Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes, fiction is truer than the history books. The Bible is clear that the Iranians, modern-day Persians, are Sons of Japheth, like both the United States and the Ashkenazi nation of Israel. Is it possible - even hypothetically - that could explain why Iran hasn’t folded like all our military planners had thought they would? Have we misjudged them? As part of this study, an odd historical caveat emerged: the Iranians are the original Aryan race. And that explains a little-known fact, which is their affinity for the Third Reich, something that current-day Germany would like them to forget. Let’s unpack that weird history.
I laid out the case for the now-infamous “Japheth Prophecy” in the NXR article, How the Bible Prophesied European Supremacy and Global Dominance, on May 11. I didn’t exactly break the Internet, but I did solicit some criticism, which I covered in the follow-up article, The Japheth Prophecy II: Criticism of God’s Prophetic Blessing for Western Civilization, a few days later. For those unaware, I’m speaking of the prophecies of Noah in Genesis 9, which are the pretext for the Table of Nations in Chapter 10.
ON THE JAPHETH THING
The Table of Nations is itself a long-forgotten (or for most Christians, never-known) passage that lays out the origins of mankind’s racial diversity. By “racial,” I mean the term in its dictionary definition of the word. It’s not a Darwinian allegation of human evolution in which the races evolved from different original ancestors - the definition ascribed to race by the Nazis and by Aryan race theory - but the Biblical one, in which the races all come from the very same set of eight ancestors who marched off the Ark onto dry ground on Mt. Ararat after the global flood. The Table of Nations is, hands down, the most historically significant account of human anthropology.
PLEASE NOTE: I know there’s an audio problem. I do not know what’s causing it, but I am working to get it fixed. Apologies.
It’s also the most accurate anthropological record of the human family, which is another reason it’s frustrating that the modern church avoids teaching the chapter’s contents. Usually, pastors and teachers are eager to highlight Bible passages that so accurately reflect the best of secular discovery, if for no other reason than to say, “The Bible told you so.” What the Table of Nations lays out for us, accords with modern genealogical science and secular history, making it a truly compelling piece of evidence for the Bible’s trustworthiness as a teaching tool. That Moses, a nomadic sheep-herder, wrote down an accurate map of human anthropological and genealogical history 3500 years ago in the desert of the Near East is impressive, if not a legitimate wonder.
Confirmed by historians who have used it to guide their anthropology for millennia, Genesis 10 begins with the aforementioned prophecies in Chapter 9. To phrase it another way, Noah’s prophecies set the scene for the genetic lineages to follow in Chapter 10. As the story goes, after arriving on the Ark, Noah plants a vineyard and gets drunk. His son, Ham, takes advantage of him in one way or another that dishonors him, and upon sobering up, he curses Ham through his son, Canaan; he blesses Japheth and Shem. His blessing is that both Japheth and Shem will be blessed by God, that God would expand Japheth, and Japheth will “dwell in the house of Shem.”
Meanwhile, the Table of Nations, built on that context, traces the lineage of Ham, Shem, and Japheth to the whole world. For some who have denied that the Table is exhaustive, the Text reads, “These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread” (9:19) and, “These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood” (10:32).
Last week, Dale Partridge, a colleague with a webcast on NXR, did an episode of the Sons of Japheth and set the Internet on fire significantly more than I did. This is for one primary reason: according to his critics, Partridge went further than I did by suggesting that the prophecies of Noah in Genesis 9 could be used today to establish a geopolitical precedent and to understand the present world around us within the geopolitical status quo. In other words, he suggested that Genesis 9 could be used for reproof, correction, and training in righteousness; not to mention practical purposes related to world governance and to understanding disparities and differences between the races.
In other words, Partridge suggested the Bible might be used to understand and shape the world around us in the modern day. That’s not allowed, apparently. And in fact, it’s some kind of grievous sin.
I tangled with several of his critics, who used some novel and, I thought, unserious arguments against Partridge’s propositions. One claimed that Noah wasn’t prophecying, per se, but merely venting. As in, Noah woke up from his stupor, figured out what happened, and just spoke some totally non-prophetic imprecations over his son and complimented the others with some well-wishes. Because, he alleged, the Text doesn’t explicitly say, “DISCLAIMER: THIS IS A PROPHECY.” When I pointed out that the language Noah used mirrors other patriarchal blessings and curses almost exactly, and that the Bible translators put “Noah’s Prophetic Blessings Over His Sons” as the heading, and that virtually every commentary suggests it’s a prophecy, they responded with a reminder about Sola Scriptura. They also suggested that, if it was a prophecy, it must have already been fulfilled within the lifetimes of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, which, again, would be out of the ordinary for other patriarchal blessings. If I could summarize all the pushback toward Partridge, it would be this: the only way to avoid accusations of “racism” is to ignore this Biblical passage, treat this Biblical passage unlike every other Biblical passage, just like it.
