To a fundamentalist, there was kind of a “well, duh” reaction to this recent headline:
It’s scarcely surprising to learn that members of an ethno-religious group — whose ancient scriptures advocate endogamy and proscribe marrying outside the group — would be genetically similar. What I didn’t realize, however, was that some revisionist historians have cast doubt on the Biblical geneaology of the Jews:
The two genome surveys . . . refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.
So, for those of you keeping score:
Genesis, Exodus, etc. . . . . . 1
Revisionist historians . . . . 0
UPDATE: If you go back and read Genesis, you find that when Abraham’s son was ready to marry, Abraham — a native of Mesopotamia, which is modern Iraq — was horrified to think that his son Isaac would be married to a woman from one of the tribes of Canaan. So Abraham sent his servant back to Mesopotamia, where he found Rebekah — who, as it turned out, was the granddaughter of Abraham’s brother Nahor. So it was that Isaac married his own cousin or, to be geneaologically specific, his first cousin once removed. (Genesis 24.)
This custom was continued into the next generation, when Isaac forbade Jacob to marry a Canaanite woman, sending him to take a wife from “the daughters of Laban thy mother’s sister.” (Genesis 28). In one of the famous stories of the Bible, Jacob fell in love with Rachel but was tricked into also marrying her older sister Leah. Jacob fathered children by both wives, as well as by their servant girls Bilhah and Zilpah (Genesis 29-30). Jacob’s children were the original patriarchs of the “Twelve Tribes” of Israelites. By the time they entered Egypt, they numbered just “70 souls” but in the course of just a few generations they became so numerous that the Egyptian pharoah feared them (Exodus 1).
Given that Jacob was the ancestor of all of them, and that most of the 12 patriarchs were also the sons of Rachel and Leah — sisters who were Jacob’s cousins — then the original pattern of endogamy would have created very distinctive genetic traits among these Israelites. The sojourn in Egypt lasted 430 years (Exodus 12:40) during which they were socially distinct, marrying amongst themselves.
By the time of the first numbering at Mt. Sinai (Numbers 1), there were more than 600,000 Israelite men of military age — all descended from the line of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and, for the most part, also matrilineally descended from Abraham’s family via Leah and Rachel. At any rate, all were descended from those original “70 souls” and, the custom of marrying within the group being well-established, you can see what a genetically close-knit tribe it was that made its way through the Wilderness back to Canaan.
If they increased from “70 souls” to 600,000 men of war — counting women, children and old men, certainly well more than 2 million total — in less than 500 years, these Exodus-era Israelites would have left a large, clear genetic “brand” among their descendants. Even allowing for intermarriage and assimilation of converts, the DNA traits of the patriarchs would remain clearly evident, and this is what recent research appears to verify.
Why would revisionist historians wish to imagine that this biblical geneaology was false? Why would Professor Sand assert that “Jews have no common origin”? Very simple:
Professor Sand . . . candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past.
Tough luck, Professor. I believe the word is, “Oy!”
