Who is Ephraim?

With regards to this older post of mine, I've recently come into a new idea that I think is an interesting compliment to it.

https://flippingfetchingfiddledeedee.blogspot.com/2016/05/ephraim-and-judah-part-i.html

Anyway, the idea comes from FrankN's comments here:

https://bellbeakerblogger.blogspot.com/2018/07/schnursprecher-glockensprecher.html

FrankN is a guest blogger at adnaera, a link I have on the side of my hobby blog, although it hasn't had a post in over a year now. (sad face) He's also a frequent poster at Eurogenes in the comments (another link I have on the side of my hobby blog) and, as seen above, he posts at Bell Beaker Blogger sometimes too (which, yes, I also have on the side of my hobby blog.) He gives support to Theo Vennemann's theory of a Semitic superstrate or adstrate in Germanic. Blodgett, in my first link above, assumes that to be Hebrew, FrankN assumes it to be Punic and related to the tin trade during the Bronze Age. The time depth is interesting; FrankN says that it has to be have happened before 500 BC; the Lost Tribes were carried away captive in 725 BC, and went "lost" in the year after that. That gives them a good ~200 years to have made their way "to the north country" which is usually defined as up near the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates in the Taurus Mountains, or somewhere else geographically close to that; i.e., the Caucasus region or thereabouts. From there, they would have had to make their way to the Nordic Bronze Age somehow, but with ~200 years to do so, that's hardly impossible. The Nordic Bronze Age people had clear trade links already with the Mediterranean world anyway, and links between them and the Bronze Age Mycenean Greeks have already been established, as well as links between them and their related Bronze Age steppe people much further to the east, like the Andronovo/Sintashta people. The Trundholm chariot and the Nebra Sky Disk are best explained with eastern written sources, after all. So routes and links from the Pontic steppes to the homeland of the Nordic Bronze Age were already probably in place for the Lost Tribes to putatively follow.

Another interesting aside; Eurogenes and others have pointed out that there is a strong line of evidence to suggest that the Nordic Bronze Age was bigger than traditionally defined, and probably included more territory along the Baltic, northern Germany, Pomerania and Estonia within its sphere. FrankN, in the comments linked above, also posits that linguistically he expects that proto-Germanic, defined as having undergone the sound shifts that create proto-Germanic, probably happened in the Iron Age during the Jastorf culture, but that that was a truncated picture of what was earlier a broader range of pre-proto-Germanic, or Germanic Parent Language, spoken much more widely; maybe even leftover from the Bell Beaker expansion, and it would have spread possibly as far as Britain in the West, Scandia in the North and the Danube in the east. It was the late expansion of Hallstatt an La Tene Celtic that curtailed its development and brought Celtic (and possibly some para-Celtic) to places that were earlier Germanic Parent language and may have developed into para-Germanic if it weren't for the Celtic expansion. 

This is in contrast to the Celtic from the West theory, which I also quite like, but FrankN's proposal would mean that the maritime beakers didn't give rise to Celtic and para-Celtic directly but rather to Germanic and para-Germanic, and the more traditional Halstatt expansion of Celtic is true after all. They're mutually exclusive.

From an emotional perspective, not that this matters at all to the truth, I don't really have a horse in that race. While I consider my culture to be Anglo-Saxon, and of course, I'm a native English speaker, my ancestry has a lot of Scottish, and the British identity (which is the parent group for the Heritage American identity, which I claim) has always had a deep and pervasive Brythonic Celtic substrate associated with it anyway, and the whole King Arthur tradition is Celtic in origin. I consider my identity to be as much Celtic as Germanic, and I'm happy with either one of them being spread across much of prehistoric Europe to have been replaced (linguistically, at any rate) with the other, maybe even twice in recursive form, without that being a blow to my pride in any way.