On the Tudors and the Prophet Ezechiel

John Salverda re Tudor post of Tues May 29



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I guess I just don’t buy it. “Tudor” was the real last name of these monarchs. Certainly it was “used” as such. It is known that Henry VII (Henry Tudor) went to extreme measures to “brand” the Tudor name (See; http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/02/tudors-henry-vii-wars-roses?INTCMP=SRCH) The so called “Tudor Rose” was designed at the beginning of the Dynasty and was used as a emblem throughout (you can see it all over in the contemporary statuary and paintings). What is the point of this article? Surely the Dynasty itself was not a myth. Does the author intend to say that the “historic” stories of the period are mythic, or simply that the use of the term “Tudor,” during the Tudor Dynasty, is a myth? Sorry Dr. Davies but just because you can’t find any contemporary references to the name Tudor, is no evidence that it was unused at the time. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as they say. In this case I think that it is best to trust common sense on the matter. I on 'Tudor era' is misleading myth, says Oxford historian

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Exchange re Tudors and Prophet Ezechiel




Dear John




I hope that your comment on the Tudors might get a discussion going.

The name Aeschylus ('Father of Tragedy') has struck me as a Greek version of Ezechiel (Eschyl = Ezchil).
And apparently a writer named Herder has actually referred to Ezechiel as an 'Aeschylus':
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Whedon - Commentary on Ezekiel-Daniel
www.westbrookewesleyan.org/wesleyan-docs/.../WHD_CO08.PDFYou ....
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by DD Whedon - 2002 .... "Herder has called him the AEschylus and Shakespeare of the Hebrews, while Schiller wished to study Hebrew chiefly because he longed to read Ezekiel in his ...".

Any ideas there?

Regards
Damien Mackey.

Dear Damien,



I too hope to loosen up your audience to the idea of a discussion, they think that they have nothing to add, but they could be wrong about that. Sometimes even what a person believes is a trifling remark can spark a significant idea in another. The process of “discussion” can be a very important one.

Now, as to the equation of the names “Ezekiel” and “Aeschylus.” In my opinion they are almost certainly transliterations of the same name. The Hebrew prophet Ezekiel lived only about one hundred years before the Greek playwright Aeschylus (conventionally speaking); and the Greek culture and people were heavily influenced and populated by Israelites, in my view.

As to the idea that they might be one and the same person; I would still need to be convinced of that. (I actually feel more certain about Homer = Omri, and Hesiod = Isaiah because of the supposed chronology) I am sorry to say that I couldn’t take into account the support articles that you sent me because they were in PDF format (I have declined to download Adobe for lack of disc space).

Never- the-less I do have some ideas that do tend to support the notion. Aeschylus seems to have had an intimate knowledge of Hebrew theology, for instance, he wrote “Prometheus Bound” Wherein he seems to be familiar with the Exodus wanderings, the Law Covenant, and the idea of the Messiah. With only but a small fraction of what he wrote available to us today, (he wrote about an hundred plays but we only less than ten have survived,) it is a bit difficult to tell what he may have been preaching to those ancient Greeks.

So far as I know he was the first Greek mythographer to link “the wanderings of Io” (the Jew), with Prometheus, the creator of man who was “bound” to his mountain (God bound by contract/covenant to Sinai). Aeschylus has Io, driven by a divinely ordained plague (gadfly) wander to the mountain of Prometheus, where he tells her that he will be freed from his “bindings” (covenant) by a descendant (the Messiah, by whom he means Heracles) of hers, thirteen generations hence. Re-read my article on Io (at http://westerncivilisationamaic.blogspot.com/2012/01/more-on-moses-as-hermes.html ) surely Aeschylus was relating traditions that he was fully familiar with.

I hope that this is of some help to you in your researches, but I must say, that Ezekiel seems to be more focused upon the future return of the tribes of Israel to join with Judah (Eze. 37:15). He does speak of the Exodus (Chapter 20) but not in the terms of God being “bound” to the covenant, to him the people were bound, but broke the covenant. He mentions David (thirteen generations from Abraham) in Messianic terms four times, but usually as a future Messiah who rules over the “re-gathered” Israel. He speaks of a future "peace covenant" without mentioning the dissolution of the old covenant at Sinai.

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