Ephraim: Founder of Y-Chromosome Haplogroup P (R and Q)?

Genesis 48:19, "Ephraim" to be "the fullness of the nations"...

Recommended prerequisite reading:

Ephraim is the most probable founder of the Y-Chromosome DNA Haplogroup P, which is one of the primary suggestions in Israelite Haplogroup (DNA) Hypotheses. Ephraim's direct male descendants and female descendants may be found in other mt-DNA and y-DNA haplogroups, but P seems to be the most apparent at this time. Connecting this haplogroup and its sub-haplogroups R and Q to Ephraim will of course receive much criticism from the so-called "Secular" Educational Establishment and Population Geneticists in general.

Migration Map for Y-Chromosome Haplogroups:

If you'd like to find out what Haplogroup you belong to, FamilyTreeDNA is the best test provider. Get tested here.

Compare above map with: Haplogroup Map of the World.

Like connecting Abraham to Haplogroup F, the main obstacle to connecting Ephraim to Haplogroup P is the official time frame estimation of the group founder living some 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, yet Ephraim lived approximately 3,800 years ago. Of course that is a massive problem. Hence, we have no other choice. We must open the radio-metric-dating can of worms. Open can of worms by clicking here.

What follows will be more fathomable if you read the recommended material from the beginning of this article.

Ephraim, Flavius Josephus, and the Great Promise

Ephraim was a man who lived 600 years after the Great Flood of Noah's day. In Hebrew, his name actually means something like "doubly fruitful". He was the son of Joseph, making him the great, great grandson of Abraham. Abraham was given the promise of Kings and Nations (Genesis 17:6). Ephraim's uncle (Judah) inherited the promise of Kings (Genesis 49:10) while Ephraim inherited the promise of Nations (Genesis 48:19) from Abraham. It was his birthright. And it was not a conditional promise. See Two Sticks of Abraham.

Considering the points already mentioned in this article, it is not difficult to conceive some part of Ephraim's descendants who were deported by the Assyrian Empire into and around Media and Persia approximately 2,700 years ago (Note: large portions of Ephraim likely settled outside the Land of Israel hundreds of year earlier), could have become a vast and innumerable multitude just as the Historian Josephus depicted in the 1st Century AD:

"...the ten tribes are beyond Euphrates till now, and are an immense multitude, and not to be estimated by numbers."
-Antiquities of the Jews - Book XI (Ch. 5) (see more of his quote here)

And thus enters the Parthian Empire, Rome's humbling counter-weight east of the Euphrates River.

The Parthian-Scythian Connection

The Parthian Empire's western boarder was generally understood by the Romans to be at the Euphrates River and conversely, it was understood to be the Roman Empire's eastern boarder by the Parthians. Although on occasion, the water became a little muddy (de facto control over Armenia was typically the flash point). However, without getting into too many of those details here, we can reasonably assume Josephus was referring to the Parthian-Scythian horde east of the Euphrates to be Israelite. And hence: Ancient History, please acquaint yourself with the modern and fiercely atheistic science of Population Genetics.

It is highly probable that the Parthians had a high frequency of Y-Haplogroup P or it's sub groups within their ranks. And it is believed many Saka-Scythian peoples surrounding the Parthian Empire were of the same stock as the Parthians themselves. The Scyths dressed the same, fought the same, spoke the same language, and frequently came to the aid of the Parthians when fighting their wars with the Romans and the locally subjugated Persians, as well as other lesser known groups. It should also be noted that the Scythians were sometimes hostile toward Parthia. However, if the Parthians were a Saka-Scythian stock, it lends greater credibility to the non-specific statement by Josephus regarding the immense Israelite multitude east of the Euphrates River, for Saka-related peoples controlled enormous tracts of land far beyond Parthian territory, to the east, to the southeast, to the north, and even northwest.

