Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Abraham's Ancestry-An Amazing Journey Through Time and Geography

 Nadene Goldfoot                                            

     The Garden of Eden, 5,783 years ago according to the Bible,  where Adam and Eve came from, was the factory.  It seems that it was located on the land mass of Africa, where so many bones of various eras of development have been found. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa from Homo heidelbergensis. They co-existed for a long time in Europe and the Middle East with the Neanderthals, and possibly with Homo erectus in Asia and Homo floresiensis in Indonesia, but are now the only surviving human species, the first we know about named in the bible:  Adam and Eve.  

Adam was made, according to the Bible, in the image of G-d from the dust of the earth on the 6th day of creation which was the last work day of G-d because the 7th was his day of rest. .  His duty was the dominion over the rest of the animals on earth.  Eve was created out of one of Adam's ribs and was intended as a help/a partner for Adam, definitely a help in the creation of more humans.   Adam and Eve's first children were Cain and Abel. Seth was the 3rd child and lived for 912 years. The sons of Seth were the nomadic Sutho, shepherds,  tribes mentioned in the neighborhood of the Palestine-Syria frontier in about the 15th century BCE. It was Balaam (Num.24:17) who mentioned them.   They seem to have been related to the Hebrews.  They could be Abraham's cousins.    Cain killed Abel, the example of fighting between the nomadic shepherd and the settled agriculturalist.  Cain was accidentally killed by his own blind grandson, Lamech.  .  

Abraham, the ancestor of Jews and their cousins, today's Muslims, are well documented in the Torah and its extension, the whole Tanakh.  His name was Abram and he lived in about 1948 BCE, born in Ur on the Tigris River of the Chaldees.  

Abram's father was Terah and mother was Amathlai of Haran whose parents were  Nahor and Iyoska, going back:  Serug and Milcah, Reu, Peleg, Eber, Shelah, Arpachshad, Shem, and finally, Noah. 


Noah's story is that he saved his family including his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth,  by building an ark or ship before the great flood, and they managed for 40 days on it, landing on new land. If his father, Lamech and mother, Adah,  were alive, they were with Noah.  Lamech's father was Methuselah who lived for a very long time.  His father was Enoch, and was remembered in stories about Noah.    He had loaded it with all the animals he was familiar with, for he didn't know where they'd land and what lay before him. From his sons sprang the 1st 70 people (types or tribes) from whom humanity was derived.  This can also be read somewhat in the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh, an epic that contains a parallel flood story with the hero called Utnapishtim.  many midrashic stories were woven around the story of Noah.  Therefore, we now have humanity moved to Turkey as hunters and gatherers of food.  


This goes along with my father's Y haplogroup line of  Q's (QBZ67).  The origin was said to be in Siberia, Mongolia and parts of Turkey.  It's an ancient Jewish line-of which today is 5% of 0.02% of the world population, a very small group of men. Does this mean that they are one of the oldest groups of males that can trace back to Noah? 

Q-M242-his genetic title originally;  is believed to have arisen around the Altai Mountains area (or South Central Siberia), approximately 17,000 to 31,700 years ago. However, the matter remains unclear due to limited sample sizes and changing definitions of Haplogroup Q: early definitions used a combination of the SNPs M242, P36.2, and MEH2 as defining mutations.)    

J1, the Cohen gene,this haplogroup evolved ~ 20,000 years ago somewhere in northwestern Iran, the Caucasus, the Armenian Highland, and northern Mesopotamia. The major branch-J1a1a1-P58-evolved during the early Holocene ~ 9500 years ago somewhere in the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and southern Mesopotamia.) This seems to be the landing site of Noah's Ark as well.                  

     The Middle East, and landing on Mt. Ararat:  The Garden of Eden could have come from Egypt for it's a country on Africa.  The Ark could have sailed over the Mediterranean onto Turkey during the Flood. Iraq was the scene of the tower of Babel of Babylon.   

Even I must use Noah in our genealogy history, for he landed on Mt. Ararat, thought to be  located in extreme northeastern Turkey, near the borders with Iran and Armenia.  Nevertheless, Mount Ararat is traditionally considered the resting place of Noah's Ark, and, thus, considered a biblical mountain. Mount Ararat has been associated with the Genesis account since the 11th century, and Armenians began to identify it as the ark's landing place during that time.  

That's where Abram, later called Abraham's ancestors came from.  They had come from the East and he had migrated west to Canaan with his family which included Terah, his father, and his wife, Sarai, later called Sarah. Sarah was his niece, which shows that they did marry into their own family.  Siblings did not marry in Abraham's group, though, like the Egyptian royalty did.    

The beautiful plan of creation included giving male humans DNA that could be traced back to their beginning roots.  Abraham was the ancestor of Moses, born in 1391 BCE to Amram and Jochebed. Amram's father was Kohath, and went back to Levi, son of Jacob whose name changed to Israel, father of 12 sons who became the 12 Tribes of Israel.  Their DNA line is J1, called the Cohen gene, coming direct from Aaron, brother of Moses who would have been J1 as well.  Jacob's father was Isaac whose father was Abraham.  

                                Sarah with Hagar, her handmaid

 Abraham had a child with Hagar, Sarah's handmaid when Sarah was very old, past child-bearing age. Then she surprised everyone and did get pregnant and had Isaac.   The child Abraham had with Hagar was  called Ishmael. Hagar took her son and left the family due to all the in-fighting of the children, Ishmael and Isaac going on.  

Isaac,  Abraham's son by Sarah  had twins, Jacob and Esau.   Jacob's fraternal twin, Esau,  fought with Jacob, having the opposite type of personality.  They were even enemies.  Esau left the family group and married with Others not related.  Jacob had fled to Haran and stayed there for 20 years before connecting with his brother once more.  The three most important men in our Jewish history were Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  

How do people remember such facts, especially names?  We saw this happening in the Black tribe mentioned in the book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a 1976 novel written by Alex Haley. It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, and transported to North America; it follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley.   

  Haley spent the last chapter of the book describing his research in archives and libraries to support his family's oral tradition with written records. If Haley's family line remembered facts orally, I believe ours could have used this method as well, possibly combined with written. If you're interested in your family, read this book, whoever you are.       

Abraham's journey can be tracked by oral history and today's DNA.  That way we can see who he has left behind as descendants.                             

Resource:

Tanakh, Stone Edition

https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/homo-sapiens-modern-humans/#:~:text=Homo%20sapiens%20evolved%20in%20Africa,the%20only%20surviving%20human%20species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roots:_The_Saga_of_an_American_Family

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33758277/#:~:text=We%20show%20that%20this%20haplogroup,the%20Levant%2C%20and%20southern%20Mesopotamia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_Q-M242


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