Figure 1.  Phylogenetic Chart of Human Haplogroups

Figure 2. Clans of the Sons of Noah from Genesis 10

The Noachian Bottleneck and the Refutation of Herman Hoeh’s Theory of the Origin of Nations

By Neo

Herman H. Hoeh was a historian trained at Ambassador College. He is known for his two volumes of alternative history titled The Compendium of World History. He also established a racial history of mankind for the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) in his published article titled The Origin of Nations! Racial policy implemented in the WCG was predicated on Hoeh’s unconventional theological anthropology. Later in life, he purportedly denied the validity of his work. I will refer to Hoeh’s viewpoint as a “theory” in this article but in the past in the WCG it was regarded as the inspired truth brought to the church by Hoeh and bearing the ideological imprimatur of Herbert W. Armstrong. Based on the science of genetics, this article will establish that Hoeh incorrectly redefined human racial history.

Noachian Genetic Bottleneck

According to the traditional interpretation of the events of Genesis, Noah was the forefather of mankind. This premise was also fundamental to Hoeh’s theory. Everyone on earth is descended from Noah according to the genealogy in Genesis 10. While that is the tradition, a counterpoint is that this genealogy has been unjustifiably labeled “Table of Nations” in some Bibles. The Biblical text itself gives it a much more focused scope and refers to the genealogy as the Clans of the Sons of Noah.

If we assume that Noah was a real person and his descendants were real people, named in the Genesis 10 genealogy, and that Noah was the progenitor of all of postdiluvian mankind, this means that the events of the Great Flood produced a genetic bottleneck. A genetic bottleneck is a population collapse with diminished heritable diversity among the survivors. The eight survivors in the Ark represented mankind’s entire gene pool. And this gene pool lacked diversity because it consisted of Noah, his sons, and their wives. Five out of the total of eight survivors were related. Hoeh theorized that all postdiluvian racial diversity transited The Flood through the wives of Ham and Japheth. Shem was a racially pure Caucasian but Ham and Japheth had non-Caucasian wives. And from this small gene pool all the races of mankind today proliferated. 

Evidence of this view of human racial history should be mapped into the human genome. But it is not. If this theory were true, given a date for the Flood of only a few thousand years ago, all of mankind should have the same Y Chromosome haplogroup as Noah which is inherited through the male line. The descendants of Shem should have Noah’s Y Chromosome haplogroup and a single Caucasian mtDNA haplogroup (mitochondrial DNA inherited through the female line). The descendants of Ham and Japheth would have Noah’s Y Chromosome haplogroup but mtDNA haplogroups from their non-Caucasian wives. All of humankind would now share a tiny gene pool consisting of one Y Chromosome haplogroup and four or fewer mitochondrial haplogroups.

The hallmark of a good theory is that it explains reality. Hoeh’s theory fails this test. Its prediction of the current genetic configuration of the earth’s population is incorrect. Instead of the tiny gene pool Hoeh’s theory would predict, we have a great diversity of Y Chromosome haplogroups, not just one. And we have a plethora of mtDNA haplogroups among and within racial clusters, not just four or fewer. In other words, there is no genetic evidence that there was ever a collapse of the human population to produce a Noachian Bottleneck. This implies that the Flood was a local event that did not affect the bulk of mankind with its great diversity of existing haplogroups. (I will mention that I do believe that Noah was an actual historical figure. But I believe that the Great Flood was a local event and seems to have found its way in a mythicized version into the traditions of many Middle Eastern people. )

A Genetic Interpretation of the Genesis 10 Genealogy

Let us assume that Noah was not allegorical but a real person. Let us also assume that the genealogical table in Genesis 10 reflects actual people and their genetic relationships. How would we then interpret the genealogy in Genesis 10 under the constraints of genetics?

Genetic mutation that formed human haplogroups is a very slow process. It happened over hundreds of thousands of years. This means that Noah and his descendants in Genesis 10 genealogy were all of the same Y Chromosome haplogroup. This may be deduced as follows: first, they are all descended from Noah and bear his haplogroup in all masculine lines; second, there was not enough time, in a few generations spanning a few hundred years, for any significant number of mutations to occur that would give rise to a haplogroup divergent from Noah’s haplogroup. This means that Noah did not give rise to the different nations of the earth but to a collection of clans which were all of the same race.

There is empirical evidence supporting the conclusion that Noah’s descendants are all of the same race. The Adnani Arabs according to Arab genealogists are descended from Abraham through Ishmael and are classical Hebrews. They are represented in the Semitic branch of the Genesis 10 genealogy shown in Figure 2. And, also, Dr. Spencer Wells’ research for the National Geographic Society established continuity between the ancient Canaanites, Phoenicians and modern-day Lebanese based on archaeology and genetics. A finding relevant to this discussion in Wells’ research is that the Canaanites are also of the same haplogroup as the Adnani Arabs. But Herman Hoeh’s theory would have predicted that the Hamitic Canaanites would be racially different from the Semitic Arabs. In fact, Hoeh’s claim was that the Canaanites were the ancestors of the West African blacks (haplogroup E). But through genetics, we have evidence that both the Semitic and the Hamitic lines descended from Noah were racially the same and of the same Y Chromosome haplogroup.