Today, there are many Eurasian ethnic groups who traditionally trace their ancestry back to Saka-Scythic related peoples. The frequency of Haplogroup Q (Hg.Q) in Siberia and the mixed frequency of Hg.Q and Hg.R in Central Asia and the high frequency of Hg.R stretching from Iceland to India confirms many of those Saka-Scythic origin traditions. Furthermore, the reality that men within Hg.R and Hg.Q (sibling sub-groups of Haplogroup P) are closely related further cements the suspicion that the Parthians were of Indo-Saka-Scythian stock themselves. Furthermore, if P, R, and Q Eurasians today are of Israelite thus Semitic stock, then they can not be of Japhetic stock as many Christian historians insist on teaching. However, Japhetic peoples may have been present before Ephraim pushed them out of their territory (Deuteronomy 33:17 and Isaiah 54:3 ) or assimilated them into their tent (Genesis 9:27).

Hg.Q's overwhelming presence in the Americas is also testament of the aggressive nomadic nature of Sacae-Scythian-related peoples. Yet again, because Oxford's carbon-dating lab insists the Native American Q's arrived in the Americas at a much earlier date, it is a struggle to connect them to Saka peoples.

The Behistun Rock Inscription

George Rawlinson, Sir Henry Rawlinson's younger brother (translator of the Behistun Rock Inscription), identified the Saka/Gimiri of the Behistun Rock Inscription to deported Israelites, who Josephus confirms was a vast multitude in the region during the First Century AD. Here George Rawlinson makes the connection:

We have reasonable grounds for regarding the Gimirri, or Cimmerians, who first appeared on the confines of Assyria and Media in the seventh century B.C., and the Sacae of the Behistun Rock, nearly two centuries later, as identical with the Beth-Khumree of Samaria, or the Ten Tribes of the House of Israel. (George Rawlinson, note in his translation of History of Herodotus, Book VII, p. 378)

The Behistun Inscription connects the people known in Old Persian and Elamite as Saka, Sacae, or Scythian with the people known in Akkadian (Old Babylonian) as Gimirri or Cimmerian. This is important because the Assyrian's referred to the Northern Kingdom of Israel in their records as the "House of Khumri", named after Israel's King Omri of the 8th century BCE. Note, phonetically "Khumri", "Omri", and "Gimiri" are similar (Capt, E. Raymond, Missing Links Discovered in Assyrian Tablets).

It should be made clear from the start that the terms 'Cimmerian' and 'Scythian' were interchangeable: in Akkadian the name Iskuzai (Asguzai) occurs only exceptionally. Gimirrai (Gamir) was the normal designation for 'Cimmerians' as well as 'Scythians' in Akkadian. (Van Loon, Maurits Nanning. "Urartian Art. Its Distinctive Traits in the Light of New Excavations", Istanbul, 1966. p. 16)

Language Ramifications

On a linguistic side note, Steve Olson has this to say about the peoples who descend from Haplogroup P (primarily R) and other closely related groups:

For more than two centuries, scholars have known that most of the languages spoken in a broad swath from Britain to India are derived from a single original language. These languages belong to what is called the Indo-European family, and they are spoken by more people than are the languages of any other family in the world. They include Indic languages such as Hindi and Urdu, Iranian languages such as Farsi and Kurdish, Slavic languagues such as Russian and Serbo-Croatian, Romance languages such as Italian and French, Germanic languages such as Norwegian and English, and Celtic languages such as Irish. (Mapping Human History pg.141)

Intriguingly, this helps connect all those respective peoples to Ephraim (or at least Abraham) in varying ways, but the reality is, language origins are much more complex than what can be tucked away into nicely classified groups. For example, Farsi is spoken largely by Iranians, people traditionally connected to ancient Persia and Media. And of course, Persians and Medes co-existed with Ephraimites in antiquity. If Parthia was largely made up of Israelites as Josephus suggests, then Ephraimites and Persians swapped ruler-ship over the region and each other more than once and most certainly influenced each others’ languages. It should also be noted, Iran and the Middle East have the most diverse haplogroup frequencies in the world (see Haplogroup Map of the World). Just because you’re an Iranian Muslim today doesn’t mean your ancestors were necessarily Persian or Median. You may have a multitude of Israelite ancestors.

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