What ethnicity was Abraham, Noah, Moses (historical, years, how, Egyptian)
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Is there any reason why you choose not to capitalize "Jew" and "Arab"?
He didn't even cap the first letter of the first word of the sentence. It would be foolish to think it anything more than being sloppy/lazy, and trouble-mongering to attempt to make it appear to be an insult.
Moses is Egyptian, I agree. He lead the Jews through the Red Sea out of Egypt.
Abraham and Noha lived in currently what is know by Iraq. The flood story with the ship and animals thing was written in Sumerian Language in Southern Iraq long time before the Bible was written in Babylon, so I would think he should be Sumerian.
BTW the Sumerian are not Semetic people, while Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Caldians are Semetic. All these lived in currently what is know by Iraq.
You say this as though the 'Bible' is/was a single work written as a whole during a relatively short period of time and in a single location, which is most definitely not the case.
The fact is that the 'Bible' is an assemblage of tales, myths, oral histories, advice, laws, poems, letters, etc. written by a variety of personages over a fairly considerable span of time.
Several hundred years after the time period ascribed to the existence of the alleged 'Christ', a group of men who desired to promote a religion based on this figure assembled these writings from a broader collection. They chose which writings to include so as to promote their views and discarded others which did not.
Generally speaking, it can only be said that it was compiled from works created in the general region surrounding the Mediterranean area, which, as you pointed out, could have included a variety of ethnicities. What one could say with some level of confidence, is that they were almost certainly not blonde-haired, blue-eyed white guys.
Exactly true and we wish more people realized that. Then, they'd understand more of history as well as the writings. In fact, not all the writings first proposed for inclusion in the Bible are there. The people who were deciding what was and was not "inspired word" argued mightily over what to keep and what to skip. Even as it stands now, the Duoay (sp?) version has more books than the King James version. We pick and choose, whatever our topic, according to what we want our readers to believe. We don't include what doesn't prove what we want to prove. By "we", I mean all of us.
Thank you, Zymer, for the good run-down on the history of the Bible.
You know, I've never before heard anyone accuse Jewish people of not really being Jewish.
The truth of the matter is that after the Jewish people were dispersed by the Romans, over time they intermarried with the local population wherever they settled. Thus there are small pockets of Asian appearing Jewish people and African appearing Jewish people. There are large swathes of European appearing Jewish people. This does not preclude modern Jews from being "really" Jewish.
However intermarriage POST-dispersal is beyond the scope of the current discussion.
IF we are to take the stance that Moses, Noah, and etc were real people;
And IF we assume that the old testament texts are roughly accurate in their genealogical assertions
And IF we accept the basic population groups and dispersal patterns worked out by historians for the regions at the time and up to roughly the birth of Christ as being accurate
THEN Moses, Noah etc were the direct ancestors of the Jewish people.
They were definitely Semitic, and the Jews post-Moses - that religion being more or less created BY Moses and his followers, according to the Old Testament - were also most definitely Semitic.
I'll accept that some of them may have been proto-Semitic if you go far enough back in time.
Again, I'm still not sure what the issue was for the OP to start with, but that's the answer. The people he is talking about, if they actually existed, would have been Semites and proto-Semites. They couldn't have been Jews until the time of Moses because the Jewish religion didn't exist until Moses came along and created it.
So, Moses was Semitic and also Jewish and all the people who didn't split off due to the schism he would have created at the time were also both Semitic and Jewish.
Everybody before Moses - not Jewish, but Semitic.
I've heard of people who accuse Jewish people of not really being Jewish.
Has anyone heard of the "Christian" Identity Movement?
Been spreading hatred and misinformation since the 1970s.
Moses is Egyptian, I agree. He lead the Jews through the Red Sea out of Egypt.
Abraham and Noha lived in currently what is know by Iraq. The flood story with the ship and animals thing was written in Sumerian Language in Southern Iraq long time before the Bible was written in Babylon, so I would think he should be Sumerian.
BTW the Sumerian are not Semetic people, while Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Caldians are Semetic. All these lived in currently what is know by Iraq.
Oddly enough, while Sumerians are not considered "Semitic" they are also supposed to have come from northern Mesopotamia - eg, Assyria - which IS considered "Semitic".
Semitic is usually applied to people sharing a family of languages; Sumerians are not termed "Semitic" because they spoke a language that was not in the Semitic group of languages. Yet the people themselves are presumed to have come from the same areas - northern Mesopotamia or perhaps eastern portions of Arabia. There is no real consensus on exactly where they came from, but they are known to have been in the region that came to be thought of Sumeria from around 5000 BC.
While they seem to have started out linguistically distinct, there is no evidence to suggest they were somehow genetically/phenotypically distinct from other tribes in the area. If they ever had been, intermarriage with surrounding tribes would have blurred any such distinctions pretty rapidly.
So while technically Sumerians are not considered Semitic due to their distinct language, its doubtful they looked much different from their neighbors.
And that is all "race" is - how you look, common features among closely related groups arising from environmental factors and the degree of intermarriage within the region.
EDIT: I don't know where you get that Moses was Egyptian. He may have been born in Egypt, but he was not Egyptian. He was Hebrew. Back then people were not identified by place of birth the way they are now, they were identified by tribal affiliation. Despite being adopted and raised by Egyptians, both his parents were Hebrews. Assuming we accept his associated mythology. There is no historical evidence that any such person ACTUALLY existed, but going by the only "evidence" we have and assuming it is factually correct, he would have been Hebrew and not Egyptian.
