THE BIBLE PEDIGREE OF THE NATIONS OP THE WORLD. 14 L 



What do these facts indicate ? That the Kelts who bore the 

 name of Kiimri were the eldest branch of the original Keltic 

 nation — a " royal tribe " — who, as was natural, were more 

 respected than the other tribes, and were deemed to have best 

 preserved the early traditions of the race. And, in that case, 

 it is reasonable that we should find them keeping the name of 

 its original progenitor. Yet why, someone might ask, were they 

 not called Riphathi instead of Kumri, if, as the writer has 

 striven to show, they were descended from Riphath's branch of 

 Gomer's family ? Possibly because Eiphath had died long 

 before his father ;* and his children and grandchildren had 

 become the special delight of the patriarch Gomer. The writer 

 has had among his acquaintance (and surely his experience 

 cannot be singular) children left orphans at an early age and 

 brought up by an uncle or a grandfather whom they called 

 " father " to the end of his days. We can hardly suppose that 

 in those early times, before apostasy began, and only two 

 generations after men had been sent forth with a fresh promise 

 of fruitfulness " to replenish the earth,"f that anyone was left 

 an orphan in childhood or youth ; still, when contemporary 

 patriarchs were having their first children at thirty or forty 

 years old, and living four hundred years after, if Gomer lived 

 only 340 years in all, and Eiphath, his second son, was born 

 when he was 60, and himself died at 140, Gomer, through out- 

 living his son by an equal period of 140 years, would have 

 woven far more ties with Eiphath's descendants to be remem- 

 bered by than Eiphath himself would have done. 



But, whatever was the cause, there is a remarkable allusion 

 in the Bible itself confirming the historic fact. Let us turn 

 again to that prophecy, already quoted from, touching a mighty 

 invasion of Israel's land just before the final reign of righteous- 

 ness will be established there, and we shall find in the 

 enumeration of Israel's foes " Gomer and all his bands "J 

 immediately followed by " the House of Togarmah of the north 

 quarters and all his bands,"j but no other son of Gomer or 

 branch of his race by name. What are we to infer from this ? 

 That, whereas a nation or a group of nations, in the last ages of 

 human rule, was to show by their name or else rightly to claim 



* Even, as in the next chapter, in another genealogy, we read that 

 Haran died before his father Terah's migration, 

 t Gen. ix, 1. 



I Ezek. xxxviii, 6 (R.V.. hordes . . . }. 



