Frederick Glover’s Error

The Emerald Isle has a long history of brilliant writers and poets, but Ireland’s most important literary contribution to the world is the medieval annals.

The late Herman Hoeh of Ambassador College once noted that “Irish history is the only literature which specifically connects Israel with its past.”

After Assyria carried the northern tribes of Israel away captive between 721 and 718 b.c., these 10 tribes lost their identity. Only the Jews and the Irish possess historical records tracing their origin all the way back to Moses and the Exodus. Yet Ireland’s records were corrupted by Roman Catholic annalists trying to make it look like the Irish descended from Magog rather than Israel. A few prominent Renaissance writers—including Henry Spelman, John Sadler and Vincenzo Galilei—realized this error. Still the Hebrew origin of the British race, and the Davidic origins of the British royal family, did not become widely known until the mid-19th century.

At some point in the 1840s, an English churchman named Frederick Robert Augustus Glover attended a series of Bible lectures by John Wilson, author of Our Israelitish Origin. After learning that the British people were descended from the lost tribes of Israel, Glover began a deep study into the history of the British royal family. He knew God had promised David a perpetual scepter and that the British royal family descended from the high kings of ancient Ireland. He dug into the annals.

Blending Two Queens, Two Kings

After much research, Glover found two poems in the Metrical Dindshenchas, one about the coming of the agreeable Tea, the other about the coming of the mysterious Tephi. Since these poems flow together as if there were no time break, Glover assumed that Tea and Tephi were one individual. And since the second poem called Tephi the daughter of the pharaoh, he believed Tea-Tephi was one of the daughters of Zedekiah whom the Prophet Jeremiah had escorted into Egypt (Jeremiah 41:10).

Glover understood that Jeremiah had been commissioned to build a kingdom (Jeremiah 1:10). He identified Jeremiah with the Irish lawgiver Ollav Fola, who he claimed had been confused with Tea’s husband. Glover published his findings in an 1860 book titled The Remnant of Judah and The Israel of Ephraim; The Two Families Under One Head. Later authors, such as A. B. Grimaldi and W. M. H. Milner, used Glover’s findings to create genealogical charts.

The various books and charts produced by the British-Israelite movement are based on the biblical truth that Jeremiah planted a daughter of Zedekiah in the British Isles. Yet they all contain a major flaw, which the late Herbert W. Armstrong explained: “Modern literature of those who recognize our national identity has confused this Tea-Tephi, a daughter of Zedekiah, with an earlier Tea, a daughter of Ith, who lived in the days of David” (The United States and Britain in Prophecy). In other words, Glover conflated two queens separated by centuries.

Numerous Irish annals identify Tea as the granddaughter of Ith and the wife of her first cousin Herremon. You cannot consider her Zedekiah’s daughter without deleting her recorded ancestors. Yet Tephi is the “daughter” of the pharaoh and the wife of Camson (who is not in the traditional Irish king’s lists). She could easily be Zedekiah’s daughter, who spent years in Egypt.

Because Glover blended Tea with Tephi, he also blended Tea’s husband with Tephi’s husband. Mr. Armstrong continued, “The royal husband of the Hebrew princess [Tea-Tephi] was given the title Herremon upon ascending the throne of his father. This Herremon has usually been confused with a much earlier Gede the Herremon in David’s day—who married his Uncle Ith’s daughter Tea” (ibid).

What caused Glover to make this mistake? Mr. Armstrong never commented on why four centuries of recorded history was ignored, but Gerald Flurry strongly feels Glover made this mistake because Gede and Tea were righteous monarchs who taught the same message as Jeremiah, Tephi and Ailill the Herremon. The ollavs who recorded the medieval Metrical Dindshenchas also skipped over these centuries in their poetry, making it seem like Tephi was Tea’s successor (which she was, spiritually speaking). Mr. Flurry noted that God had to prepare Ireland for Jeremiah, and He did this largely by having Gede and Tea lay a foundation in the days of David. Some of the kings between Gede the Herremon and Ailill the Herremon chipped away at this foundation, but Jeremiah was still able to point people back to Tea and Gede as he built the nation’s Davidic culture.

Getting the Chronology Right

Numerous authorities recognize the chronology that Roderick O’Flaherty outlined in his 1685 work Ogygia as the most accurate. The Annals of the Four Masters is unreliable because its chronology was expanded to make it appear that Irish history commenced centuries earlier than it actually did.

Ancient Ireland was divided into several kingships, each with its own sovereign who was related by blood to the other royal families. Yet these kings were normally under the authority of a high king who was elected from among the nobility of Ireland during the Feis of Tara. Yet since each king usually ruled much longer over his own kingship or country than as high king, Catholic annalists stretched out Irish history by applying the number of years each king reigned in his own kingdom to his reign as high king. Thus, the Four Masters say Sirna the Long-Lived reigned as high king for 150 years. Long-lived indeed! O’Flaherty more correctly gave him 21 years.

Since O’Flaherty recorded that Sirna was king when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, the most likely throne name of Tephi’s husband Camson is Ailill Olcháin, a son of Sirna whose descendants went on to become kings in Ireland, Scotland and England.

Glover correctly recognized that the Catholic annalists had overextended Irish history. But in his attempts to shorten the chronologies, he ended up erasing the history of Ireland that transpired between the time of King David and King Zedekiah.

The medieval genealogies show that King Eochaid, whom they call Ollav Fola, was the son of Fíacha Fínscothach and the great-great-great-great-nephew of Queen Tea’s husband. Given this ancestry, clearly King Eochaid is not the same person as Jeremiah; the Hebrew prophet who traveled from Jerusalem was obviously not in the line of Irish royalty. Glover was correct in recognizing that Ollav Fola and Eochaid were two different people. He proved that Ollav Fola was not a king but was, in fact, Jeremiah. The achievements of Ollav Fola need to be distinguished from those of King Eochaid.

However, Glover thought Eochaid was of the Herremon line and was the husband of Tephi. Aside from the fact that this erases all the generations between Gede the Herremon, husband of Tea, and Ailill Olcháin, husband of Tephi, this cannot be, because the genealogies clearly show that Eochaid’s descendants did not become kings of Scotland and England. So that would nullify the unbroken Davidic royal line.

The annals are not perfect, and Mr. Armstrong admitted that you have to keep “the facts of biblical history and prophecy in mind” when you “sift out the legend from the true history in studying ancient Irish annals” (ibid). There are occasional misplaced kings in the genealogies, but deleting 400 years of history destroys the “only literature” that “connects Israel with its past.”

The annals of Ireland are not mere legend and oral tradition. King Cormac mac Airt, the same Irish high king who later disseminated The Psalter of Tara, also published a book called The Chronicles of Ireland, compiled from written records going back to the time of Ollav Fola. The same poem series that Glover used to learn about Queen Tea and Queen Tephi says these Chronicles of Ireland contain “all the best we have of history.”

Sadly, they were lost during the Middle Ages, and the histories written afterward were of lesser quality. But the general outline of Irish history has been preserved and is without need of major revision.