What ethnicity was Abraham, Noah, and Moses? There is actually quite a few figures in the Bible that are pre-exodus, and I am wondering what ethnicity they are. I dont believe they are jewish especially Noah. I have tried looking this up, and it never mentions what ethnicity they are. Who came before Noah?
The Hebrews and Abraham came from and originated in Mesopotamia and are thus Semites like most of the people who live in the Middle East.
I admit I am under the impression that these men are historically real, except maybe Moses. But this topic is about ancient myths of some cultures, and I think that is a part of history.
I did not mean any religious context in this question. This is meant as more a history question. If these people were real what ethnicity did they come from? Were they babylonians, or Hittites, or Phoenician?
Noah was entirely fictitious. The flood is just a children's bedtime story that got out of hand. "And that's why there are rainbows. Now go to sleep."
Abraham was supposedly from Ur, which is in Mesopotamia. What ethnicity he was depends on his era, but the Sumerians were Caucasian. There were later incursions of Semites which drove the Caucasians north. The modern Kurds are their descendants.
Abraham really didn't found the Hebrews, that was done by the Hyksos, who invaded Egypt and left a strong Semitic contingent in the East Delta.
Moses was a culture hero, like Hercules, and like Hercules was a melding of many stories. The Exodus itself never occurred as described in the Bible. It left no archaeological evidence of millions of people wandering in the Sinai for 40 year. As we all know, people leave their garbage behind them, and stuff like that lasts a long time in the desert. Any return from Egypt to Canaan was piecemeal, and likely as camp followers to Egyptian armies that dominated the area. Moses the Murderer who ran to the Kenites (descendants of Cain) for shelter from the law and was brought into the priest business by his father-in-law was apparently an influential preacher, but the Egyptians left no historical records of his supposed miracles. The Egyptians were good at keeping records. This fits with no archaeological evidence of an Exodus.
The 12 tribes were at least partly fiction. The Tribe of Dan was native Canaanite, and appears in history as Danaeans, part of the Sea Peoples who invaded Canaan and Egypt in the 12th and 11th centuries bc. They first showed up as Philistines, but by the time a written Hebrew existed (9th century bc) they had apparently assimilated with their neighbors. It was some time after this that the first written version of the Books of Moses were written down, and edited into a more or less coherent story from oral tradition. That's why there are two creation myths in the Bible; there were two current stories so they put both of them in. The Fifth Book of Moses, Deuteronomy, was composed sometime in the 7th century bc.
Oddly enough, while Sumerians are not considered "Semitic" they are also supposed to have come from northern Mesopotamia - eg, Assyria - which IS considered "Semitic".
Semitic is usually applied to people sharing a family of languages; Sumerians are not termed "Semitic" because they spoke a language that was not in the Semitic group of languages. Yet the people themselves are presumed to have come from the same areas - northern Mesopotamia or perhaps eastern portions of Arabia. There is no real consensus on exactly where they came from, but they are known to have been in the region that came to be thought of Sumeria from around 5000 BC.
While they seem to have started out linguistically distinct, there is no evidence to suggest they were somehow genetically/phenotypically distinct from other tribes in the area. If they ever had been, intermarriage with surrounding tribes would have blurred any such distinctions pretty rapidly.
So while technically Sumerians are not considered Semitic due to their distinct language, its doubtful they looked much different from their neighbors.
And that is all "race" is - how you look, common features among closely related groups arising from environmental factors and the degree of intermarriage within the region.
EDIT: I don't know where you get that Moses was Egyptian. He may have been born in Egypt, but he was not Egyptian. He was Hebrew. Back then people were not identified by place of birth the way they are now, they were identified by tribal affiliation. Despite being adopted and raised by Egyptians, both his parents were Hebrews. Assuming we accept his associated mythology. There is no historical evidence that any such person ACTUALLY existed, but going by the only "evidence" we have and assuming it is factually correct, he would have been Hebrew and not Egyptian.
This is the first time I heard that Sumerians come from Northern Mesopotamia, it has been always south, what are your sources?
Jesus's ancestry on his mother's side, and step-father's side was Hebrew/Israelite.
He was raised among the lost tribes to the north in Galilee which was not in Judea.
All Biblical and historical texts refer to "Jews" as "Judeans", named for just one of the
12 Tribes of Israel, that of Judah. At the time, the tribes of Benjamin and Judah were
the ones in power in Judea, the other "lost 10" had already dispersed. Hundreds of years
after the fall of Jerusalem, Judaism as a religion was chosen to be the state religion by King Bulan
of Khazaria, a south Asian kingdom. This is why, for example, Benjamin Franklin called modern
Jews "asiatics". Ashkenazi and Khazarian "jews" such as the vast majority of those living in
Europe, "Israel", and America today are Sure, there are some blood-tied "jews" such as a portion
of the Sephardic who are ethnically ancient Israeli, but the ancient ethnic Israelis spread far and wide,
far away from Judea proper, some were Scythians who crossed the Caucasus
Mountain range into Europe. Jesus said in the last days there would be false "judeans"
living in the Holy Land, such as is occurring now. Concerning the photo above,
there is more traditional evidence to support photo A, than B, which A is based
upon tradition from early Christianity, whereas B is a recent computer-generated
trifle constructed by assumptive data based on false geneaological constructs.
You bring up an interesting point. I've heard that genetic testing proposed that 47%ish of Jews in Isreal have Khazar/Indo-European DNA tracers and not Semetic-Middle Eastern tracers.
But Hebrew is a Caananite language, under the branch of Semetic languages, so that should narrow it in some. Also, I've heard that the OT with moses and the bunch was dated to about 1300 to 1200 ish.
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