Yes. Obviously yes. Short of relocating eighty-five million Turks, their army and their borders to Siberia, the ground Ezekiel named sits inside Turkey and will keep sitting there.

Beth-togarmah was a fortified town the Assyrians called Til-garimmu, on the frontier between Kammanu and Tabal, in the highlands above the upper Euphrates. Today that spot is Gürün, in Sivas province. Anyone can drive there. Rock-cut caves and Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions in the Şuğul canyon are most of what the ground has yielded; almost everything else we know comes from Hittite and Assyrian tablets rather than from excavation.

So the question answers itself, and the interesting part starts one sentence later.

Til-garimmu sold horses. Ezekiel names it twice, and the first time it is nobody’s enemy: in chapter 27 it turns up at Tyre’s fairs with horses, war horses and mules, doing business. Sennacherib burned it around 695 BCE. When the prophet wrote the name into chapter 38, roughly a century later, the town itself was long gone. The name survived as a people and a region, the way Babylon survives now.

That gap is worth holding onto, because the modern equation skips it. Ezekiel did not write “Turkey.” He wrote a place name. The Turks were not in Anatolia when he wrote it and would not arrive for another fifteen centuries. The town spoke Luwian, answered to Assyria, and belonged to a Neo-Hittite world with no descendant in Ankara. Between Til-garimmu and the Republic of Turkey there is no continuity of language, people, religion, or state. What carries over is the terrain, and nothing else.

Compare Persia. Iran occupies the same ground, its people are largely the same stock, the language descends from the same root, and the country was called Persia until 1935. That identification carries weight the Togarmah one does not, and the two sit side by side in the same verse as though they were equivalent.

Then there is the accident of the map itself. When the Ottoman Empire lost the First World War, the victors imposed the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, which carved it up and handed much of eastern Anatolia........

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