It is also a remarkable fact that a few hundred years after Joel had delivered his message of condemnation to Tyre and Sidon, that the people of one of these Grecian states, the Lacedemonians or Spartans, claimed relationship with Israel as children of Abraham, and had their claim allowed, and still more remarkable in the light of poetical justice, that these Lacedemonians were the ones used by Alexander the Great in the destruction of Tyre, and in the fulfillment of the words of the Lord through Joel: "Behold I will raise them out of the place whither ye have sold them, and will return your recompense upon your own head" (_Joel iii:7_). It would appear that the sons destroyed the cities that had sold their fathers into captivity. The fact that these Lacedemonians did claim kindred with Israel, is narrated both by Josephus and the author of the First Book of Maccabees. The writers of both histories give a synopsis of the letter sent by Oreus, king of the Lacedemonians, to Onias, the High Priest of Israel. The two accounts agree very closely. Josephus gives the opening clause of the king's letter in these terms: "We have met with a certain writing whereby we have discovered that both Jews and Lacedemonians are of one stock, and are derived from the kindred of Abraham." In the book of Maccabees it runs as follows: "It is found in writing that the Spartans and Jews are brethren, and come out of the generation of Abraham." (_I Mac. xii_.) The Jews admitted the relationship in a letter full of sentiments of friendship and brotherhood, sent by a special embassy to the Spartan court. This letter is given in full in _I. Maccabees, chap. xii_. In neither history is any hint given as to which branch of Abraham's family the records showed that the Lacedemonians belonged, but from their rigid virtue and honesty, and their near approach to the united order in their daily lives, it is presumable that they had not been long separate from a people in whose midst the law of the true God was known and observed.