The Restless Danites

"The eponym DAN is found to be a root-name applied to some of the most famous sections of the ancient GREEKS and their leaders. The derivatives of this name include Danaus, Danae, Danaans, Danoi, Danaoi, Danaids. According to Thucydides (Peloponnesian War), the earliest immigrants to Greece were called PELASGIANS. Danaus, who later arrived with his followers FROM EGYPT, commanded that all should be called DANAANS (Strabo). Hecateus of Abdera, a Greek historian of the early third century B.C., records that there had been an expulsion of 'ALIENS' from Egypt and that some of these, under their leaders Danaus and Cadmus, migrated into Greece, though the greater part followed Moses. Confirming this, Diodorus Siculus states that those who left Egypt with Danaus settled in ARGOS, and that -- according to contemporary belief -- ATHENS also was colonised from Egypt. Strabo says that the Danaans colonised the regions round about Lemnos and Imbros; also that some of them sailed from those islands with TYRRHENUS to the region of Italy neighbouring the Tyrrhenian Sea, their descendants becoming known as ETRUSCANS. In his 'History of Greece' Dr. William Smith says that of all the heroic families of Greece, none was more heroic than the DANAANS OF ARGOS.

"As early as 1852, Dr. R. G. Latham, a well-known ethnologist of his day, identified the Greek Danaans as being of the TRIBE OF DAN. His words form a masterly conclusion:

"Neither do I think that the eponymous of the Argive 'Danai' was other than that of the Israelite tribe of Dan -- only we are so used to confine ourselves to the soil of Palestine in our consideration of the history of the Israelites, that we treat them as if they were adscripti gleboe, and ignore the share they may have taken in the ordinary history of the world. Like priests of great sanctity, they are known in the holy places only -- yet the seaports between Tyre and Ascalon, of Dan, Ephraim and Asher, must have followed the history of seaports in general, and not have stood on the coast for nothing. What a light would be thrown on the origin of the name 'Pelop-o-nesus,' and the history of the 'Pelop-id' family, if a bona fide nation of 'Pelopes,' with unequivocal affinities, and contemporary annals, had existed on the coast of ASIA! Who would have hesitated to connect the two? Yet with the DANAI and the TRIBE OF DAN this is the case, and no one connects them' (Ethnology of Europe)."

-- Wake Up! November 1977.

Hope of Israel Ministries
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