date of the founding of Carthage to be the first year of the 7th Olympiad, which by the typical chronologies would be around 752 BC, the same time as the traditional date for the founding of Rome. The Greek sources seem to date the founding of Carthage at least several decades later than it should be, but the dates are relatively reasonable. There is no reason to believe that Carthage was founded before the end of the 10th century BC, long after Solomon’s ships had sailed for Tarshish.

The “ships of Tarshish” are mentioned in Kings, Chronicles, Psalms, and several of the prophets. Although a separate and quite lengthy topic, it can be convincingly demonstrated with evidence from Scripture and the secular poets and historians that the Phoenicians of Tyre and elsewhere were the Israelites, who were only called Phoenicians by the Greeks [24]. Carthage was a Phoenician colony of Tyre, and the Carthaginians eventually controlled the land which we call Spain today, then called Iberia, “Hebrew” or “Eber” land, just as the land north of the Caucasus mountains, where the deported Israelites first settled and became known as Scythians, was also called Iberia, even in Roman times.

[24 Classical & Biblical Records Identifying the Phoenicians, by this same author and available here at Christogenea, /essays/classical-biblical-records-identifying-phoenicians, accessed May 12th, 2023]

The 5th century BC Greek historian Herodotus is writing about a period much earlier than his own, even predating the Trojan War, and speaking of Tartessus in southern Spain he wrote, “This trading town was in those days a virgin port, unfrequented by the merchants” [25]. The Trojan War was about 200 years before King Solomon’s ships, so Herodotus certainly seems to have been accurate, and his having referred to Tartessus as a “trading town” helps to illuminate the Scriptural record. [25] In their Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Liddell & Scott readily identify Τάρτησσος as “the Tarshish of Scripture”. But the Carthaginians could only have come to political control of Tarshish at a much later time, as Diodorus Siculus described wars between the Carthaginian Hamilcar Barca and the “Iberians and Tartessians” in the 3rd century BC [25]. The Iberians were also Phoenicians, but not necessarily subject to Carthage. Evidently, Carthage and at least many of the other Phoenician colonies in the Mediterranean had remained loyal to the Tyrians, until Tyre was destroyed by Alexander the Great before the end of the 4th century BC.

[25 Herodotus, The Histories, 4.152; 25 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 25.10.1 ff.]

Tubal and Meshech are the fifth and sixth sons of Japheth: Once again, from an inscription of Sargon II, who ruled Assyria from 721 to 705 BC, we read: “(Property of Sargon, etc., king of Assyria, etc.) conqueror of Samaria (Sa-mir-i-na) and of the entire (country of) Israel (Bît-Hu-um-ri-a) who despoiled Ashdod (and) Shinuhti, who caught the Greeks who (live on islands) in the sea, like fish, who exterminated Kasku, all Tabali and Cilicia (Hilakku), who chased away Midas (Mi-ta-a) king of Musku, who defeated Musur (Mu-şu-ri) in Rapihu, who declared Hanno, king of Gaza, as booty, who subdued the seven kings of the country Ia', a district in Cyprus (Ia-ad-na-na), (who) dwell (on an island) in the sea, at (a distance of) a seven-day journey.” [26] Here we see Assyria not only once again conquering the Levant, but also extending its reach far into Anatolia. This Midas is not the famous Midas of Greek legend, who was about a hundred years later and who was the king of Phrygia. Rather, the name seems to have been popular in Anatolia. However the Tabali and Musku can certainly be associated with the Japhethite Tubal and Meshech of Scripture, of Genesis chapter 10 and Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39, and they dwelt on the coasts of the Black Sea. Cilicia and Cyprus were at this time populated with Phoenicians, since it is near the end of the 8th century BC, so the name for Cyprus in this inscription is not from either Kittim or Elishah.

We have already discussed how Herodotus had mentioned two tribes which were under Persian dominion, the Moschi and the Tibareni [27], and these we may identify as Meshech and Tubal, the Musku and Tabali of this inscription of Sargon II which dates to only about 150 years before the time of Herodotus. And as we have also already explained, Strabo had attested that portions of the land of the Moschi were later held by the Colchians and Iberians, who lived north of the Caucasus Mountains [28]. While we cannot identify the Colchians precisely in Biblical terms, they were mentioned by the Greek poets, especially in relation to legends of Jason and the Argonauts, as Jason was said to have married Medea, a daughter of the king of Colchis. The characters in those legends were said by the ancient Greeks to predate the Trojan War by only a couple of generations. In his tragedy Medea, the poet Euripides described the title character as having had a “snow-white neck” (line 30), and referred to Colchis as being “at the world’s edge” (lines 540-541) [29]. In the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, in books 3 and 4, Medea is described as having pale cheeks, and as blushing on more than one occasion.

[26 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament 3rd edition, James Pritchard, editor, 1969, Harvard University Press, p. 284; 27 Herodotus, The Histories, 3.94, 7.78; 28 Strabo, Geography, 11.2.18; 29 Euripides: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, translated by David Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library volume 12, Harvard University Press, 1994, 2001, pp. 287, 331.]

