Santa Rosa City Representative Dan Fernandez is flirting with – or maybe seriously entertaining – the idea that the Philippines is the land of Ophir, a biblical region or port that is supposedly rich in gold.

Its exact location is unknown, but a quick search on Facebook would indicate that it has caught the attention of conspiracy theorists in the Philippines.

In his speech, Fernandez said:

• a Spanish colonial document in the Archivo General de Indias from the 16th century states that to reach Ophir, one must sail from the Cape of Good Hope in Africa to India all the way to a group of islands opposite China that was rich in gold;
• that the Philippines has the second largest gold deposit in the world after Africa;
• that the Tagalog baybayin is similar to Hebrew, the primary language of the Bible, which mentions Ophir numerous times.

This guy might be on some good stuff. This shit deserves a three-part series depicting a group of lost Jews and their epic journey. They face life-threatening adventures, but are saved due to the interventions and guidance of the angel Gagoni, tasked by g’d to guide these lost ones to the promised lands of Ophir to the far east.

On a more serious note, while the first two points are somewhat acceptable, it’s the last one that’s pains me. Unless he’s willing to say that every writing system that has developed along the belt from Morocco to Israel, to India, all the way to the Philippines are all descended from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, itself an ancestor of the Hebrew alphabet as we know it, then… Yeah! I’d sooner believe that the Japanese language is an Austronesian language though.