Scythian meaning

Meaning

Archer, Shooter, [Nobel Savage]

Darkling

Etymology

From skuda, archer.

From σκοτος (skotos), darkness or gloom.

Related names

• Via σκοτος (skotos): Scotland

The name Scythians refers to a vast nomadic, tribal herdsmen and mounted archer warrior people that lived on the steppes north of the Black Sea, in what today is Ukraine and southern Russia. They had originated somewhere east of modern Iran, spoke a language closely related to Persian, and were driven west by the Medes during the same period of upheaval in the 6th century BC that saw the Jews deported to Babylon and rise to prominence in Persia. The original Scythians became the oppressive overlords of countless local peoples, who adopted their invading masters' lifestyle and ethnonym. For any Greco-Roman alive during the second temple period, the name Scythian corresponded to anything dark, mysterious and strangely sophisticated in a barbaric sort of way, in the dark unknown expanse east of Germania and north of Greece, Parthia and Persia.

The original Scythians were master craftsmen but had no temples, they had rulers but no capitals. They were indicative of an ancient lifestyle that had been normal prior to the rise of the cities or even the palatial estates: remnants of the world as it was before the Bronze Age Collapse (1177 BC), during which the modern world was created and which was told of in urgent portent by the great foundational texts of the Levant — Homer's epics and Moses' story of the Exodus tell of the same events but from different perspectives, namely the collapse of the illiterate old world and the rise of literate new one (see our articles on YHWH, Troas, Aeneas and Phoenicia).

From the late seventh century on, the Greeks began to make inroads into Scythian lands, built small towns around trading posts but submitted to Scythian authority and traded in respectful peace. That caused a wave of Greek influence on the Scythians, who absorbed their wine and pottery and paid for that in beautifully crafted gold artifacts that in turn cemented their legendary status in Europe. They introduced iron to the region, and body armor. Peoples they conquered were sold as slaves to peoples they traded with, and their destructive raids into Europe were widely feared and may have reached as far as Iberia.

Particularly the city of Athens created colonies in Scythian lands, on the northern Black Sea coast, and in turn employed Scythian mounted archers for their home army. The lengthy war between Persia and Greece, that started in the late 6th century BCE and lasted until the victory of Alexander the Great, also extended into the Scythian lands where Athens had set up shop. This destabilized the relation between the Greeks and the Scythians, and also further reduced the traditional identity of the Scythians, who became ever more "modern" and federated their tribes into a centralized kingdom to withstand the rise of competing empires and began to establish cities to complement their vast rural population. The Greeks remained loyal customers of the Scythians, however, who supplied them with grain, animals and slaves, especially when the Greek mainland had erupted in war (between Athens and Sparta mostly) and local agricultural production largely ceased.

In a way that was doubtlessly recognizable to traditional Jews in the first century CE, in the fifth century BCE the Scythian realm began to destabilize when Hellenized Scythians began to rival traditional ones. The Hellenized Scythians had less trouble relating to the neighbors, and were economically more successful, but were resented by the traditional Scythians who controlled the military. That in combination with waves of migrants, the formation of Alexander's empire and the rise of Egypt as a supplier of grain to Europe caused the Scythian phenomenon to contract and fade and slowly disappear from the historic records. Small enclaves of self-identifying Scythians held out until the formation of the Roman Empire, but more in name than in any other way.

By the first century CE, the name Scythian was used pretty much in the same loose and legendary way as the term Hun was in medieval times — or even later: in the First World War, the allies would refer to the Germans as barbaric and beastly Huns. So when Paul used the ethnonym Scythian (in Colossians 3:11 only), he did so in a grand proverbial sweep sort of way in which we moderns would refer to Celts or Indians or anybody from a fabulous but faded time of romanticized glory and autonomy: the proverbial Noble Savage to contrast the equally proverbial Jew (including the "Persian" Pharisees) and the Greco-Roman non-Jew, who was nevertheless someone of considerable refinement and recognizable sophistication (see our article on the many Hebrew roots of Greek).

The Assyrians referred to the early Scythians as Askuzai, and reported the Cimmerians among the people the Askuzai displaced. These two peoples appear in the Bible as Ashkenaz and his "father" Gomer (son of Japheth, son of Noah: Genesis 10:3), which is rather remarkable because from the name Ashkenaz we get the Ashkenazi Jews, the Yiddish-speaking northern European counterpart of the southern Sephardic Jews.

