Israel lobbying is to some extent driven by scripture understanding, prone to misunderstanding. It has huge influence on US and UK foreign policy. Iraq war. Intentions against Iran. Lybia invasion. Palestinians. And now attitude towards Russia. Key to some of this is clearly a prophecy in the scripture book of Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39. One influential conservative evangelical book I read as a teen in the 1980s told me to interpret Ezekiel 38 and 39 as a future invasion against Israel by countries it lists. In that list is Persia. Clearly, the book says, this is Iran. The writer became famous in Israel. Lance Lambert. In the UK many conservative evangelicals read the book and were inspired to lobby based on its interpretation of Ezekiel. Lobbyists seem to want the countries listed to be preemptively attacked by US and UK. Look at how this has influenced wars. The list includes Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Egypt, and all because interpretations of Ezekiel’s prophecy point to these as modern equivalents of names given during Ancient Greece times. Also in that prophecy is mention of ‘prince of Ros, Meshech, and Tubal’ (Ezekiel 38:1-3, 39:1). The ‘understanding’ in the conservative evangelical view of this is that it points at Russia. Ros (Rosh) being Russia, Tubal being Tublinsk, Meshech being Moscow. Could it really be that influence on wars and attitudes driving Western countries towards wars, led by US and UK, influenced by lobbying, has been based on how this list of Ezekiel future enemies of Israel is interpreted? It seems so. Now Russia gets singled out. Nobody wonders if the interpretation is wrong. Yet nobody involved is asking what history tells us about possible meanings of ‘Prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal’. Rus was possibly (etymology is not an exact science) an ancient Greek term for a people of Eastern Europe and for a taxation system associated with them. The term over the centuries was used for a region based, not on Russia, but on Ukraine, Kiev in particular. It was for centuries called Kievan Rus. The people known as the Rus might have included descendants of Eastern European Scythians, Tartars Cossacks, but also, perhaps most of all, the Vikings who used that region for trade. They had very fierce warriors in Byzantine times. Belarus and Russia have Rus in their names today but the historical leader of the Rus region was Kiev, Ukraine. Could the focus today on Rus as apocalyptic Armageddon future enemy of Israel be behind the current Western Russophobia? Could this all be because of a misunderstanding of Ezekiel 38/39? How awful if WW III starts from a misunderstanding of a prophecy.