In other words, modern Christianity demands that we treat the Holy Bible, at least Genesis 9, as a meaningless caveat that illumines almost nothing about how the races developed the way they did, and provides no usable wisdom for race and race-relations today.
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It’s a weird thing to watch evangelicals argue against the usefulness or applicability of Scripture, but here we are. The topic is verboten because of the sensitivities of our age, and we can go along with it, or be called racist. Ignore the Word of God, or avoid epithets. Pick your poison.
I’ve picked mine.
It would help the anti-racist witch hunt if we could demonstrate that there are implications for Romans 9 that don’t include the White vs Black paradigm. Nobody gets upset when a pastor explains in his sermon that the Palestinians are the descendants of ancient Philistines, and that they’ve been warring with ethnic Israelites for thousands of years. That’s allowed. As long as we pretend that modern Israelis are ancient Israelites, anyway, it’s acceptable. So, if only this whole Japheth thing is helpful outside Black and White issues, then maybe it would be possible to discuss the Biblical passage without being torched as a racist.
It turns out that the implications of Genesis 9 are much broader than most people realize. The rest is just fun, and hopefully interesting, history for you to glory in how creatively God turned history out.
I wrote this article to demonstrate that the implications of Genesis 9 go much further than “White and Black.”
WARRING AGAINST A CIVILIZATIONAL POWER
On Easter, the President of the United States picked up his phone and posted, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” on Truth Social, then added, almost wistfully, that he didn’t want it to happen but it probably would. Ninety million people. It’s one of the oldest continuous civilizations on planet earth. It was supposed to be gone by 8 p.m. Eastern unless Tehran reopened a shipping lane.
It was just one of a long line of threats and promises by American politicians meant to invoke fear and obedience from the Iranians, while expressing confidence to the American people that Iran would soon collapse like a bag of potatoes, fold like a cheap suit, or whatever analogy works to describe a lack of resolve to continue fighting until the last Persian is dead. Trump himself had predicted the Iranian regime would collapse within “days” of the bombing campaign’s initiation. On March 10, Pete Hegseth said that Iran would fall within “a week or two.” Three weeks into the campaign, Victor Davis Hanson said it would be “two to four weeks.” All of these predictions were based upon threat assessments in which almost everyone grossly underestimated the regime’s resolve.
The Washington Institute said the bombing campaign the year before “exposed Tehran as a paper tiger.” On the morning Operation Epic Fury launched, Lindsey Graham declared on Meet the Press, "The mothership of terrorism is sinking. The captain is dead. The largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, is close to collapsing." It wasn’t.
Ted Cruz went on Face the Nation the same day calling the strikes "the single most important decision" of Trump's presidency, insisting Iran no longer being "led by a theocratic, murderous dictator" made America "much, much safer." A month later, watching Iranian missiles hit Saudi Arabia, Graham was still swaggering, posting that "our allies in Israel have shown amazing capability when it comes to collapsing the murderous regime in Iran," predicting confidently there would "be a day soon" the Iranian people ran their own country. By June, with the ceasefire fraying, Graham was threatening to seize the Strait of Hormuz outright, boasting the US would "control the Strait of Hormuz" and "charge a fee for all those who go through," adding a line that reads especially rich in hindsight, "If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them." Iran did contest it. Repeatedly. Nobody got obliterated.
Instead, the United States burned through its missile stockpile trying to reopen a waterway Iran never actually lost its grip on, and five months after "the mothership of terrorism is sinking," that same sinking ship is still sinking ships.
So, here’s how it actually ended: The civilization did not die. It barely blinked. The regime absorbed a decapitation strike that killed its own Supreme Leader, propped up a replacement within days, kept the Strait of Hormuz closed whenever it felt like closing it, and then sauntered to the negotiating table and walked out with a $300 billion reconstruction fund, a full termination of American sanctions, its frozen assets handed back, and a nuclear promise so toothless it might as well have been written in glitter glue. Meanwhile, the United States burned through more than half its stockpile of some of its most important precision missiles, dropped hellfire and brimstone on them for months, assassinated not one, but hundreds of their top officials, and literally pounded them with half of everything we have.
