Quote of the Day (45)

As we have worked our way through the Minor Prophets in our Saturday studies, we have noted repeatedly the problem of communication that the Holy Spirit had to resolve when speaking through Hebrew seers two to three thousand years ago about events still to take place. I mention the Holy Spirit particularly, because the prophets themselves may not always have understood the communication barriers involved, though the Spirit of God was well aware of what was going on as he carried them along.

After all, in many cases the prophets had no idea when God would bring about the fulfillment of the events they described, let alone all the things that would happen to the nations and peoples they mentioned in the interval.

If you had told Joel, for example, that many of the events he wrote about would still await their fulfillment 2,600 years later, he might have never finished his prophecy.

Conquest, Migration, Displacement

Think about it. Over the span of centuries, people groups migrate or find themselves conquered and forcibly displaced (or more often partially but not completely displaced) on a regular basis. The languages they speak change all the time. Ethnic subgroups intermarry and spread their genes around. When prophesying concerning a period thousands of years down the road, which place names do you use to designate cities or territories that will experience name changes over time, or which a certain people group currently inhabits but another will occupy at some future date? How would you refer to any particular ethnic subgroup if you knew its own people would call themselves something completely different ten centuries later? Do you stick to the place names and ethnic designations currently in use, or introduce names and designations that would be utterly meaningless to your original audience? (I will not even begin to contemplate yet another thorny issue, which is that certain place names in scripture are invested with figurative significance and do not refer to the original locations at all. For example, Jerusalem is called “Sodom” and “Egypt”, the latter of which is not even a city.)

So is it Chaldeans, Iraqis or just Babylonians? Sidonians or Lebanese? Philistines or Palestinians? Edom or Jordan? Is Gog and Magog Russia or might the ethnicities referred to have migrated somewhere else? What will make your prophecy most understandable?

The writers of Bible history had to deal with the same issue in reverse. When referring to people groups and territories 1,000 years in the past, they had to decide whether to use the current names or ancient designations their readers may not have recognized. I considered this problem at greater length in an earlier post.

Looking for the Past in the Present

Chances are the Spirit of God did not overly trouble the prophets with such issues. What we observe as we investigate both Bible prophecy and history is that most times the problem was resolved the same way: by using the names then current. You will not find the names Iraq or Russia in scripture, and if you find Lebanon and Jordan, rest assured they are not necessarily being used to refer to precisely the same geographic areas, let alone to label the modern nations of those names.

Does that mean we should give up entirely on trying to figure out what modern ethnic groups may be in view in prophetic scripture? Have migration and other forms of displacement, and the intermarriages between people groups that often result from such upheavals, so completely transformed the ethnicities of the nations named by the prophets in the Eastern Mediterranean that they have no association whatsoever with those who lived there in the time of the prophets?

Genes That Don’t Travel

Not necessarily. In 2018’s Skin in the Game, N.N. Taleb makes this fascinating observation:

“Looking at genetic data in the Eastern Mediterranean with my collaborator the geneticist Pierre Zalloua, we noticed that both invaders, Turks and Arabs, left few genes, and in the case of Turkey, the tribes from East and Central Asia brought an entirely new language. Turkey, shockingly, is still inhabited by the populations of Asia Minor you read about in history books, but with new names. Further, Zalloua and his colleagues claim that Canaanites from 3,700 years ago represent more than nine-tenths of the genes of current residents of the state of Lebanon, with only a tiny amount of new genes added, in spite of about every possible army having dropped by for sightseeing and some pillaging. While Turks are Mediterraneans who speak an East Asian language, the French (North of Avignon) are largely of Northern European stock, yet they speak a Mediterranean language.

So … Languages travel; genes less so.”

Genes travel less often than languages. Some people groups in the Bible have indeed been completely displaced. Others are lost to history. Still others show evidence of remarkable preservation over dozens of generations, much as Israel has been preserved and will continue to be.

That won’t answer every question raised by curious students of the prophetic scriptures, but it’s a factor we ought to consider.