Arabs & Jews Related

(Postscript to the book on Ishmael) by Robert Brow  (www.brow.on.ca)

EVIDENCE A YEAR LATER FROM GENETIC STUDIES



My faith in the Bible as the Word of God does not need bolstering by scientific proof. But yesterday's New York Times article by Nicholas Wade titled "Sons of Abraham" (featured in today's National Post, May 10, 2000, p.A17) came as a very happy surprise.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (May 9, 2000) has published the result of a vast international study of the Y chromosome family tree. Nicholas Wade reports that "The close genetic affinity between Jews and Arabs, at least by the Y chromosome yardstick, is reflected in the Genesis account of how Abraham fathered Ishmael by his wife's, maid, Hagar, and when Sarah was then able to conceive, Isaac." And this Arab-Jewish family of people is genetically quite "distinct from that of European populations and both groups differ widely from sub-Saharan Africans."

Last year (1999) I posted on my web site a little book titled Ishmael the Arab 1866-1792 BC. This was written in the first person from Ishmael's point of view based on taking literally as written the accounts and chronology given in the Bible. I pointed out that the Jewish book of Genesis gives Arabs the only available record of their historical origins and the genealogies of the various branches of their ancestral tribes.

It is fashionable among Old Testament scholars to dismiss the table of nations in Genesis 10 as an ignorant invention, and to view the stories of the patriarchs as mythical tales. Who could have expected the science of modern genetics to prove that a common origin for Arabs and Jews is totally plausible?


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