The Bedouin Arabs are an excellent reference population that will lead to the identification of the Y Chromosome haplogroup common to the Clans of the Sons of Noah. Though the progenitor of the Jews, Abram, is identified in the Genesis 10 genealogy, the Jews do not make a good reference population. Because of the Diaspora, Jews absorbed people from other ethnic backgrounds through intermarriage. It is estimated that Ashkenazi Jews are from 30% to 60% European in ancestry resulting in a modified genotype and phenotype. But Bedouins provide a good reference population because they “are the best representatives of autochthonous Arabs” (Indigenous Arabs are descendants of the earliest split from ancient Eurasian populations, Genome Research, Feb. 2016, p. 151). Bedouins are a mix of Adnani Arabic ancestry and Qahtanie Arabic ancestry. The Adnanis trace their descent to Ishmael the son of Abraham. And the Qahtanites trace their ancestry to Joktan the son of Eber, the father of the Hebrews. Bedouins a high frequency of Y Chromosome haplogroup J. In one genetic sample, taken from Ajman, they were 100% haplogroup J (Genetic Structure of Nomadic Bedouin from Kuwait, Heredity (Edinb), November 2009, Table 3). The conclusion this evidence permits us is that Bedouins are paradigmatic Hebrews and are haplogroup J. We may infer from this that Noah, a Hebrew, and his descendants are haplogroup J.

References in classical literature may be found to some of the names listed in the Clans of the Sons of Noah. No doubt Noah’s descendants migrated widely, settling among the peoples of other haplogroups that populated the earth, giving their names to some populations, but were not the source population for all mankind. Also, some peoples who are a part or the Arab culture do not have genetic connection to the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula. An example would be North African tribes that are haplogroup E and have a North African history and heritage.

Charts in Conflict

Hoeh relied on a number of methodologies that did not have great fidelity, such as similarities in names, to identify various races. For this reason, he made many misidentifications. An example involves the Germans, Eastern Europeans and Russians. Hoeh identified the Germans and the Eastern European Slavs as Semitic. The Russian Slavs he identified as Japhetic. In his reckoning, the Germans were descended from Asshur, the Eastern Europeans from Elam, on the branch of Shem, and the Russians from Meschech and Tubal, on the branch of Japheth. These names can be located on Figure 2. But, from genetic analysis, the Germans in the east, the Eastern European Slavs and the Russian Slavs are all haplogroup R1a (see map in Wikipedia article titled Haplogroup R1a) and Hoeh’s divide between Semitic and Japhetic races here is not supported.

In brief, if one were to take Hoeh’s racial identifications and label each patriarch in Figure 2 and then label each patriarch with the haplogroup identifications from Figure 1, the resulting chart would not look anything like Figure 1 which is based on progressive mutational development connecting haplogroups. This necessary haplogroup connection in Figure 1 would be lost because of erroneous identification in Figure 2.

Implications for British Israelism

The evidence cited in this article thus far supports the conclusion that the Hebrews, including Abraham and his sons, are haplogroup J. Since this is true, the British people are unrelated to these clans. The British people are haplogroup R which has a separate extensive history based on genetics and archaeology. Some will assert that the Jewish population contains some haplogroup R, particularly the Ashkenazi who have a history of intermarrying with Europeans. This presence of haplogroup R in the Jewish population may then be pretextually used to link the Jews racially to the people of Britain. But by establishing that Abraham was haplogroup J, using the Bedouin Arabs as a reference population, we can identify the Abrahamic element in the mix of haplogroups in the Jewish population. This Abrahamic element is haplogroup J. A similar analysis can be used to identify the tribe of Asshur as Y Chromosome haplogroup J. Archaeogenetics has identified haplogroup J and haplogroup G among excavated ancient Assyrian remains. From this approach, we know that the native Assyrian haplogroup is J. This means that the ancient Assyrians did not give rise to the Germans who are haplogroups R1a and R1b. It is worthwhile mentioning that haplogroups are not the full story but autosomal studies must also be considered. In such studies the Jews group autosomally with other Middle Eastern populations that have a higher frequency of haplogroup J.

Critics and Unicorns

Some of the material in this article appeared on this blog some months back and there were two principle criticisms:

1. One critic stated that the large time spans for the existence of modern man were fabulous. I think the point was that God had to create the racial diversity putatively reflected in Genesis 10 because there had not been enough time for that diversity to evolve – Adam was created around 6,000 BP supposedly. My view is that Adam may have been created sometime in the Neolithic but the earth was then already populated by other sentient hominids. Statements in Genesis point to this. Adam, in this view, was the father of mankind in spirit but not genetically.

2. Another critic persisted in asserting that there was no way to determine the haplogroup of Abram short of actually swabbing Abrams cheek and submitting this sample to DNA testing. I recall that this person contended that Abram might well have been haplogroup R – the haplogroup of the British people – and this could not be disproven. This is somewhat like this critic requiring me to disprove there is such an animal as a unicorn by my looking everywhere in the universe. First, it is a fool’s errand to take this kind of unending approach and, second, the critic can always say that my search may not have been thorough enough. Circumstantial evidence suffices for Abram and for unicorns. Any reasonable mind would understand that. It can be easily deduced from indirect conditions that Abram was haplogroup J – like Ishmael, Joktan, the Bedouins and the Canaanites. 

Conclusion

Herman Hoeh’s theory of racial history has a principal flaw from which other flaws emanate. The flaw is the belief that Noah was the progenitor of the racial diversity that we know in the human population today. Hoeh should not be taken to task too harshly for this. Many Christian denominations at one time interpreted Noah’s role in this way and some still do. There was no Noachian Bottleneck as one might expect if the account in Genesis is interpreted to insist on a global flood. Noah and his family were all of the same race and genetic affinity. Racial policy of many different perspectives can be formed but it cannot be rooted legitimately in the anthropology of Genesis 10. But then Herman Hoeh did not have the benefit of the science of genetics to aid him in his historical analysis and reconstructions. We do have this advantage and it would be a regrettable intellectual dishonesty to neglect this advantage.

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