!JACOB, ISRAEL of TSWA(PYGMY) PEOPLE!

"The pygmoid Tswa people, who reside in the Zairian province of Equator, tell a . . . legend of the sainted ancestor who ascended to the sky. His name is DJAKOBA; his diminutive descendents call themselves the "children of Djakoba," as Schebesta reported. Hebrew Ya'akoba or English JACOB was the original name of Israel, the first Israelite, who sired the famous Children of Israel. After his death, according to the legends in the Hebrew Talmud, Jacob or Israel went to live in the moon.

The Tswa "Children of Jacob" piously maintain that God or a spiritual force somehow intervened on their behalf to divide a body of water. This fragmentary and poorly understood tradition is summarised in Schebesta's description of "elima, the vital force that parted the water(?)." His text explains that Elima probably represented the original Tswa "name of the supreme being, thus of God." In the Efe language, ilani or ila is energy, force, power, or strength. The Pygmies use this word to describe any form of energy. Ila'tado, "pulling energy," is the Efe name for the magnetic force embodied in lodestones. Pygmies who have seen magnets explain that these devices operate by the same principle, Such enormously abstract concepts and words are commonplace among the vast ostensibly "savage" Pygmies. Ilani or ila demonstrates the vast antiquity and importance of these concepts: Old Norse elijan, energy; Anglo-Saxon ellen, strength; Hebrew el or il, a strong and mighty one, a hero, a god, God, Arabic ilah, God; Al-ilah, the God, "Allah"; Phoenician elonim or elim, Hebrew elohim, god or gods; Tswa elima, the vital force or God.

Genesis 1:1 proclaims in Hebrew that Elohim created the hevens and the earth, after which the deity recited the "Let ther be" formula. The book of Exodus give a rousing account of the journey accomplished by the children of ISrael through the divinely parted waters. The pygmoid "Children of Jacob" are better known as the Tswa, a name that illustrates their close connections with the Sua Pygmies of the southern Ituri and the pygmoid Twa people of Zaire, Burundi, Rwanda and the bordering regions of western Uganda, where a few upre-blooded Pygmy bands survive on the eastern side of the Mountains of the Moon. Egyptian records dating back to the sixth dynasty describe the Pygmies as a semi-legendary people of the far southland or equatorial :land of trees and spirits" near the Mountains of the Moon. E.A. Wallis Budge verigies that the Pygmies were undoubtedly well known to the predynastic Egyptians. The Pygmies by any stretch of the imagination be interpreted as the descendents of Hebrews or Israelites who departed from Egypt no earlier that the fiteenth century B.C. or during ANY period of Egyptian history."

- "Pygmy Kitabu", p. 113-114