The British Museum conservation department has reassembled -- from a handful of fragments -- and put on display a rare specimen of "Etruscan" culture. This is a ceremonial siren vessel, believed to date from the 6-7th century B.C. and attributed to Lydia, in Asia Minor.

It is accepted that there were large colonies, descended from both of the TEN NORTHERN and TWO SOUTHERN tribes of Israel -- who had been carried captive by the Assyrians into exile in Media, and had subsequently moved westwards under pressure from further east. They settled, at least temporarily, in the regions of Asia Minor and the Aegean. It was to Christian communities among these that the Apostles (particularly St. Paul) preached and wrote.

But it is not generally realized that, more than seven centuries before the period of Jesus Christ, there were large sections of Israel in those regions who were well on their "stop-start" westward trek. The Lacedaemonian Greeks provide a case in point. There is record of their contact with Jerusalem some centuries before his birth.

It is hard to escape the claim that the mysterious ETRUSCANS, idolatrous and gentilized though they had undoubtedly become, contained a substantial proportion of "Israelites of the Dispersion."

In this connection, we need always to remember the PRE-EXODUS "BREAKAWAY" of an enterprising section of the tribe of DAN who moved to GREECE well in advance of the westward trekking main body of Israel.

-- Wake Up! October, 1980.

Hope of Israel Ministries
P.O. Box 853
Azusa, CA 91702, U.S.A.
www.hope-of-israel.org