Re: Culture's effect on Genetics

From: Kate Distin (memes@distin.co.uk)
Date: Wed 15 Feb 2006 - 12:14:53 GMT

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    The emphasis on Arabs as Ishmaelites is, from my understanding of things, placed far more heavily by Muslims than by Christians or Jews. Genesis 25:1-18 implies that one branch of Abraham's family (the descendants of Isaac, whose mother was Sarah) is to be distinguished from all others. Those others include tribes descended from Sarah's slave-girl, Hagar (Ishmael's mother) and also those descended from Abraham's second wife, Keturah. So the Isaac-Jew/Ishmael-Arab dichotomy isn't so sharp in the OT as it is in Islam. I don't know whether Islamic tradition even mentions the second wife, Keturah. What it does say (not in the Qur'an but in later tradition) is that Ishmael not Isaac was the chosen son. And that Hagar was Abraham's wife not his wife's slave-girl.

    Kate

    > So who is supposed to be descended from Abraham's first wife, the one he
    > expelled from his tent with Ishmael? I realise that the modern term
    > Semite is a reference to Shem, but I thought the implication of the
    > Genesis story was that the Arabs are Ishmaelites? (and do they not
    > claim to be so based on the Koran?)
    >
    > At 10:08 15/02/2006, you wrote:
    >
    >> Derek Gatherer wrote:
    >>
    >>> Okay, wearing my geneticist hat here.....
    >>> For a common ancestor of all the Ys within both Jewish and
    >>> Palestinian populations (which would be the "Y-chromosomal Abraham"
    >>> by analogy with the "Y-chromosomal Adam"), the date is probably
    >>> something like 8000-11000 BC (so the story in Genesis about Abraham
    >>> cannot be true if one goes with the historians who guess that Abraham
    >>> was ~2000 BC. If a historical figure, Abraham could have been the
    >>> common ancestor of many current Jews and Palestinians but
    >>> nevertheless only a minority in both populations as he is too recent)
    >>
    >>
    >> Responding with my RE teacher's hat on . . .
    >>
    >> I'm not intending to spark a debate about Biblical historicity, but
    >> it's interesting in the light of what you say to note that Abraham is
    >> first introduced (Genesis 11) against the background of a
    >> geneaological history that gives the Hebrews a place in the wider
    >> Semitic context ("the descendants of Shem"). Although this
    >> genealogical picture is apparently painted in terms of individuals, in
    >> fact the OT thinks of people as being so tightly bound up with their
    >> tribe that it's not always easy to se whether names refer to a person
    >> or his tribe (e.g. later references to Jacob/Israel).
    >>
    >> So although Abraham is revered as a patriarch, he of course did not
    >> spring from nowhere, and indeed the Bible specifically draws our
    >> attention to his ancestry. Talk of a Y-chromosomal Abraham may
    >> therefore be misguided - when talking about his genetic fathering of
    >> nations, the Bible places this in the context of his genetic ancestry.
    >> It is when talking about his theological fathering of nations, if you
    >> like, that the Bible emphasises his lack of memetic ancestry - that he
    >> was the first monotheist. (And there's a rather delightful Qur'anic
    >> story which makes the same point.)
    >>
    >> Kate
    >>
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    >
    >
    > ===============================================================
    > This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
    > Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
    > For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
    > see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
    >
    >

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