24

IDENTIFYING ABRAHAM’S

DESCENDANTS

Know ye not why

We created you all from the same dust?

That no one should exalt himself over the other.

Bahá’u’lláh¹

For millennia, each familial tribe, wherever it lived, was quite proud of itself. It drew pleasure and courage from the belief that it was distinctly different from other groups. The time it took to cover even short distances, coupled with the impossibility of quickly and easily crossing the largest oceans, reinforced this notion of separateness, as did differences in language, food, and customs. In spite of information contained in religious scriptures suggesting common ancestors, very few people were able to feel an intimate connection to someone hundreds or thousands of miles away whose name they did not know, whose picture they had never seen, and whose hand they were certainly never going to shake.

In the last five hundred years, however, the ways in which people create and define tribal loyalties have changed drastically, and they are continuing to change with every passing day. Many things have influenced the change, but the six that seem most important are communication, travel, tidal waves of emigration, widespread education, the emergence of the social sciences, and discoveries in the field of genetics. In exceedingly brief form, here’s what has happened.

The first big jump in the field of communications came in the fifteenth century with the invention of metal presses containing reusable movable type. Within a hundred years, reliance on the tedious and expensive processes of block printing and hand-copying had ended in many countries, and inexpensive, mass-produced books began to flood the market. From there, methods of widespread communication advanced to newspapers (1605), then to telegraph (1844), then to telephone (1876), radio (1897), and television (1928). Right this minute, in the early years of the twenty-first century, communication is experiencing another intense growth spurt, this one due to the ubiquity of computers, cell phones, and the World Wide Web.

People have traveled hither and yon for millennia, but not very quickly. Land travel was by foot or on the back of an animal. Water transportation was limited to smallish boats powered by oars and / or sails. Most of them hugged the coastline for safety, though a few ventured across larger gaps. Boats large, sturdy, and fast enough to carry dozens of people plus heavy cargo back and forth across the enormous expanses of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are, like the printing press, a recent development. Only in the last five hundred years have we suddenly advanced from sailing ships, to steamships, to enormous oil-fired ocean liners with four thousand passengers, to trains, cars, airplanes, submarines, and space shuttles.

As a result of improved communications and better means of travel, wars and genocidal attacks were able to increase in size and range and, ironically, refugees from those conflicts were able to flee faster and further than ever before. Unprecedented waves of emigrants rendered homeless by violence or natural disasters began moving from country to country and even across oceans. The practice of taking indentured servants and slaves from country to country also added to the intercontinental mixing of people.

Improved communications and easy access to books and newspapers fostered the growth of literacy, which, in turn, spurred an increase in educational institutions. Wider travel produced explorers and journalists who published riveting descriptions of life in other places, and their reports were read by the increasingly large number of educated people. Curiosity about these alien peoples and places encouraged universities to establish departments of social sciences—anthropology, economics, linguistics, language, psychology, political science, and more. Researchers in the various social sciences began investigating why people do what they do, and humanity as a whole began to appreciate itself in ways unfathomable to its ancestors.

The scientific study of genetics sprouted in the mid-1800s. When, in the 1900s, it became possible to study genes at a molecular level, researchers suddenly realized that “Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes.” The most recent genetic research reveals that modern man arose in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago, and that somewhere between forty thousand and seventy thousand years ago, a group of them left Africa and began trekking eastward. Slowly, so slowly that no one realized what was happening, the descendants of that group covered the world. It is only now, within the past two decades, that we—the divided tribes of man—have been faced with unequivocal scientific evidence that “All the variously shaped and shaded people of Earth trace their ancestry to African hunter-gatherers.”²

One might conclude, on hearing about our relationship to ancient Africans, that each of us would be forced to trace our own family tree back for thirty or forty thousand years to produce a common ancestor. But, according to research done by Yale statistician Joseph Chang, writer Steve Olson, and computer-genealogist Mark Humprys, it’s really not necessary to go back that far. The truth is much simpler: every single one of us has a common ancestor who lived just two or three thousand years ago. What’s more, millions of pale-skinned Europeans and Americans have a much more recent and very surprising common ancestor: Muḥammad.³

When records of European ancestry are consulted and lines are followed for twenty generations or so, each line eventually claims the same person as an ancestor: a daughter of the Emir of Seville. The Emir, who lived c.1200, was a Muslim and a descendant of Muḥammad. His daughter, Theresa, who reportedly converted to Catholicism, married the King of Aragon, Alfonso IV. When this royal couple produced children, each one of them was, naturally enough, a descendant of Muḥammad.