Earlier we had presented evidence from Diodorus Siculus and the prophet Isaiah that the Scythians had relocated some of the tribes of the lands which they came to occupy in the regions of northern Syria and the Caucasus Mountains to places in Central Europe beyond those mountains. So it is not difficult to imagine that some of the most immediate tribes in that vicinity, including Meshech and Tubal, who were in ancient times living in a convenient geographic location that without stretching the imagination we may associate these ancient Japhethites with the much later Russian cities of Moscow and Tobolsk. This may seem like conjecture, but these tribes evidently still retained their original names into the Hellenistic period, so the connection does not stretch the imagination. In relation to the Galatae, the Greek historians had explained that at least one tribe in Gaul shared the same name that a tribe of the Galatae in Anatolia had retained, which is the Tectosages. [30] The distance from Galatia in Asia Minor to Gaul, or modern France, is about the same as the distance from Iberia in the Caucasus Mountains to Tobolsk, and much further than the distance from Iberia to Moscow, so tribes certainly can keep their names over such great distances.

[30 Strabo, Geography, 12.5.1.]

Tiras is the seventh and last of the sons of Japheth. In Strong’s Hebrew lexicon the Hebrew word תירס is transliterated as Thiyrac. The name, which is said to mean desire, is not mentioned anywhere else in Scripture, except in the copy of this genealogy which is found in 1 Chronicles chapter 1. Many writers have made connected this name to the Thracians north of Greece, and we believe that the identification is proper. In Book 1 of his Antiquities of the Judaeans (1:125), Flavius Josephus writes of Tiras that: “Thiras also called those whom he ruled over Thirasians: but the Greeks changed the name into Thracians.” We do not agree with all of the identifications which Josephus had made from the list of nations in Genesis chapter 10, but some of them are certainly valid, and we esteem this one to also be valid.

In later history the land of Thrace is instead occupied by Greeks, as Macedonians and Thessalians, and Strabo was confused as to whether one barbarian tribe in the area, the Treres, were Kimmerian or Thracian [31]. The Thracians were not considered Greeks but rather barbarians [32], and had colonies in Asia [33], and also, along with the Eneti, they had settled the area around of Venice [34]. The Phrygians of Anatolia were said to have been Thracians [35]. It appears to be either Phrygians or Thracians who were the first mound or tumuli builders of early Europe, and the tomb of the Phrygian king Midas is a famous example.

[31 Strabo, Geography, cf. 13.1.8, 14.1.40; 32 ibid., 7.7.1; 33 ibid., 12.3.4; 34 ibid., 12.3.25; 35 ibid., 7.3.2, 7.25, and 10.3.16.]

The later tribes of the Getae and the Daci are described by Strabo as being akin to the Thracians and as having shared the same language [37], and also as having inhabited a great part of both sides of the lower Danube. Although Strabo considered everything north of the Danube to be Germany [38], this particular area is historically Slavic, as is Central Asia where we have already connected many of its historic inhabitants to the Japhethite tribes of Madai, Meshech and Tubal. The Greek Ionians also made many settlements. The Ionians of Phocaea in Asia Minor were called by Herodotus “the first of the Greeks who performed long voyages” [39], and they were credited with having founded Massalia (modern Marseilles) on the coast of France, Maenaca in Iberia, Elea in Italy and many other colonies [40]. The Etrurians, or Etruscans, of Italy descended from the Shemitic tribe of Lud found first in Anatolia – the ancient Lydians, which shall be discussed along with the other descendants of Shem. A large portion of Italy, and especially Rome, was also settled by the Trojans [41], and other portions by the Ionians of Asia Minor [42], the Athenians who were also Ionians, and the Achaeans who were Danaans [43]. So while the Phoenicians may have dominated the seas in later history, it is evident that the Japhethites had never left the waterways of Europe and the Near East.

[37 Strabo, Geography, 7.3.10, 13; 38 ibid., 2.5.30, 7.1.1; 39 Herodotus, The Histories, 1.163; 40 Strabo, Geography, 4.1.4, 3.4.2 and 6.1.1; 41 ibid., 6.1.12, 14; 42 ibid., 6.1.14, 6.2.2; 43 ibid., 6.1.10, 11, 13 and 15.]

5 By these were the isles of the Gentiles [Nations] divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.

Modern anthropologists, archaeologists and historians often discuss the “sea peoples”, whom they usually claim were Caucasians who came from the Aegean area and invaded the Mediterranean. The true origin of at least most of the “sea peoples” are the Japhethites of Genesis chapter 10, who at a very early time had been spread along the waterways from the Caspian and Black Seas to as far west as the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Here we must contrast the text of Genesis chapter 10 verse 5 with verses 20 and 31, where the sons of Japheth were explicitly assigned the isles, or coast-lands, as the word may have been translated, but not the sons of Ham or of Shem, although later in history the Hamitic Philistines also plied the waves, and only after a considerable time were these tribes rivaled at sea by the Israelite Phoenicians.

This concludes our commentary on the sons of Japheth and this portion of Genesis chapter 10.