To the Greek, the name Σκυθης (Skuthes) would probably have reminded of the noun σκοτος (skotos), darkness or gloom, which also happens to be identical to the ethnonym Scotsman, which in turn suggests that the Scots may have been named after the Scythians. Other important names that mean "darkling" are Amraphel (i.e. Hammurabi, the famous law-giver), Bezalel (the creator of the Ark of the Covenant), Kedar (one of the few surviving sons of Ishmael) and Lilith (the haunting witch of the night).

But whatever the truth of that, our name Scythian is an endonym: a name by which the Scythians referred to themselves — that is to say: Scythian is Latin-derived English for what the Greeks called Σκυθης (Skuthes), which in turn derived from something that sounded like skuda, which derives from the Proto-Indo-European root "skewd", to drive, propel, push or advance. Our English word "scythe" has nothing to do with this root (it stems from PIE "sek-", to cut), but it may be (experts are divided) that our English verb "to shoot" indeed does. This would be convenient because skuda indeed means archer: someone who shoots arrows from a bow.

In Paul's time, the name Scythian was deployed in reference to the Nobel Savage but literally means Shooter. And since in antiquity all shooting was done with bows and arrows, it more specifically means Archer.

In our article on the familiar term Rabbi, we explain the link between ραββι (rabbi), meaning great (i.e. much/many) one, and the noun רב (rab), archer, who rarely shot alone and usually with a great many colleagues who caused an entire cloud (νεφελη, nephele) of arrows to fly to their target. Sometimes that target was an enemy that had to be defeated (Ephesians 6:16), but frequently the objective of archers was to send messages or signals across large distances (1 Samuel 20:20). Closely associated to the noun רב (rab), archer, is the verb ירה (yara), to throw, cast or shoot but in great numbers so that a great many impulses bring about a unified effect. Noun מורה (moreh) means both rain and teacher. Noun תורה (tora) refers to any set of instructions (hence the familiar word Torah).

Archers who were mounted were equipped lightly to move fast. Arrows were unique in that they were long distance weapons (spears are for defense rather than for throwing), and although archers were often decisive in battle, they didn't actually partake in hand to hand combat, and their role had often more to do with intelligence and information management than with the actual fight.

Also in our article on Rabbi, we discuss that the Greek word for bow, namely τοξον (toxon), was not used to refer to the rainbow (ιρις, iris), but the Hebrew word for bow, namely קשת (qeshet), certainly was. Even in antiquity it was known that the rainbow happened upon the "marriage" of light and water, and nobody in the original audience of John the Revelator would have missed his many puns: from the (first) white horseman, whose signature attribute was a bow (6:2), to the rainbow around God's throne (4:3).

Salvation is from the Jews; this is beyond dispute (John 4:22, Zechariah 8:23, Isaiah 2:3). And around the point of intersection of realities — of the reality of what was, what is and what will be — which is where God meets man, there was built first the tabernacle, which grew out into the Temple of YHWH. The Jews are native to that temple and to the community with God, and because of the enormous influence of the Semitic Phoenicians on the Greek language and its subsequent mythological vocabulary, the Greeks became sort of native too (see Genesis 9:27, Al-Hahf 18.18, and our articles on the noun κυων, kuon and the name Caleb, the friend of Joshua).

The Second Temple is signified by a great Outer Court, called the Court of the Nations (and see Genesis 18:18, Haggai 2:7 and Revelation 22:2), so yes, this will one day cover the entire earth. But for now, the Outer Court divides the Inner Court, where saints have routine communion with the deity, from the outer darkness where wild animals and lawless people live. Any native of the wild animal world who somehow feels wrong and misplaced, and wants to leave the wilderness, to seek community with God, cannot simply do so, because intercourse with God is accomplished via the Word (John 14:6), which consists of language and that has to be learned. Animals don't speak, cannot speak and will not ever begin to comprehend what it might be like to speak like a human. Any animal that can, is not an animal.

The Outer Court is for misplaced people who were born lost in the outer darkness but who heard the Voice calling them out and onto the light. These people will first enter the Outer Court, where friendly and willing saints catch them and calm them down and walk them patiently through their ABC's (Matthew 21:12, John 10:22). There they will teach them the concept of regularities — those strangely invisible rules via which everything works and that binds all things together: nature but also language and hence the entire human κοσμος (kosmos).

Contrary to what is commonly believed, the Ark of the Covenant was not simply a box that contained the record of one specific covenant but rather symbolized the concept of the Covenant: any and all binding legal contract that binds people together in ways that exceeds any physical force or emotion, that is entirely supernatural and sits as the most crucial condition at the very heart of all modern humanity. Contrary to what is commonly believed, the Ark was never lost (Revelation 11:19).