Many of Theresa’s descendants were members of Europe’s royal families, including at least one king as well as a queen of Sicily. Royalty had better access to good food and water than the average person and, during the Middle Ages, could travel away from plague areas. These advantages often resulted in a higher-than-average survival rate. Combine those advantages with the predilection certain male members of royalty had for fathering children out of wedlock, and it’s easy to see why contemporary Europeans whose families have lived in Europe for several centuries must count Theresa, the Emir of Seville, and Muḥammad as ancestors. And why, in both North and South America, descent from Muḥammad can be assumed by almost anyone whose family line traces back, on one side or another, to Europe.

FATHER ABRAHAM

When someone traces a family tree, the branches quickly become tangled in a forest of limbs rising from other family trees, creating a three-dimensional mess. My great-aunt turns out to be your grandmother. Your great-great grandfather from Boston, who captained a trading ship, managed to father an extra child while buying silk in China, which gives you some third cousins on the other side of the world. And so on. The numbers of each person’s ancestors, writes Steve Olson, “are manageable in the first few generations—two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents—but they quickly spiral out of control. Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived.”⁴

Reconciling the notion of trillions of ancestors with the much smaller number of people who were actually alive is quite simple. With each step into the past, any individual’s family tree is going to have more and more people in common with family trees of other people on the planet. “This means,” writes Olson, “that the most recent common ancestor of all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people on the planet were direct ancestors of everyone alive today. Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone’s ancestors.”⁵

By adding a little something to the previous sentence without changing its validity, it is apparent that Abraham, Confucius, Nefertiti and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone’s ancestors. If Abraham existed, and this book assumes He did, and if He had eight children, the number stated in Genesis, the obvious conclusion is that God’s promise to Abraham has been abundantly fulfilled: “And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.”⁶

Having reached the point of understanding that Abraham’s seed has completely covered the earth, it’s possible to conclude that God’s promises about who will inherit the Land of Canaan have been fulfilled as well. No matter who legally owns any square foot of soil, he or she must, by the inexorable math of statistical genetics, be a descendant of not only Abraham but of all three of His wives. We have met the inheritors of the land, and they are us, no matter what we look like or what faith we follow.

There is also a second, even more literal sense in which Abraham’s descendants have inherited the land of Canaan: All of His children—His religions—have important shrines and holy places in Israel. Every year thousands of pilgrims—each a seed of the Father of monotheism—journey to that special part of the earth, drawn by the unique role it has played in religious history.

IT WAS NEVER ABOUT GENEALOGY

The heart of Abraham’s legacy seemed, for generations, to center on the importance of tribes and inheritance, but it’s easy for modern eyes to perceive that DNA was never really essential to the story. Tracing hereditary lines was important only because people believed it was important. Abraham couldn’t simply dismiss the tribal system that was already in place because people weren’t ready to give it up, so He used the system as an incubator for monotheism. By connecting prophecies to the lineages, He reinforced the notion that it was important to pay close attention to spiritual matters, and He thereby strengthened the influence of religion.

But, even as Abraham indicated the importance of certain lineages, it was clear that the tradition of linking spiritual worthiness to ancestry must someday be outdated. When Abraham’s seed covered the earth—or, to be more accurate, when science was at long last able to demonstrate that it had covered the earth—humankind would, happily or not, find itself united into a single worthy tribe, the tribe of Abraham.

The more one ponders genetics, the clearer it becomes that the simple lineages leading from Abraham to Moses, Jesus, Muḥammad, the Báb, and Bahá’u’lláh were never what they seemed to be. The deceptive straightforwardness of the lines was due partly to the widespread habit of tracing ancestry through fathers even though mothers were equal contributors, partly to the difficulties inherent in trying to keep track of every single line, partly to unrecorded liaisons, and partly to ignoring the effect of traders who trekked to foreign lands and begot children there.

The math of genetics produces a solid guess that Jesus might well have been a descendant of David, even though New Testament genealogies don’t mention it and He didn’t confirm it. The math would indicate that Muḥammad and the Báb were, as claimed, descendants of Hagar, as well as being related to Sarah and Keturah. The math would also bring to light something Bahá’u’lláh’s parents might have found astonishing: He, too, was descended from all three of Abraham’s wives.

The four-thousand-year-old legacy of Abraham is a convoluted paradox of spiritual growth. The end of lineages was contained in the beginning. Ancestry never really mattered, yet it was vital to the story. The three wives came from dissimilar backgrounds and led vastly different lives, but they became grandmothers to us all. Abraham’s seed spread out to cover the earth like dust, and we are physically all made of that dust … the dusty DNA of our ancestors, the dust of Abraham, of Sarah, of Hagar, of Keturah, of Ishmael, Isaac, Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah.