God Preferred Inbred Relationships

I'm a former Christian and reading the Bible led me to disbelief. It's been a long time since I've done that, so I've decided to get into it again now that I'm older. I'm adding some Bible study to my Agnostic Guide for this blog. It's starting to feel like a waste of time, but I'll use it to throw out a general observation here and there.

Here's an odd thing that really jumped out at me during my recent review: God preferred inbred relationships in the Old Testament for many key characters as his chosen people.

Inbreeding is understandable if everyone originates from a single couple. The Bible doesn't explain the origin of the wives for Abel and Seth, but that's another issue. It's unlikely these were the only two men for all of humanity if their wives came from other people separate from Adam and Eve. If they were the only two fathers producing the rest of humanity then all of their children were siblings or first cousins.

Genetic diversity would have increased over time if biology was given enough time to work. The timelines documented by the Bible aren't long enough. Science says we've been working at our current genetic diversity for 300,000 years instead of 6,000 years. A literal look at the Genesis flood story puts that event about 4,000 years ago.

Major inbreeding was brought back when God chose Noah, his wife, their 3 sons, and their 3 wives to repopulate the entire Earth after the flood. God could have gathered a small group of mostly unrelated people for the ark but he didn't. That took whatever diversity we had built up and reset it back to one family.

The Jewish Book of Jubilees says Noah's wife can be traced back to Seth just like Noah, so we might assume everyone in the ark was descended from Adam and Eve's son Seth. The 3 wives are still a mystery even though these 6 people were claimed to have repopulated the entire Earth. You'd think their names would be as important to preserve as the names of the sons. Hopefully the wives were generally unrelated instead of cousins, siblings, or half-siblings.

What about the wives for the children of the 3 sons? Noah's grandsons had to have children with Noah's granddaughters, but it wasn't said how many daughters there were to go around. The Bible doesn't give any mention to making sure the cousins produced the next generation. There could have been some sibling marriages depending on which of Noah's sons produced the daughters needed for their sons to have wives.

Abram/Abraham descended from Shem who was one of Noah's 3 sons. Abraham and his wife Sarai/Sarah were half-siblings from the same father, so there's some clear inbreeding with God's chosen one there. Abraham had a son named Ishmael with his wife's maid Hagar. Ishmael was the ancestor of Muhammad. Abraham had another son named Isaac with Sarah when she was 90. Isaac was the father of the Jews and Jesus. Abraham took another wife after Sarah passed, but those 6 sons apparently don't matter as much as Ishmael and Isaac. Isaac's parents were the coupling of half-siblings but he was the chosen father of the Jews and Jesus. Ishmael had the better parentage since his mother wasn't related to Abraham.

I could mention Lot's daughters getting him drunk to have his children, since it's the next story in Genesis, but he's not an important character compared to the direct ancestors of God's chosen people. This bit of incest happened around the same time so that's why I mention it.

Isaac had two sons with Rebekah named Jacob and Esau. Jacob stole the birthright and blessings from his brother Esau. Jacob wasn't specifically born from inbreeding like his father Isaac, but he was a bit of a jerk and was said to be the ancestor of Jesus.

Jacob had children with his two wives, who were sisters, and their two handmaids. He was renamed Israel by God. Jacob/Israel fathered Judah with his unloved wife Leah. Judah is the ancestor of Jesus. Jacob really loved his other wife Rachel, so it appears the ancestry of Jesus isn't traced through the loving relationship. There wasn't inbreeding here because Jacob/Israel was unrelated to his wives who were related as sisters. Here's a cartoon showing these biblically sanctioned unions producing God's chosen people under one of those sisters.

We can move on to Moses in Exodus where we learn the mother of Moses was his father's aunt. Moses was the chosen representative of God to free the Hebrews from the Egyptians. My recent Bible study hasn't made it to Leviticus yet, but apparently Leviticus 18 makes all of these couplings bad after God specifically selected them as ancestral traits of his chosen people.

Leviticus may have changed the rules on inbreeding but it's clearly a foundation of Noah's and Abraham's ancestral line for the Hebrews and Jesus. I found the chart below as a biblical genetic history with 2,500 years of close intermarriage as a normal thing. It doesn't show the genetic reset with Noah during that initial period of inbreeding.

I can finish with this old joke: Jesus was so inbred that he's his own father. His genetics aren't really as clear as his ancestors listed in the Bible. The DNA of Jesus may have only been Mary if she really had a virgin birth. I don't think he had Joseph's DNA. The virgin birth was most likely a cover-up by Mary for having someone else's baby while engaged to Joseph. That's a much more likely explanation if you think about it.

The authors of the Bible trace the ancestry of Jesus through Joseph, so that has to be wrong if you believe he's literally the son of God. Jesus was made by impregnating a virgin already engaged to be married. That surely violates the sanctity of marriage even though she was only engaged at the time. Mary wasn't asked if she wanted to do it, so not having consent might be considered rape. She was told it was going to happen and didn't protest, so that might be consent. She went ahead with her marriage even though she was pregnant with someone else's child. It's all rather odd. Well, at least it wasn't more inbreeding like the ancestry of Jesus and God's chosen people.