Who are the descendants of Ancient Israel today?
Tracing the Genealogy of the Modern Jews
Let us apply some reasoning to the concept that the current people called Jews are the only true descendants of ancient Israel. Let us start by asking how many people alive today have ancestry that has kept accurate genealogical records going back several thousand years? I doubt if anyone can honestly produce records going back that far (and some of the records will need to be on ancient scrolls), and even if some were able, which is highly doubtful, it could only be a few people and it certainly does not apply to the population of any nation today, including Israel.
Moreover, if some group has actually kept those records, they would have done so contrary to God’s Word. In 1 Timothy 1:4 and Titus 3:9, the Apostle Paul commands the people of his day (and us) to not keep genealogies. If God wanted His people to keep genealogical records after the Messiah had come, do you really think He would command us to not keep endless genealogies as the Israelites had been doing for 4000 years? (Luke 3:23-38) Prior to the Cross, God had the sons of Israel keep and record genealogies. However, after the Messiah, the need to keep genealogies to trace, point to, and prove the Messiah was no longer necessary.
Now we need to ask, how much has this potential Jewish lineage been diluted or corrupted from purity, and what modern-day people could possibly be the descendants of Biblical Jews? Moreover, it is almost 2,000 years later and literally fifty generations (generation - 40 years) after the destruction and dispersal of the Jewish race throughout the world by the Roman Army in A.D. 70 (and again as a final crushing blow, in what was called the 2nd Jewish rebellion, in A.D. 135).
It is also easy to understand that in the genealogy of every person alive today there have been literally millions of births, lives, and deaths that are unrecorded and untraceable in history. No person living today can ever know who those people were. It has only been in recent times that the necessary genealogical records have been preserved — and then not in every nation. Anyone who had children, even just a few hundred years ago, is likely to have millions of descendants today. A quick way to illustrate how this multiplication factor occurs can easily be accomplished with a modern calculator and, after the next paragraph, you will see how.
As was previously stated, it has been fifty generations since the Jews of the Bible were either killed in Jerusalem, brought back to Rome where they were enslaved or killed, or scattered throughout the populated biblical areas. At that point, the Biblical Jewish religion, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist. The temple was destroyed, the priests were killed (and with them the priestly lineage), the Holy of Holy's was gone, the Ark of the Covenant vanished (it actually vanished hundreds of years earlier when the Temple built by Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians), what was left of the identity of their tribes was lost, and the animal sacrifices ended. The Jews who escaped, or were not in Jerusalem at that time, were scattered into the diaspora and were no longer a homogeneous people. Many, if not most, gradually intermarried and became part of the surrounding culture.
Now, let us look at how the multiplication factor works regarding a person’s ancestry. We all know that it takes a mother and father to create a living human being (and yes, even a test tube baby has a sperm donor father!). Therefore, every person comes from the blended genetics of two parents, and each one of those two parents came from the blended genetics of their two parents, and they came from the blended genetics of their two parents, etc. Now take a modern calculator and multiply 2 x 2 fifty times [2 parents x 50 generations (a generation calculated at 40 years)], and you will get the potential number of great, great, great, great, etc, grandparents that your genetic mix from two thousand years ago is derived from. As you will see, the number is staggering! Most calculators only allow eight digits for determining the result of the foregoing calculations, even at that, calculating a mere 25 multiplications of 2 x 2 totaled over 65 million! And at 25 multiplications you are only halfway! If you were able to go further you would see that the number goes into the trillions.
If only one of those people in your genetic background had the genetics from a Biblical era Jew, then you are also a descendant, albeit distant, of a Biblical Jew! Let us not forget that thousands of Old Testament Jews had also, prior to the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, become followers of Jesus (Christians). Therefore, their religious Jewish identity had already virtually been lost as they intermarried with the surrounding Gentile population; these people also helped to spread the Biblical Jewish genetics throughout the known world.
So how many people today could be a descendant of an ancient, Biblical era Jew? The answer is more than billions and that number could possibly include almost everyone in the world! ...... (Note: Therefore, it is conceivable that ever human alive, ... every one of us, ... has at least one of the Jewish Pharisees, that stood before Pilate calling for the death of Jesus, in our genetic lineage.)
The following statement came from an Associated Press article dated August 2006, titled Famous Ancestors Adorn Almost All Family Trees, and helps to make this point: “Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say, the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from someone famous in one way or another” (Yes, I know Adam and Eve and Noah and his family are famous, but I do not think they were talking about them). The article continues: “Millions of people have provable descendants from someone historically famous,” said Mark Humphreys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. “The number of people with unprovable descendants must therefore be massive.”
If that statement is even close to being true, and logically it is, then the same could be said that at least one Old Testament Jew (famous or not) is in the lineage of almost every person in the world. Everyone’s genetics is a compilation of the blended genetics of billions of different people, and in this blended genetic mix virtually everyone with descendants from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Minor has at least one Biblical Jew in their lineage, and the real number is probably in the multiple thousands.
We all, therefore, have genetic lineage to those of Old Testament Biblical Israel, and who knows what else. We are all the descendants, albeit distant, of the people of God’s Old Testament Israel, so it is not just a select few today who call themselves Jews. Ironically, even those who vehemently hate or have hated Jews in the past (i.e., Muhammad and Hitler) must also have Biblical Jewish lineage in their ancestry. Furthermore, those who call themselves Jews today may actually have less true genetic lineage to ancient Israel than many who they now called Gentiles or Goys.
Therefore, when someone refers to the descendants of who some claim are God’s chosen people, who in reality are they? The answer is virtually everyone in the Western world (and quite possibly the entire world), not just a relatively few people now calling themselves Jews.
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