Nothing. We got nothing out of it. Not a single item on the war objectives to-do list.
Nobody thought it would be this difficult. Well, nobody in the Pentagon thought it would be this difficult. They look at things like tanks and runways, ships and missiles. They think in terms of strategic targets and military weaponry. But many cultural anthropologists and historians of civilization shook their heads in disbelief at the arrogance of the war planners and tried to warn them that Iran wasn’t Venezuela. It wasn’t Iraq, for that matter. Iran was…different. It’s different in a way that’s hard to put into words, but entire history books have attempted. It’s just…made different.
Every talking head on every channel acted stunned that the “civilization” didn’t expire on command, stunned that shooting one old man in Tehran didn’t collapse the machine behind him, stunned that ninety million people with three thousand years of continuous memory didn’t behave like a rental property that switches hands the moment the landlord gets evicted. They shouldn’t have been stunned at all, because plenty of unglamorous people in unglamorous journals had already told them exactly what was coming.
MADE DIFFERENT
Before a single missile flew, serious Iran scholars were waving red flags nobody in Washington bothered to read. Political scientists studying how policymakers lean on lazy historical analogies warned that Iran has more than double Iraq’s population, a detail that tends to matter enormously once you start fantasizing about tidy regime collapse. Stanford’s own Iran specialist was cautioning planners not to underestimate the regime’s paramilitary base. Analysts warned in print, months before the “decapitation strike,” that the Iranian regime had a proven track record of converting external attacks into fuel for nationalist cohesion, and that prior strikes on Iranian targets had never once produced a decisive strategic outcome.
None of that required a crystal ball, and none of it required insider access. It required someone with actual power to read a paragraph written by a real Iran scholar instead of soaking in the confidence of men who promised a clean two-week war on television.
Iran is what a growing number of historians and political scientists now call, without irony, a civilizational state, the same phrase usually reserved for China. Not a nation that sprang into being with a flag and a founding document, but the living residue of an empire that was already ancient when Rome was a village full of shepherds and cows. Henry Kissinger once asked whether Iran was a nation or a cause. Turns out it’s neither one. It’s older than both categories put together.
And if you want to understand why it’s older, and why it seems to come equipped with an institutional immune system that shrugs off decapitation strikes, you have to go back much further than 1979, further than 1935, even further than Cyrus the Great. You have to go back to a boat, three sons, and a very old man who had just harvested his vineyard.
IRANIANS AND ARYANS
The nation’s name, “Iran,” descends straight from the Avestan Airyanem Vaejah and the Old Persian Ariya, the very word Darius the Great carved into stone to describe his own bloodline twenty-five hundred years ago. Iranians were calling themselves Aryans back when the concept of “Germany” didn’t exist yet.
In 1935, Reza Shah didn’t just quietly change his country’s name. He made an announcement to the entire world demanding it be called Iran instead of Persia from that day forward, and the push behind that decision came straight from Nazi diplomats who were fascinated that the Persians and Germans shared the same ancient blood. The following year, in 1936, Germany actually rewrote its own Nuremberg Laws, the laws built to define who counted as racially pure and who didn’t, and carved out a specific exception declaring Iranians officially Aryan. A regime obsessed enough with racial purity to build death camps around the concept looked at an entire nation of Middle Eastern people and said, “these ones count as us.”
Fascinating, right?
It gets stranger. Fast forward almost seventy years, past the fall of the Shah, past the Islamic Revolution, past everything that supposedly severed Iran from its old identity, to a soccer stadium in Tehran in 2004. Germany’s national team is on the pitch. The German national anthem starts playing. And the cameras catch it, Iranian fans in the stands throwing up Nazi salutes, leaving the entire Western world wondering what in the %#)*@ that was about. It was awkward for the Germans, eager to forget the sins of their ancestry. But the Iranians were proud of whatever is in their blood.
And it’s still alive today. Fast-forward one more time to 2010, and Disney is casting a movie called Prince of Persia. They hand the lead role, a Persian prince, to Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor who is Scandinavian and Ashkenazi Jew. People screamed “whitewashing,” complaining that a European-descendant actor was playing a Persian. Who cast him? Iranian American writer, Reza Aslan. And he didn’t apologize for the casting. He defended it, telling the Los Angeles Times that if you rewound history far enough, “every single ancient Iranian would have looked exactly like Jake Gyllenhaal.” Everyone laughed at the claim because they didn’t understand it. Nor did they understand why a modern Iranian intellectual, writing for an American newspaper, in the twenty-first century, made the same racial claim the Nazis made in 1936, completely unprompted, completely sincerely, and clearly still believing it.
Three separate moments. 1935. 2004. 2010. Seven decades apart, no coordination between them, no one generation handing instructions to the next. And every single time, the same claim resurfaces on its own. Aryan. Not Arab. Not “Middle Eastern” as Americans picture it. Iranians insist they are European by blood. In fact, Iranians have been saying this about themselves for two and a half thousand years, and they were saying it long before anybody.
Here’s where the story gets genuinely fascinating: it turns out the book of Genesis got there first and named names.
MADAI, SON OF JAPHETH, FATHER OF THE MEDES
Genesis 10:2 reads, “The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.” Madai might be some forgotten footnote lost in a genealogy nobody reads, but Josephus identified him as the ancestor of the Medes nearly two thousand years ago, and virtually every commentator since has agreed with him. The Medes are the textbook Indo-European Aryan people, cousins by blood and language to the Greeks, the Germans, the Celts, and the Slavs, essentially everyone who eventually became what we now call Europe.
Standard reference works classify the Medes as Japhethites straight out of Genesis 10:2, as Aryans under any definition you care to use, and as a people Herodotus says called themselves Arioi and Airya in their own Avestan scripture, the very word that becomes Iran.
So when Reza Aslan claimed Iranians are Aryans and would have resembled Jake Gyllenhaal in the ancient world, he confirmed a genealogy the book of Genesis had already laid down in black and white. Madai to the Medes to the Aryans to Iran is not a stretch, and it’s not fiction. It is a traceable line running from a chapter most Christians skim on their way to Abraham, straight through to a Disney casting fight argued out in the Los Angeles Times.
Ancient DNA extracted from Bronze- and Iron-Age skeletal remains across the Iranian plateau tells a story most people have never heard. Modern population genetics has established that the specific alleles responsible for lighter pigmentation appeared independently on the Iranian plateau early. That’s real, peer-reviewed science.
But the stronger proof of Persian identity isn’t genetic at all. It’s linguistic and self-declared. The Persians never needed anyone else to tell the world who they were. They said it themselves, in their own language, carved into their own stone. Herodotus recorded that the Medes and Persians already used the term Arioi for themselves as a matter of course, and that same word survives independently in their own Avestan scripture as Airya, the very root that eventually becomes the modern word Iran. That is not a foreigner’s guess about a people. That is a people’s own testimony about themselves, preserved in their own tongue for two and a half thousand consecutive years.
But there is a second layer buried in this story, and it might be the best part of the whole thing.
JAPHETH MOVED INTO SHEM’S TENT
Genesis 10:22 reads, “The children of Shem; Elam, and Asshur, and Arphaxad, and Lud, and Aram.” Elam was the ancient civilization centered at Susa, in what is now southwestern Iran, which fed directly into the rise of the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Cyrus and Darius. That means the ground beneath modern Iran belonged, genealogically, to Shem first
Then Noah’s oracle went to work. Genesis 9:27 says, “God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.” Bible commentators for centuries have pointed to the Medes fulfilling exactly that promise, toppling the Assyrian and Babylonian empires that belonged to Shem’s line. Push that same logic south and the fulfillment gets even cleaner. The Indo-Iranian Aryans, Japheth’s own sons through Madai, migrated onto the Iranian plateau, absorbed the older Elamite population, and built an empire directly atop it. Japheth did not merely stop by Shem’s tent for a visit. He moved his furniture in, repainted the walls, and the “Persian” identity that walked out the other side is the leftover residue of a three-thousand-year-old prophecy still cashing checks in the modern news cycle.
SO, ARE THE IRANIANS ARYANS? MYTH CONFIRMED OR BUSTED?
I realize some folks might be lost. Let me explain it as simply as possible. This is a summary:
The Table of Nations lists Japheth’s sons, and Genesis 10:2 names one as Madai. Then, Madai is named as the ancestor of the Medes (Persians). Not just by Josephus, although that would be enough because he was rarely wrong, but by plenty of different ancient sources. Assyrian records also do the same, and refer to the Medes as the Madai. Meanwhile, linguistically and culturally, the Medes are part of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, the same family that produced Greek, Latin, German, and English.
