Nadene Goldfoot
Abram, later called Abraham, was born in the city of Ur of the Chaldees, a Babylonian city, near the Euphrates River and the Persian Gulf. He was said to be related to the Moabites. Ur has become very well excavated land by Sir Leonard Woolley who found it had a highly-civilized nature of the city in Abraham's time.
Ruth, a Moabite, married into his family line. She had married the son of Naomi, a woman who was married to Elimelech, son of Nahshon, son of Amminadab, son of Ram or "Aram, "son of Hezron, son of Perez, son of Judah!
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The son of Naomi was Mahlon. She had another son named Chilion. Mahlon, Chilion, Naomi and Ruth were living in Moab and Mahlon was killed.
Naomi decided to return to her land and Ruth insisted on accompanying her. The two women cared for each other and really didn't want to part. Naomi was in need of the help Ruth was giving her.
They returned and eventually Naomi realized that Ruth was still young and could benefit from another marriage. She had a cousin that was not married; Boaz. Naomi made a shidduch and Boaz married Ruth.
Boaz and Ruth had a son, Oved/Obed. He married a lady and their son was Jesse. Jesse married a daughter of Ithra and they had 8 children.
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The 8th was David, who grew up to become David, King of Israel. Here David's ancestor was a Moabite, people he wound up fighting against later in his life.
Moab was a country in Southern Transjordan, and that area was populated by Arabs; taken over by Prince Abdullah of Arabia who brought in his contingent of his own followers to live with him in his new land of Transjordan, renamed later to Jordan. Today, Moab is part of southern Jordan. The existence of the Kingdom of Moab is attested to by numerous archaeological findings, most notably the Mesha Stele, which describes the Moabite victory over an unnamed son of King Omri of Israel, an episode also noted in 2 Kings 3. The Moabite capital was Dibon. According to the Hebrew Bible, Moab was often in conflict with its Israelite neighbours to the west. (Amazing that the same thing has continued into this day and age.)
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Rashi explains the word Mo'ab to mean "from the father", since ab in Hebrew and Arabic and the rest of the Semitic languages means "father". He writes that as a result of the immodesty of Moab's name, God did not command the Israelites to refrain from inflicting pain upon the Moabites in the manner in which he did with regard to the Ammonites. Fritz Hommel regards Moab as an abbreviation of Immo-ab = Immoab="his mother is his father." Oh yes, The story is that Lot got drunk and fathered his 2 daughters' sons, Ammon and Moab. Their DNA should reflect this somehow but now? We're already carrying some DNA from Moabites, for sure.
The Moabites first inhabited the rich highlands at the eastern side of the chasm of the Dead Sea, extending as far as Wadi Mujib to Wadi Hasa, from which country they expelled the Emim, the original inhabitants (Deuteronomy 2:11), but they themselves were afterward driven southward by warlike tribes of Amorites, who had crossed the river Jordan. These Amorites, described in the Bible as being ruled by King Sihon, confined the Moabites to the country south of the river Arnon, which formed their northern boundary (Numbers 21:13; Judges 11:18).
The Ammonites presented a serious problem to the Pharisees because many marriages between Israelite men and Ammonite (and Moabite) women had taken place in the days of Nehemiah. The men had married women of the various nations without conversion, which made the children not Jewish. So we have intermarried with both Arab lines.
David's relatives thus were Arabs as well as Jews of today. Originally, the Moabites were kindred to the Israelites, so they had shared genes from the same origin, and that origin was Lot, Abraham's nephew. Both the Moabites and the Ammonites came from Lot, so were related. Lot's father was Haran, brother of Abraham.
Haran, brother of Abram and father of Lot, lived and died at Ur of the Chaldees (Gen.11:26-31). It was said to be a trading town of NW Mesopotamia, center of a moon cult. Assyrian inscriptions from this period mention a Habiru settlement in the vicinity which some scholars link with Terah's residence there. Terah was Abraham and Haran's father.
Of course, our family line goes WAY back in time. Abraham was born in the 2nd millennium BCE, in about 1948 BCE. That was about 3,971 years ago, or rounded out, more like 4,000 years ago.
I love the fact that this information comes to me through the Torah (5 Books of Moses who is said to have written it) which is also a part of the Tanakh (Bible). The explanation of the family line of people, our Homo Sapiens, is fantastic considering how far back it was created. They saw that the male line was not only special socially, but guessed at its importance through DNA. We can trace the male line through their Y haplogroup. The same can be done with the female line, the Mt haplogroup, but I find it is a lot harder with us since often women's names were not written down.
According to a 2010 study by Behar et al. titled "The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people", Palestinians tested clustered genetically close to Bedouins, Jordanians and Saudi Arabians which was described as "consistent with a common origin in the Arabian Peninsula".
In the same year a study by Atzmon and Harry Ostrer concluded that the Palestinians were, together with Bedouins, Druze and southern European groups, the closest genetic neighbors to most Jewish populations.
There are about 4 generations every 100 years (1 generation=25 years). There are 40 100's in the past 4,000 years from now to Abraham. 40 x 4 generations=160. Arabs could be our 160th cousins; you know, like 1st cousins; 2nd cousins, etc. We go way back to have Lot as our common shared ancestor. (hope I solved this correctly as my back is hurting and I can't sit here any longer).
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