Genetics, Racial Intermarriage and Armstrongism
Back in the Seventies, an Ambassador College Pasadena graduate showed me some notes he made in one of his classes. The topic was preparation for marriage and the notes he showed me dealt with racial intermarriage in particular. The policy as he wrote it was that anyone who was one-eighth Hamitic or more could not marry into the White (Shemite) race. And anyone who was one-quarter Japhetic or more could not marry into the White race. It now strikes me as remarkable that such imprecise terms as “Hamitic” and “Japhetic”, when applied to modern racial categories, would be used in the formulation of policy that would affect people’s lives. It was also revealing that the policy was formulated to protect the White race from “contamination” by gene flow from other racial branches.
The Biblical Condemnation of Intermarriage
The Bible does condemn a certain type of intermarriage. When Israel invaded Palestine, they were told not to marry into the tribes that occupied the land before them (Deut. 7:3). In Ezra 9 and 10, we find a condemnation of the Jews for intermarrying with these same Canaanite tribes. The book of Nehemiah recounts that Nehemiah confronted Jews with rants and violence for having intermarried with these people. According to the Biblical account, the issue for Ezra and Nehemiah was the detestable practices of these people foreign to Israel. Did this instruction also entail race? This will be examined in the next section.
The Pivotal Role of Canaan for Armstrongism
Dr. Charles V. Dorothy gave a sermon in the Field House on the Big Sandy campus back in the Seventies that spoke to this topic. He went over the account of Rahab the Harlot and as a sidebar identified Rahab as a Canaanite. He further described Rahab as a “beautiful Mulatto.” Herman Hoeh had already established for the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) that the Blacks of West Africa were the descendants of Canaan. The electrifying problem for the WCG was that Dorothy’s statement meant that a Black woman was in the genealogy of Jesus Christ. This was not something left to deduction. Dorothy emphasized this conclusion in his sermon and castigated the White people in the audience for being so shocked by this fact. Several years later, in a WCG publication entitled Tomorrow’s World, Kenneth Herrmann returned Rahab to an acceptable racial status and rescued the heredity of Christ. Herrmann in an article about Rahab described her, without citing historical support, as a Moabite – no doubt to a palpable sense of relief for some in the WCG.
The Biblical accounts of Ezra and Nehemiah do not call out race as a concern. Herman Hoeh imposed race on these post-exilic Biblical events by proclaiming the Canaanites of Palestine to be Black Africans. From this seed flowered the broad racial policies of the WCG. Hoeh’s catalog of racial identifications and affinities served as the foundation within the WCG for the administration of racial policy pertaining to marriage. In the case of Canaan, this supposition also conveniently dispelled, as a bonus effect, the guilt that the United States, particularly the southern States, should rightly have for the heinous sin of state condoned, commercial slavery. This was because a curse of servitude was placed on Canaan in Genesis. I have never seen Hoeh’s detailed work for supporting his various racial identifications. His articles on this topic are more like declarations rather than carefully vetted analyses. It is a mystery whether Hoeh documented the further and necessary details to support his views for WCG internal use.
The tragic error in this odd chain of events is that the ancient Canaanites were not Black Africans. Dr. Spencer Wells (geneticist, anthropologist) in a National Geographic television documentary explained that his research indicated that there is genetic continuity between the ancient Canaanites, the Phoenicians and the modern Lebanese people (see PBS video The Quest for the Phoenicians). Brody and King pointed out that studies support the idea that the “genetic affinities of the Jewish populations with Druze and Lebanese may reflect a common Canaanite substrate (Aron Brody and Roy King, Genetics and the Archaeology of Ancient Israel). We also have: “Levantine Semites — Lebanese, Jews, Palestinians, and Syrians — are thought to be the closest surviving relatives of the ancient Phoenicians, with as much as 90% genetic similarity between modern Lebanese and Bronze Age Sidonians” (see Wikipedia article on “Phoenicians” for cited sources.) Finally, Jews and Lebanese are both Y-haplogroup J with some inclusions in their modern populations.
Conclusions
These conclusions were developed using an exegetical model augmented by genetic findings.
1. The ancient Canaanites, and their modern-day descendants the Lebanese, are very closely related to the Jews. (Note that the Lebanese may not look like American Jews who are typically Ashkenazi in origin. The Ashkenazi Jews are 30% to 60% European. A better visual comparison would be the Mizrahi Jews of Palestine.).
2. If you want to view a Canaanite or Phoenician, have a look at photos of the Lebanese people. You will see they are not Black Africans. Then compare photos of the Lebanese to representations of ancient Canaanites from archaeological research. These people, ancient and modern, are incontrovertibly Middle Eastern.
3. Black Africans are generally Y-haplogroup E and Lebanese are Y-haplogroup J. As a sidebar to the main topic, the case of Canaan demonstrates that the descendants of Ham were not Blacks. Canaan is a descendant of Ham and his descendants are not Blacks. Blacks have a genetic origin separate from the Y-haplogroup J people of Palestine. Y-haplogroup E has been in existence for about 70,000 years based on mutational rates of change, long before the putative era of Adam, Noah and Canaan.
For those who subscribe to the idea popularized by Hoeh that Ham married a Black woman (this is why Dorothy referred to Rahab as a Mulatto), the mtDNA of the Lebanese, inherited in the female line, has European affinities and not Black African affinities. (See Dannielle Badro, et al., Y-Chromosome and mtDNA Genetics Reveal Significant Contrasts in Affinities of Modern Middle Eastern Populations with European and African Populations). Also, autosomal genetic studies would reveal any Black African connections in the Lebanese.
4. WCG’s racial intermarriage policy based on Hoeh’s interpretation of the Bible collapses under the weight of the science of genetics. The policy was underpinned by the idea that Deuteronomy, Ezra and Nehemiah made not just religious and cultural statements but also racial statements concerning the Canaanites who were erroneously thought to be Black Africans. However, the accounts in the Bible that proscribe intermarriage with Canaanites do not cite racial concerns. The racial spin was added by Herman Hoeh based on his personal research which seems never to have been published.
Note: As it turns out, Kenneth Herrmann did not have to write an article correcting Dr. Charles V. Dorothy and sanitizing the genealogy of Jesus of Canaanite blood. The Canaanites are the same race as the Jews and this is borne out by the science of Genetics.
Y-haplogroup J
