Sons of Japheth – Meshech
Meshech, the name of Japheth’s fifth son, who along with Tubal, appears in the annals of Assyria under the names Tabali and Mushki. They were their enemies and are seldom named without some of the others – Tubal, Javan, Gog, and Magog. Ezekiel mentions Meshech several times, once as involved in the trade of Tyre in vessels of brass and slaves and in association with Javan ad Tubal.
Prism Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser I, king of Assyria, around 1100 b.c. tells of fighting five kings of the Mushki. The Mushki appear in the records of other kings of Assyria, but most often in the Annals and Pavement Inscriptions of Sargon II (722-705). In these records, a certain Mita, king of the Mushki, is a very formidable adversary of Sargon. The Assyrians tell of military alliances being formed, along with border fortresses being erected, to punish these warlike people. After long years and many battles, Mita is forced to submit and pay tribute to Assyria.
A region that surrounds the city of Moscow is called the Meschera Lowland to this day. Given the general area and the similarity in names from different languages, the name “Moscow,” the capital city of Russia, is believed by some to have taken its name from the region that surrounds the city. However, Henry Wallace in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia proposes that these descendants dwelt somewhere in the neighborhood of Armenia. Despite the difficulty in determining the exact boundaries of this descendant, it is clear that the names continued to be identified with peoples living in this northern region dwelt south or west of Magog. Japheth and his descendants, then, occupied the continent of Europe and the Northwestern part of Asia.