How Our Ancestors Developed: Comparing the Story of Noah to Today's DNA Findings

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                   

                          The three sons of Noah-We come from Shem.

I'm sitting pretty.  I admire and respect our history as told in the Torah, told to us by Moses who wrote it almost 3,000 years ago.  Knowing, as the teacher I am, that DNA is a brand new science and that we are just finding out more about ourselves, I am in awe at the similarities in our two resources.

Take for instance, the story of Noah, which is told to us by Moses.  We've discovered that clay tiles also tell a most similar story, found in Elba, an ancient city in Mesopotamia, near Ur, where Abraham was said to have come from.  Noah's story tells us that a man named Eber was the ancestor of both Abraham and Joktan.  I already knew that Abraham's father was Terah, as told in Genesis with Abraham.    Abraham was the ancestor of the Jewish people and Joktan was the ancestor of the Arabs.  

         

Arabs will also tell you that Esau, twin brother of Isaac, is the father of the Arabs.  They were not identical twins, and Esau was born first, but Jacob and their mother, Rebecca, managed to cheat Esau out of his rights as a first son.  It was so close-twins, only a matter of minutes.  The birth-right was a big deal, a way of deciding who inherited the father's rights and property.  It was to go to only one son in those days.  Esau, a hunter, and Jacob, the farmer and cook, continued through life with this deception that Esau could not overlook.  It is a way of explaining the problems we have today with the Palestinians, a 3,000 year old incident that hasn't been pardoned till about 3 years ago with the Abrahamic Accords signed with 4 new Arab states now, along with Egypt and Jordan.  Only back then, how did Moses know there would continue to be problems?  Well, we know.  G-d knew.  It's mind-blowing.  

The Abraham Accords are a series of treaties normalizing diplomatic relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, facilitated by the U.S. Administration[1] between August and December, 2020. In the span of five short months, these four Arab states joined Egypt and Jordan in making peace with Israel. The agreements were called “The Abraham Accords” in honor of Abraham - the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Here our connection goes back to Eber.  Eber was a great-grandson of Noah's son Shem and the father of Peleg, born when Eber was 34 years old, and of Joktan. He was the son of Shelah, a distant ancestor of Abraham. According to the Hebrew Bible, Eber died at the age of 464.  This is all found in Genesis, the table of nations, that explains all our connections to each other.  The Arabs are the distant cousins of the Jewish people no matter which reference you use.

70 Nations are said to have come from these 3 sons.  There were 80 descendants of Noah (Song of songs 6:8) include the 74 named in the Tanakh chart 1/2028 (including both Nimrod and Pelishtim) as well as Peleg's son Reu, his son Nahor, his son Terah, his sons Nahor and Haran. (Some omit Nimrod from the count of 70 and instead include Pelishtim (Philistines). 

What I know from DNA is that both males carry the J1, the Y haplotype, that Jews refer to as the Cohen gene. 3-Research shows that (J1) haplogroup makes about 72% of Yemen people, 34% of UAE people, 58% of Qatari people, 50% of Iraq people, 55% of Palestinian Arabs, 48% of Oman People, 34% of Tunisian, and 35% of Algerian. Rest of these countries populations is a mixture of Haplogroups. It's the gene that Aaron, brother of Moses, carried.  They Y haplogroup goes from father to son, on down the line, and has for these past 3,000 with only a few mutations that happen naturally.  

Where and when did the J1 start?  1-(J1) Haplogroup is believed to have been generated some 10,000 years ago south of the Levant and in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula (Source is National Geographic Genetic Project)

I'm Jewish.  My Jewish father's Y haplogroup is one of the others, Q, (QBZ67) to be exact.  I had seen that some Arabs also carry this,  in Marsh Arabs who are known as the descendants of ancient Sumerians. Approximately 2.5% (4/157: 3 Q*, 1 Q-M346) of males in Saudi Arabia belong to haplogroup.  Then they came from Sumer, site of the earliest known civilization, located in the southernmost part of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in the area that later became Babylonia and is now southern Iraq, from around Baghdad to the Persian Gulf.  Well of course;  Abraham was from Ur practically on the Euphrates River. What I found was Haplogroup Q is found predominantly in Central Siberia, Central Asia and among Native Americans. Approximately 90% of pre-Columbian Native Americans belonged to haplogroup Q, and all descend from the branch Q1a2a1 (L54), including various subclades of Q1a2a1a1 (M3) and Q1a2a1a2 (Z780). In Europe haplogroup Q is found chiefly in southern Sweden (5%), among Ashkenazi Jews (5%), and is various isolated pockets in central and Eastern Europe such as the Rhône-Alpes region of France, southern Sicily, southern Croatia, northern Serbia, parts of Poland and Ukraine. Šarić et al. (2013) also found 6.1% of haplogroup Q out of 412 samples from the island of Hvar in southern Croatia (accompanied by 2% of East Asian mtDNA haplogroup F).

• Q1b1a (L245): found in the Middle East, among the Jews, in Central Europe and in Sicily
• Q1b1a1 (L272.1): found in Sicily (probably Phoenician
• In a report published elsewhere, we recently showed that Jews and Palestinian Arabs share a large portion of their Y chromosomes, suggesting a common ancestry (Nebel et al. 2000). Surprisingly, in the present study, Jews were found to be even closer to populations in the northern part of the Middle East than to several Arab populations. It is worth mentioning that, on the basis of protein polymorphisms, most Jewish populations cluster very closely with Iraqis (Livshits et al. 1991) and that the latter, in turn, cluster very closely with Kurds (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). These findings are consistent with known cultural links that existed among populations in the Fertile Crescent in early history.

One must remember that Iraq is the land of Mesopotamia, with Sumer, Babylon, Ur-home of Abraham.   

We are said to be the closest to the Kurds in DNA.  

Some Western Jews belong to Q-M378 as well. Q-M378's subbranch Q-L245's subclades Q-Y2200 and Q-YP1035 are the only varieties of haplogroup Q that are found in Ashkenazi Jews. Citizen scientists found that some Sephardic Jews carry different subclades of Q-L245, including Q-BZ3900, Q-YP745, and Q-YP1237.

                                         

Resource:

http://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-y-haplogroup-movements-of-people.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-DNA_haplogroups_in_populations_of_the_Near_East

http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2017/03/pashtos-of-afghanistan-and-pakistan-and.html

https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/arabian-ydna-j1-project/about/results#:~:text=3%2DResearch%20shows%20that%20(J1,is%20a%20mixture%20of%20Haplogroups.

Tanakh, Stone Edition

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

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