Herodotus records that the Medes and Persians called themselves Arioi. Their own scripture, the Avesta, uses the word Airya. That word is where "Iran" comes from. So "Aryan" isn't a label some outsider slapped on them; it's their own self-designation, and it's a linguistic-ethnic category, not just a religious or political one.
In the 1800s, European linguists, most notably Max Müller, were mapping out the Indo-European language family and needed a name for the branch that includes Sanskrit, Persian, and their relatives. They borrowed the word the ancient Indo-Iranians already used for themselves, Arya, and "Aryan" became the standard 19th-century academic term for that language family. At this point it's a linguistics term, describing a family of languages, not a race.
Race theorists in the late 1800s, people like Arthur de Gobineau and later Houston Stewart Chamberlain, took that linguistic label and grafted a racial hierarchy onto it. They redefined “Aryan” to mean a supposed superior race, and, this is the key move, they reassigned its purest form to blond-haired, blue-eyed Northern Europeans. The Nazis inherited this already-corrupted version and built their entire racial ideology on top of it.
Germanic peoples never called themselves Aryan; there's no ancient Germanic inscription using that term. The Nazis took a real ethnonym that belonged to actual historical peoples on the Iranian plateau and in India, stripped it from them, and reassigned it to a population that never used it. Then, almost comically, in 1936 they had to write Iranians back into the definition, because you can't build a master-race myth around a word while excluding the one group of people who'd actually been using it correctly for two thousand years.
Here’s what’s not comical, though. They are, in fact, kin according to the Table of Nations. They're descended from two different brothers who were both sons of the same father, Japheth. That makes them first cousins by descent, in the same way your own first cousins share a grandfather with you but come down through two different sons of that grandfather. Gomer and Madai are the brothers. Everyone who descends from Gomer and everyone who descends from Madai are cousins to each other, all the way down through history.
And here’s what is neat: Secular scholarship confirms the Bible on this. Modern historical linguistics, built entirely independently of the Bible by scholars who, in most cases, weren’t even trying to confirm Genesis, arrived at the exact same family structure from a completely different direction. Germanic and Iranian languages are both classified as Indo-European, branches of a single reconstructed ancestor language, Proto-Indo-European, that linguists date to roughly 4,000 to 6,000 years ago on the Eurasian steppe. Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, German, and English all sit on the same tree, just on different branches.
So you’ve got two independent lines of evidence landing on the same conclusion. The Bible calls them cousins by blood. The linguists call them linguistic cousins. Same family tree, drawn twice, by two completely different methods that never talked to each other.
JAPHETH VERSUS JAPHETH
The overwhelming majority of the American population, including POTUS, traces its own ancestry back through Europe, meaning back through Japheth’s other sons, Gomer and Javan and the rest of that branch of the family tree. Put plainly, this was never the clash of Shem against Japheth that everybody assumes when they picture “the West” squaring off against “the Middle East.” This was Japheth’s children through Europe firing precision missiles at Japheth’s children through Media and Persia. Cousins were fighting cousins, several thousand years and two continents removed from each other, and neither side had the faintest idea a family reunion was happening in real time over the Strait of Hormuz.
The thing is, we know how Japheth fights. Japheth does not break. He sweeps up the rubble and keeps going. That’s what centuries of fighting Europeans have demonstrated to forces all over the world - including other Europeans. We do not bend, and we do not break. At least, not easily. When we are at war, we go until there’s no one left to fight. We’re the most resilient people on the face of Planet Earth.
German bombers spent months trying to burn London to the ground during the Blitz, and the British answer to nightly incineration was to ride the Underground to work the next morning, as if nothing had happened, keep the shops open, and turn national trauma into a slogan cheerful enough to print on a poster. It’s called “The British stiff upper lip.” The problem with that expression is it’s the same resilience that the Germans demonstrated when Churchill bombed Dresden. Brother was fighting brother in that horrible war, and they both had the stiff upper lip.
Eighty years later and three thousand miles east, Tehran took the same beating from American and Israeli aircraft, and the people underneath it behaved like they’d read the same manual. NPR ran a diary straight from a Tehran resident living through nightly bombardment, and what came through wasn’t hysteria; it was routine wrapped around terror that sounded exactly like the British during the bombing of London.
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